Pension Reform Waits for California Supreme Court

With markets fitfully advancing after a nearly two year pause, the need for pension reform again fades from public discussion. And it’s easy for pension reformers to forget that even when funds are obviously imperiled, with growing unfunded liabilities and continuously increasing demands from the pension funds, hardly anyone understands what’s going on. Unless you are sitting on a city council and facing a 10 percent budget deficit at the same time as your required pension contribution is increasing (again) by 20 percent, pension finance is eye-glazing arcana that is best ignored.

But when your local government has reached the point where it’s spending nearly as much on pensions as it spends on base salaries, and pension finance commands your attention, you still can’t do much. Pension reforms were approved by voters in San Jose and San Diego, among other places, but their impact was significantly reduced because of court challenges. Similarly, a moderate statewide pension reform passed by California’s legislature and signed by Governor Brown in 2013 has been repeatedly challenged in court.

The primary legal dispute is over what is referred to as the “California Rule.” According to this interpretation of California contract law, pension benefit accruals – the amount of additional pension benefit an employee earns each year – cannot be reduced, even for future work. Reformers find this appallingly unfair, based on the fact that when California’s public employee pension benefit accruals were enhanced, the enhancement was applied retroactively. Suddenly increasing a pension benefit by 50 percent or more, not only for future work, but for decades of work already performed, is a big part of why California’s pension funds are in the precarious shape they’re in today.

While pension benefits can be changed for new employees, there are over a million state and local government employees in California who are already working and whose pension benefit formulas – even for future work – cannot be changed unless the California Rule is struck down. Several active court cases are challenging the California Rule, and because of the decisive impact the eventual rulings in these cases may have, pension reformers have largely put their efforts on hold. So what’s the latest?

Earlier this year, in the case Cal Fire Local 2881 v. CalPERS, the California Supreme Court struck down one of the challenges to the state’s 2013 pension reform act. The plaintiffs argued that the ability of retirees to purchase so-called “airtime”was a constitutionally protected vested benefit that could not be taken away. Purchasing “airtime” was a common practice whereby upon retirement, a pension recipient could make a payment and in exchange have more years of service added to their pension formula, increasing their annual pension for the rest of their life. This was however a narrow ruling, only stopping purchases of airtime. The ruling did not address the larger issue of the constitutionality of the California Rule.

Additional cases pending before the California Supreme Court that could be decided next year are coming with lower court opinions of great interest to reformers. In the case Marin Association of Public Employees v. Marin County Employees’ Retirement Association, the appellate court opinion included the following: “While a public employer does have a ‘vested right’ to a pension that right is to a ‘reasonable’ pension – not an immutable entitlement to the most optional formula of calculating the pension. The legislature may prior to the employee’s retirement, alter the formula, thereby reducing the anticipated pension.” If the California Supreme Court embraces that opinion in a broad ruling, it is possible the California Rule could be the casualty.

For two decades now in California, when it comes to pensions, “reasonable” has become a contentious word. Back in 1999, pension benefit formulas were still reasonable and financially sustainable. But starting in 1999, in most state and local government agencies, pension benefits were increased by roughly 50 percent, at the same time as the age of eligibility was lowered. Also beginning around this time, pension “spiking” became more common, where not only could “airtime” be purchased, but overtime pay, on-call pay, call-back pay, vacation and sick leave sold back, and recruitment bonuses could all be added to the base salary when calculating retirement pensions. These many changes are the reason California’s state and local public employee pension funds are financially stressed and demanding increasing payments that government agencies cannot afford.

The following information, recently compiled by Retirement Security Initiative, provides details on the recently settled Cal Fire Local 2881 v CalPERS case, along with four active cases before the California Supreme Court. Depending on how they are decided, options for pension reformers in the coming years could be greatly expanded.

California Pension Cases before the State Supreme Court

SUMMARY STATUS – DECIDED:

Cal Fire Local 2881 v. CalPERS
In March 2019, the California Supreme Court upheld one of Governor Brown’s (modest) changes to retirement benefits in PEPRA for public employees: eliminating the opportunity to purchase “airtime.” The court determined that this perk was different than the core pension benefit and therefore able to be modified.

PENDING:

Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, et al. v. Alameda County Employee’s Retirement Association
The Deputy Sherriff’s Association (and others) are challenging the elimination of overtime pay, on-call pay, call-back pay, vacation and sick leave sold back, recruitment bonuses, and other items from pension calculations. The appellate court upheld most of the modifications under the same reasoning of Marin. Both sides have asked for the Supreme Court to review.

Marin Association of Public Employees v. Marin County Employees’ Retirement Association
Four local unions challenged the elimination of callback and standby pay from their pension calculations. In a departure from California Rule, appellate court ruled the modifications were legal and employees only have a right to a reasonable pension. Court of Appeal sided against the unions. It is currently pending in the California Supreme Court.

Hipsher v. Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association
The PEPRA law allows the modification of public pension benefits for public employees who are convicted of a felony for behavior while performing official duties. The court of appeals upheld the ability to alter the benefits in these narrow circumstances but requires due process for public employees. It is now awaiting review from the California Supreme Court.

McGlynn v. State of California
Six trial judges petitioned for retirement benefits for when they were elected in 2012, rather than when they took office in January 2013, which was after PEPRA changes. All courts have sided with the state. It is now pending review from the California Supreme Court.

DETAILED STATUS – DECIDED:

Cal Fire Local 2881 v. CalPERS
Supreme Court Case: S23995

Summary:  This case presented the following issues: (1) Was the option to purchase additional service credits pursuant to Government Code section 20909 (known as “airtime service credits”) a vested pension benefit of public employees enrolled in CalPERS? (2) If so, did the Legislature’s withdrawal of this right through the enactment of the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 (PEPRA) (Gov. Code, §§ 7522.46, 20909, subd. (g)), violate the contracts clauses of the federal and state Constitutions?

The Supreme Court’s decision in March 2019:  “We therefore affirm the decisions of the trial court and the Court of Appeal, which concluded that PEPRA’s elimination of the opportunity to purchase ARS credit did not violate the Constitution.”

Notable quotes from the Supreme Court’s opinion:  “We conclude that the opportunity to purchase ARS credit was not a right protected by the contract clause. There is no indication in the statute conferring the opportunity to purchase ARS credit that the Legislature intended to create contractual rights. Further, unlike core pension rights, the opportunity to purchase ARS credit was not granted to public employees as deferred compensation for their work, and here we find no other basis for concluding that the opportunity to purchase ARS credit is protected by the contract clause. In the absence of constitutional protection, the opportunity to purchase ARS credit could be altered or eliminated at the discretion of the Legislature.” (page 3)

“In this regard, plaintiffs argue that a contractual right with respect to the opportunity to purchase ARS credit should be found because public employees reasonably expected that the opportunity would continue to be made available for the duration of their employment. The only cited basis for those “reasonable expectations,” however, is the belief that the opportunity to purchase ARS credit would continue to exist in the future because it “was in effect for ten years.” The argument proves too much. We have never held that statutory terms and conditions of public employment gain constitutional protection merely from the fact of their existence, even if they have persisted for a decade. Such a rationale would directly contradict the general principle that such terms and conditions are not a matter of contract and are generally subject to legislative change.” (page 35)

“Because we conclude that California’s public employees have never had a contractual right to the continued availability of the opportunity to purchase ARS credit, the question of whether PEPRA worked an unconstitutional impairment of protected rights does not arise.” (page 45)

Undecided Questions:  Two major issues remain open, perhaps to be decided in the other pending cases:
1) The degree of protection for unearned benefits for future work by current employees.
2) The circumstance under which vested benefits can be changed once vested and whether a “comparable” benefit must be provided.

DETAILED STATUS – PENDING:

Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, et al. v. Alameda County Employee’s Retirement Association
Supreme Court Case: S247095
19 Cal. App. 5th 61 (1st Dist. 2018), review granted, 413 P.3d 1132 (Cal. Mar. 28, 2018).

Summary:  This case includes the following issue: Did statutory amendments to the County Employees’ Retirement Law (Gov. Code, § 31450 et seq.) made by the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 (Gov. Code, § 7522 et seq.) reduce the scope of the pre-existing definition of pensionable compensation and thereby impair employees’ vested rights protected by the contract clauses of the state and federal Constitutions?

In the courts below:  Deputy Sheriff’s union and others sued challenging the elimination of overtime pay, on-call pay, call-back pay, vacation and sick leave sold back, recruitment bonuses, and other items from pension calculations. The appellate court upheld most of the modifications under the same reasoning of Marin, but held some of the changes were illegal and would send others back to the trial court for further review. Both sides of this case asked the State Supreme Court for review.

Status:  Briefing in Progress. Supplemental Briefs in response to friends of the court briefs. As of October 17, 2019, the most recent document was filed May 29, 2019.

Marin Association of Public Employees v. Marin County Employees’ Retirement Association
Supreme Court Case: S237460
2 Cal. App. 5th 674 (1st Dist. 2016), review granted, 383 P.3d 1105 (Cal. Nov. 22, 2016).

Petition for review after the Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in an action for writ of administrative mandate. The court ordered briefing deferred pending the decision of the Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Four, in Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. v. Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Assn., A141913[, or further order of the court].

Four local unions challenged the elimination of callback and standby pay from their pension calculations. In a departure from California Rule, appellate court ruled the modifications were legal and employees only have a right to a reasonable pension.

Court of Appeal conclusion:  “As will be shown, while a public employer does have a “vested right” to a pension that right is to a “reasonable” pension – not an immutable entitlement to the most optional formula of calculating the pension. The legislature may prior to the employee’s retirement, alter the formula, thereby reducing the anticipated pension.” Marin Ass’n. of Pub. Emps. v. Marin Cnty. Employees’ Ret. Ass’n, 206 Cal. Rptr. 3d 365, 380 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016), appeal pending in California Supreme Court, 383 P.3 1105 (2016).

Hipsher v. Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association
Supreme Court Case: S250244

Petition for review after the Court of Appeal modified and affirmed the judgment in an action for writ of administrative mandate. The court ordered briefing deferred pending decision in Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. v. Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Assn., S247095, which includes the following issue: Did statutory amendments to the County Employees’ Retirement Law (Gov. Code, § 31450 et seq.) made by the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 (Gov. Code, § 7522 et seq.) reduce the scope of the pre-existing definition of pensionable compensation and thereby impair employees’ vested rights protected by the contracts clauses of the state and federal Constitutions?

The California Rule is described in Hipsher v. Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Assn., 24 Cal.App.5th 740, 754-754 (2018) “… with respect to active employees any modification of vested rights must be (1) reasonable, (2) bear material relation to the theory and successful operation of a pension system and (3) be accompanied by a ‘comparable new advantage,’” but that court noted that, after the Marin decision, there is no “must” related to a modification of a comparable new advantage and a modification need not be so accompanied. Id. At 754.

McGlynn v. State of California
Supreme Court Case: S248513

Petition for review after the Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in an action for writ of administrative mandate. The court ordered briefing deferred pending decision in Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. v. Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Assn., S247095, which includes the following issue: Did statutory amendments to the County Employees’ Retirement Law (Gov. Code, § 31450 et seq.) made by the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 (Gov. Code, § 7522 et seq.) reduce the scope of the pre-existing definition of pensionable compensation and thereby impair employees’ vested rights protected by the contracts clauses of the state and federal Constitutions?

Six judges who were elected to the superior court in mid-term elections in 2012, but who did not take office until January 7, 2013, maintain they are entitled to benefits under the Judges’ Retirement System II (JRS II), which were effect at the time they were elected, rather than at the time they assumed office.

Court of Appeal conclusion:  “We conclude, as did the trial court, that the judges did not obtain a vested right in JRS II benefits as judges-elect, but rather obtained a vested right to retirement benefits only upon taking office, after PEPRA went into effect. We also conclude PEPRA’s provisions pertaining to fluctuating pension contributions do not violate the non-diminution clause of the California Constitution (Cal. Const., art. III, § 4), nor do they impermissibly delegate legislative authority over judicial compensation (Cal. Const., art. VI, § 19).” (pages 1-2)

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

CalPERS Annual Valuation Reports – main search page

Moody’s Cross Sector Rating Methodology – Adjustments to US State and Local Government Reported Pension Data (version in effect 2018)

California Pension Tracker (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research – California Pension Tracker

Transparent California – main search page

The State Controller’s Government Compensation in California – main search page

The State Controller’s Government Compensation in California – raw data downloads

California Policy Center – How much will YOUR city pay CalPERS in a down economy?

California Policy Center – California Rule Does Not Protect “Airtime”

California Policy Center – Resources for Pension Reformers (dozens of links)

California Policy Center – Will the California Supreme Court Reform the “California Rule?”

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Fossil Fuel Reality

Over the weekend, the traditional Harvard versus Yale football game was interrupted during halftime by about 150 student activists, spontaneously joined by hundreds of fans, to protest climate change. Occupying the area around the 500-yard line, the protesters chanted “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Fossil fuel has got to go!” The game resumed after about 30 students were arrested and the rest left.

It would be reasonable to suppose that people who manage to gain admission to Harvard and Yale are among the most gifted students in America. But when it comes to swiftly eliminating the usage of fossil fuel, have they done their homework?

Around the world, billions of people are now convinced that catastrophic climate change is inevitable if humanity continues to rely on fossil fuel. Most developed Western nations, along with the United Nations and other supranational organizations, are promoting aggressive policies to replace fossil fuel with renewable energy. While a scientific debate remains, especially with respect to the severity of the predicted climate change, it is the economic challenges relating to rapid elimination of fossil fuel that require urgent examination.

The reason for this is simple: At this time, there is no feasible economic scenario whereby worldwide fossil fuel use does not increase steadily for the next several decades. To dispute this assertion, several indisputable facts would have to be ignored. For starters, shown below is a chart illustrating just how large a percentage of global energy remained dependent on fossil fuel over the past ten years. Using data provided by the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which is the most authoritative source available, on this chart, the total energy consumed in all of its forms – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, and renewables – are expressed as million metric tons of crude oil (MMTO).

By converting quantities of energy from various sources into a single normalized unit – the petroleum industry uses units of crude oil, economists use BTUs, scientists use joules – it is easy to see how much each type of fuel contributed to total global energy consumption over the past decade. As shown, renewables – solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass/biofuel – only comprised 4 percent of total energy consumed in 2018.

There has been strong growth in renewable energy. But absolute values also matter. Ten years ago, in 2009, renewables only contributed 1.2 percent of global energy consumed. Between 2009 and 2018, total worldwide energy consumed rose by 22 percent, or 2,502 MMTOs. Annual consumption of renewables, on the other hand, only rose by 424 MMTOs. Renewable energy only represented 17 percent of the increase in energy consumption between 2009 and 2018.

To get a better idea of exactly what type of renewables were part of the global energy mix in 2018, the next chart provides details. As can be seen, the top producer was wind at 1.7 percent, followed by solar electricity at 0.8 percent, biofuel at 0.7 percent, and all other, mostly geothermal, at 0.8 percent.

But there are serious problems with biofuel. According to the World Bioenergy Association, biofuel crops are already consuming an astonishing 550,000 square miles of land. This already represents 5 percent of all arable land area on earth – to produce less than one percent of global energy.

Solar and wind energy, while also being huge consumers of land for the amount of energy they produce, have an additional problem; there is still no cost effective way to store the energy they produce. Not only are solar and wind energy dependent on daily fluctuations of wind and sunlight, but there are seasonal fluctuations that create even greater challenges.

To account for this, either solar and wind installations must be oversized sufficiently to generate adequate daily power during the times of the year when the hours of daylight are the shortest and wind is the least reliable, or batteries and other electricity storage solutions must be deployed. These electricity storage farms would have to be capable of storing enough energy to supply large cities for literally months at a time.

According to former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who served during the Obama Administration, California’s 2050 “decarbonizing” targets “can be met only with breakthroughs in a portfolio of affordable technologies.” Meanwhile, in California and around the world, hundreds of billions are being invested each year on technologies, such as gargantuan land based and offshore wind farms, that are extremely disruptive to ecosystems. These investments only yield adequate returns when the costs to provide grid connections and upgrades, as well as backup capacity including quick start natural gas power plants are socialized onto taxpayers and ratepayers.

Despite the incredible cost, and the likelyhood that many solutions being implemented today will be obsolete within a few decades, if not a few years, political support for decarbonization remains strong. But even if tens of trillions were spent, can it be done? Here is where the algebra of energy consumption presents challenges to the decarbonizers that may be unsolvable.

The next chart shows the average amount of energy an American consumed in 2018, compared to their counterparts in China and India. A few things immediately jump out. First, it is clear that in the past ten years, Americans did not lower their per capita energy consumption, despite driving more fuel efficient cars, deployment of mass transit options and urban densification, regardless of more efficient laptop and cell phone batteries, “smart” utility meters, “connected” appliances, etc. Can Americans significantly reduce their per capita energy consumption? The most recent data does not yet show that they can.

Turning to China and India, however, highlights just how far behind the rest of the world is in terms of average energy consumption. As shown, the average person in China consumed 539 units of energy (expressed as gallons of crude oil equivalents) in 2009, and increased that to 723 units of energy by 2018. They did this at the same time as their population increased by 62 million. India logged similar progress, going from a per capita consumption of 130 units in 2009 to 184 units in 2018, at the same time as their population grew by 135 million.Based on these facts, the global energy algebra comes down to this: In the future, how much per capita energy is it reasonable for people to expect, in order for them to fulfill their aspirations to become educated, engage in productive work, afford entertaining diversions in their spare time, and raise their families in a nation where the infrastructure – all of it, from hospitals and universities, to roads and rail, airports and seaports, to a resilient water and power grid – is robust enough to support their towns and cities?

To answer this, imagine that everyone on earth used only half as much energy as Americans use. And suppose, quite optimistically, that global population stabilizes at 8 billion. To accomplish this would require worldwide consumption of energy to grow from 13,865 MMTOs in 2019 to a staggering 34,621 MMTOs. That is, for everyone on earth, including Americans, to consume half as much energy as American’s currently consume, global energy production would have to increase to 2.5 times its current output. And would that be enough? Americans, with all the emphasis and investment in energy conservation over the past ten years, have not reduced their per capita energy consumption. Shall global energy production then quintuple, so everyone on earth can use as much energy as Americans do?

Facing this enormous challenge, investments in renewables might focus on research into leapfrog technologies. The return on that investment may enable decarbonized sources of energy to arrive sooner than anyone expects, not because they were mandated, but because they truly cost less than fossil fuel. Instead, R&D focuses too much on preposterous schemes such as “sequestering” CO2 in underground caverns, or mechanically removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Perhaps not algebraic, but arguably axiomatic, is the following equation: Affordable energy equals prosperity equals literacy equals female emancipation equals voluntary family size reduction equals ZPG sooner rather than later. In the continent of Africa, where the population is currently projected to rise from 1.3 billion today to 2.5 billion within the next thirty years, either there will be cheap and affordable energy, or there will be a Malthusian event on that continent that will rival any similar such paroxysm in human history.

Looking forward, this is the moral case for fossil fuel. The fact that there is no choice. Humanity needs to develop every single type of energy it possibly can as quickly as it possibly can, because that is how everyone on earth will readily have the opportunity to enjoy first world lifestyles. Only then can people make first world choices to limit the size of their families and only then can they participate enthusiastically and effectively in efforts to preserve the environment around them. Only then will the allure of comfort and security outweigh the desperate imperatives of war. And soon enough, commercially competitive renewable energy – perhaps in forms we haven’t yet imagined – will supplant fossil fuel.

People who demand rapid elimination of fossil fuel need to either face the algebraic impossibility of doing that, or be honest and disclose their true motives.

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Californians Exempt from the Consequences of Liberalism

When trying to understand why Californians continue to elect liberals, several explanations routinely surface. Chief among them is the theory that conservatives forever alienated California’s diverse electorate by championing “discriminatory” policies.

The early example of this was Prop. 187, passed in 1994, which banned providing government services to illegal aliens. Most of Prop. 187 was overturned in court. Claiming it should serve “as a warning to immigrant bashers,” the Left is now well into their third decade of using it to bash conservatives in California.

The other, more recent example of a discriminatory policy promoted by California conservatives – and also used ever since to taint them – was Prop. 8, passed in 2008, which banned gay marriage, and which also was overturned a few years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Whether you support these social issues or oppose them – and conservatives are by no means monolithic in their positions on either of them, not now, nor at the time – they have come to dominate the political conversation in California. Racism. Sexism. The war on women. Gay bashing. Immigrant bashing. “Transphobia.” Conservatives, go away. California is no home for you.

Along with social issues, the California’s liberal elites also claim a popular mandate on the issue of “climate change.” No public education system in America is more geared towards terrifying the next generation on this topic. When it comes to displays of unanimity, obsession, and panic over climate change, no media region in the world can rival the bloviating hysteria of California’s many local news anchors and pundits. California’s tech titans and entertainment moguls see profit and power in green technology, and, of course, it’s a green gold mine for California’s insatiable unionized public sector.

But is it this simple?

Even if California’s conservatives are forever tainted as planet destroying racist sexist bigots, aren’t the liberals nonetheless failing in California? The highest rates of poverty. The worst roads. The highest taxes. The worst schools. The most homeless. The fewest affordable homes. Water rationing. Mismanaged forests and catastrophic wildfires. The list goes on. California is a tough place to live. And the liberals and the progressives, who have held absolute political power in California for decades, own all of it. What gives?

There’s another explanation. A supermajority of Californians are exempt from the consequences of liberalism. These exempt Californians comprise four groups.

The Technology Elite

This is the smallest group, but it’s the most influential. These liberal voters are exempt from high taxes and high home prices because they’re wealthy enough to pay the high prices without feeling the financial pain. Who cares if your mortgage and property taxes amount to $10,000 per month, if you have a household income of over a million per year?

The technology elite is itself stratified, but at every level, their exemption from the consequences of liberal politics remains intact. At the top are the tech billionaires and near billionaires. These people are almost all politically liberal (or “libertarian progressive”), and they are not only completely unaffected by California’s high cost of living, but they are using their wealth to support liberal politicians and powerful liberal nonprofits.

In the middle of the technology elite’s pyramid are the attorneys, CPAs, successful PR executives and other high-end servants to the technology industry. With incomes easily averaging over a half-million per year, and often living in two-income households, these mid-level elites can easily pay their mortgages, their taxes, and the private school tuition for their children.

At the base of the technology elite’s pyramid are the knowledge workers who write code or create press releases and marketing campaigns, or otherwise keep the technology giants growing. With engineer salaries averaging around $150,000 per year in the big companies, these workers can afford to share swanky apartments with plenty of money left over to fulfill their lifestyle desires. They are typically childless, which removes that expense, and the companies they work for shower them with ancillary benefits such as private buses for their commutes, along with company gyms, cafeterias, and play spaces.

The Public Sector

California’s unionized public sector is one of the highest paid bureaucracies in the world, probably only rivaled by the federal workers in Washington DC. Their pensions and other retirement benefits, which now average over $70,000 for only 30 years of work, threaten to eventually bankrupt California’s cities and counties, and are the primary reason for the relentless drive – always pushed by their unions – for more state and local taxes.

While California’s public sector unions bemoan the financial difficulty “nurses, teachers and firefighters” have to endure to “live in the communities they serve,” what they ignore is that nobody in California can afford to live in these communities. But their rates of pay, which in most cases are well in excess of what the market would require to attract qualified workers, partially exempt them from the worst effects of California’s high cost of living, as does the subsidized home loans, generous family health benefits, housing assistance, and a host of other benefits.

When California’s public employees claim they can’t afford to live in California, they’re right. But they’re considerably better off than most private sector workers of equal skills. And it is the financial power of California’s liberal public employee unions that buy the candidates who enact the laws that make it so hard for everyone else.

The Ultra Low Income and the Undocumented

If you’re a code inspector looking for violations, and your city is coping with a budget deficit, where do you spend your time? Do you go into the barrios and hoods, looking for someone who didn’t get a permit before they replaced a window or water heater, or do you hit the solvent suburbs? Magnify that basic incentive by millions, and you have what’s happening in California.

If you want to add a room to your home, altering the foundation, in most California counties the time and money required to get the permits – especially if it involves kitchen or bathroom amenities – will add up to more than the cost of the construction. People of modest means either don’t bother, or they accept that their project will have to be much less than they want or could otherwise afford, because in California, you pay the government punitive amounts to get permission to do things that in most states you wouldn’t need a permit for in the first place. And you waste a lot of time.

Or, you just do it, because “we don’t need no stinkin’ permits.” Victor Davis Hanson, who lives in California’s Central Valley when he isn’t teaching at Stanford, has been writing about this for years. Here’s a vivid example of what he’s seen:

“Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant.”

Needless to say, low income and undocumented Californians don’t have things easy. But instead of having upwards mobility, they have government handouts. Imagine how they would start voting if these code enforcers and business regulators started universally enforcing all of California’s intrusive regulations.

The Prop. 13 Privileged Class

To head off charges of heresy, let’s be clear: Prop. 13, which limits property tax increases, should not be touched until everything else in California gets fixed. Reform crippling anti-housing regulations and get home prices down to earth. Outlaw public sector unions and deflate the bloated public sector. Right-size the financially unsustainable pensions. That’s understood.

Moreover, the rationale behind Prop. 13 is durable and fair. When you buy a home in California, you pay market rate property taxes. Over time, as the increasing value of your home outpaces the 2 percent per year that your property taxes are permitted to rise, the burden becomes less in real dollars. This parallels your children passing through the public schools, which are the primary beneficiaries of property taxes, and as well leaves you better able to stay in your home when you retire and have less income. Leave Prop. 13 alone.

But there are consequences. Take a look at voting patterns in California. How many of these school bonds and affordable housing bonds – almost always put to hideously inefficient use – would pass, if a sizable percentage of the voters weren’t paying negligible property taxes? Sure, it’s ok to tack another $200 per year onto a property tax bill to service a school bond, if the base rate is only $1,500 per year. And don’t forget that property tax rates are passed by homeowners to their heirs, so there is now a younger generation living in these homes – by the millions – who don’t feel the true burden of California’s wasteful spending.

Imagine how having to pay current rate property taxes on a 1,200 square foot home that currently sells for $1.8 million would focus the mind. Perhaps it would no longer be a slam dunk for the tax and spend liberals to get elected.

California May Realign Despite its Exempt Supermajority

This combination – successfully demonizing conservatives while exempting large swaths of the population from the consequences of liberal governance – has worked so far in California. But liberal dominance could come to an end, and it could happen swiftly.

California’s low income communities are hit the hardest by the failed public schools, and they are increasingly unwilling to accept the conventional explanations. Why are the worst teachers shuttled into schools in the low income neighborhoods, instead of fired? When are the elected school board representatives going to start telling the truth – that families and hard work and a cultural priority that values educational achievement is the surest guarantee of success, not more BS about discrimination? Low income parents are rising up, demanding charter schools and reform of hiring and management rules imposed by the teachers union. Things are changing.

Similarly, California’s low income communities are beginning to hear the message that maybe “climate change” isn’t the real reason it’s now impossible to build suburbs for all of California’s new arrivals; maybe it’s greedy landlords and investors who just want to keep home prices high so they can extract higher rents and higher returns. Green activists beware. A backlash could be coming from places where you’ll least expect it.

Even many of California’s public sector workers are able to see that liberal policies have gone too far. Many of them are still driven by a desire to serve the public, and not just enjoy the lavish benefits, the often lackadaisical workload, and the lucrative pension.

Will California’s unionized firefighters really choose to march with the teachers union again, like they did in Los Angeles in January 2019? Don’t bet on it. It’s becoming increasingly obvious what the teachers union has done to public education in California.

An insurgency is brewing within California’s public sector, and significant percentages of them will either demand their union stop exclusively supporting liberal candidates, or – thanks to the Janus decision – they will quit.

Can California’s Prop. 13 privileged class see past their exemption to realize how liberals have failed their state? Can the progressive libertarian technology elite? Maybe they will when the liberal mentality of California’s state legislature tips fully into a socialist mentality, imperiling their ability to manage their companies and their investments.

But only one of these four groups has to be peeled away to change the political landscape in California. The biggest wild card are low income Californians, who have more reason than ever to make common cause with what’s left of California’s middle class. That day could arrive sooner than anyone expects.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Interviewing the Host of the Channel That Never Happened

Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great – so called – told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened.
Amon Goeth, Schindler’s List, 1994

Invoking the holocaust as analogous to cancel culture is a tasteless stretch. Or is it? We hear the analogy every day applied to climate skeptics, who are stigmatized as “deniers.” And when it comes to online censorship, Amon Goeth’s quote from Spielberg’s masterpiece is too evocative to ignore. Because when someone is cancelled online, they don’t just lose their ability to publish new material. Their entire body of work, their history, their audience, their past, present and future, is wiped out. They never happened.

On October 18, 2019, the YouTube channel Red Ice TV was erased. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Red Ice TV is a white nationalist hate site, promoting racist views. At the time of “cancellation,” Red Ice TV had 334,000 subscribers and its videos had been viewed nearly 50 million times.

Today, Red Ice TV is just the latest YouTube channel that never happened. The online megaphone that can reach the world instantly and for pennies, can also in an instant be deleted without a trace. If you click on the link to Red Ice TV’s YouTube channel, you get a generic screen with the message “This channel does not exist.”

But why doesn’t this channel exist, as if it never happened? Why has Lana Lokteff, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, and the subject of an in-depth interview to conclude this article, been wiped out by YouTube, and every other major online platform?

YouTube Channels That Flourished, And Then Never Happened

YouTube has been playing a game of cat and mouse with channels they deem to produce “white nationalist” content. Earlier this fall, they deplatformed three similarly labeled channels, then admitted two back. “Replatformed” were The Iconoclast and Way of the World. Gone forever, along with 450,000 subscribers and nearly 75 million video views, was James Allsup.

Red Ice TV and James Allsup can now be found on BitChute. But who watches BitChute? Conservatives and nationalists – and, shall we say it, globalism skeptics – are dangerous when they spread their ideas on a video platform that everybody watches. That platform is, and only is, YouTube.

Standing up for the right of these vloggers to operate without being deplatformed by YouTube, which by any reasonable standard is a monopoly, is not an endorsement of these vloggers. But so what? Whether you are defending what they say, or just defending their right to say it, there’s no recourse.

For example, government intervention would probably create more problems than it would solve. Conservative politicians in the U.S. want to regulate YouTube, possibly taking away its exemption from publisher’s liability, because it censors too much. Liberal politicians in the U.S. are also threatening to take away YouTube’s platform exemption, because it doesn’t censor enough. It’s hard to imagine government intervention ending well. But the status quo isn’t turning out very well for free speech, either.

Vincent James, whose Red Elephants channel has nearly 300,000 subscribers despite being demonetized and algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, explained how leftist activists use “mass flagging campaigns” to take down conservative online platforms. “What online activists do is post something on Reddit or a ‘discord server’ which is an encrypted online messaging app,” he said, “these mass flagging campaigns will originate from activists using these forums to say ‘all of you go and flag this channel.'” When the platform administrators receive a high volume of complaints, they suppress or erase the channel.

There is no similar sort of online attack mob operating on the right to silence left wing voices, and these grassroots online flash mobs have become very effective at shutting down conservatives online. In the case of sites without large fan bases that can raise objections, the power of the mob to erase is near absolute, and nobody knows how many of these smaller sites are gone as a result. In Red Ice’s case, it didn’t matter that thousands of their fans objected.

Ultimately, if new federal regulations are problematic and online flagging warriors successfully attack channels even if they haven’t violated the First Amendment, YouTube management has to take it on themselves to do the right thing. In this case, that means reinstating Red Ice TV, no matter how repugnant they may seem. As YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki very recently asserted, “it’s more important than ever that YouTube remains open to anyone.”

While nothing in this report, or the interview that follows, is intended in any way to endorse the views expressed by Red Ice TV, judgement of any kind is not the point. The question that should be being asked is simply this: Does Red Ice TV have a First Amendment right to say what they’re saying, and if so, does YouTube have an obligation to offer them a platform? As Adam Candeub and Mark Epstein, writing for City Journal, put it, “Exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication—not curators of acceptable opinion.”

Maybe there is a general consensus that some of the content produced by Red Ice TV does not constitute “acceptable opinion.” But it should be obvious that supporting someone’s right to speak their mind does not mean you agree with everything they have to say. It should also be obvious that some of the things they have to say need to be said.

How Big Tech Smacks Down the “Right-Wing”

The online platform war began in earnest after the 2016 presidential election, when the liberal management of the social media giants – often egged on by their even more liberal workforces – realized that conservatives, inexplicably, had mastered the art of online political campaigning and did a better job of it than the liberals. Notwithstanding the incessant finger pointing at the Russians, the smarter heads in Silicon Valley knew they were legitimately outplayed, and vowed to never let that happen again.

The stepped up attacks on right-wing online content include subtle measures that are hard to detect, harder still to prove intent, but have huge impact. Alex Jones and his website InfoWars offers an example. In November 2016 InfoWars attracted 125 million views. This was the high water mark for Jones. By July 2018, Jones was still attracting an impressive 25 million views a month, but that was an 80 percent drop in 20 months. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.”

Up until the Summer of 2018, most of the steps taken against right wing content creators took this relatively soft approach, using manipulated results in Google searches, throttled down appearances in news feeds and YouTube recommended videos, shadowbans on Twitter, deboosting on Facebook. But with the 2018 midterm elections looming, the tech giants decided to take off the gloves.

For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, InfoWars was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned the InfoWars app from their App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.

According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing “political messages.” Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial published by USA Today entitled “Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives.”

Other noteworthy casualties in late 2018 were Sargon of Akkad, whose YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Sargon, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, a 40 year old British political commentator, eventually got his channel back. Yiannopoulos did not, although he has fitfully attempted to pick up the pieces with new online ventures.

The Strange Case of Milo Yiannopoulos

The case of Milo Yiannopoulos is telling, because nobody with a sense of humor would consider him to have ever engaged in “hate speech,” much less going beyond First Amendment free speech protections and advocating violence. Yiannopoulous, denounced by his critics as a right-wing extremist, proudly describes himself as a gay man with Jewish heritage who is specifically attracted to black men. He was offensive, he was outrageous, but it would be hard to claim he was a hardcore homophobe, or anti Semite, or racist.

For a few brief months in 2016 and early 2017, Milo Yiannopoulous was arguably the most famous troll in the world. To those who agreed with his politics, he was hilarious. For everyone who wanted Yiannopoulos to disappear, however, his cavalier comments on the subject of pedophilia, which came to light in February 2017, were the last straw. Even Yiannopoulos knew he’d gone too far, and, to no avail, issued a rare apology.

Whether Yiannopoulos was defending pedophilia, or, only slightly less repugnant, was just making light of it, is not really the point. Because to those who found him disagreeable, his articulate, widely shared denunciations of political correctness were a threat, and that is the point. The other takeaway from the Yiannopoulos story is the preposterous double standard that his erasure exemplifies.

In a culture dominated by the Left, we now have “tolerant” parents across America taking their children to Drag Queen Story Hour, and flamboyant prepubescent transvestites are celebrated by the American mainstream media. Are these practices, highly sexualized and arguably inappropriate (to put it mildly), which directly involve very young children, any less objectionable than Milo’s fatal transgressions which were made on forums that cater exclusively to adults? Apparently it depends on who you ask.

Milo Yiannopoulos was making it cool to mock the Left, and his message was influencing tens of millions of people. But by the end of 2018, when Facebook and Patreon kicked him off their platforms, he had already been reduced to a rumor. And then he never happened.

The Intellectual Dark Web

About this time a new term was entering common usage, the “Intellectual Dark Web.” On the website “KnowYourMeme.com,” the Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW, is described as “a phrase coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein referring to a loosely defined group of intellectuals, academics, and political commentators who espouse controversial ideas and beliefs surrounding subjects related to free speech, identity politics and biology.”

This happened in mid-2017, shortly after Eric Weinstein’s brother, Bret Weinstein, had been harassed for refusing to participate in the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen College in Washington state, where he was a professor. Organized by campus leftists, the “Day of Absence” sought to exclude white people from the campus for a day – apparently to further their efforts at achieving social justice. Stung that his brother’s unwillingness to be banned from the campus where he taught was considered “controversial,” Eric Weinstein identified the Intellectual Dark Web as an antidote.

In May 2018, the New York Times published an opinionated but detailed expose of the Intellectual Dark Web. It remains one of the definitive mainstream descriptions of the IDW. Here are some of the topics and premises the article lists as typical fare for the IDW: “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.”

A more detailed description of how the tech giants have partnered with financial intermediaries and internet service providers, all the while taking direction from a powerful coalition of activist left-wing nonprofit pressure groups, can be found in an April 2019 American Greatness article “The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web.”

The Establishment Reactionaries

The 20th century produced two writers of uncommon vision who both wrote books about the future that have become cautionary classics. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell imagined a hellish future of endless war, where the people are oppressed by a tyrannical regime that erases history, engages in constant surveillance, and punishes “thought crimes.”

Aldous Huxley imagined an equally dystopian future in his novel “Brave New World,” but where Orwell’s regime used brutality, Huxley’s tyrants used seduction. Huxley’s government of the future employed psychological manipulation, along with abundant drugs and sex, to pacify a population where people led lives devoid of true love or purpose. What both of these authors shared, however, was the belief that future regimes would rely on Pavlovian conditioning.

It would be fascinating to observe either of these literary giants taking a trip into the actual future, for them to see just how right they were on that fundamental premise. For a while, the internet was an unambiguously revolutionary phenomenon. Everyone could broadcast truth to the world. What social media has done more recently, however, threatens the internet revolution in two ways: The interactive, personal, instantaneous, and perpetual access to an infinite audience has disrupted the human psyche in ways we are only beginning to understand. And the Pavlovian control of this interaction by a small handful of social media platforms in the Silicon Valley has given those companies almost indescribable power.

Virtually all Americans between the ages of 18 and 65 use social media. YouTube is used by 73% of U.S. adults, Facebook 69%, Instagram 37%, Pinterest 28%, LinkedIn 27%, Snapchat 24%, Twitter 22%, WhatsApp 20%, and Reddit 11%. It isn’t uncommon for Americans to use all of these platforms. Among smartphone users in the U.S., the average time spent with their device is an astonishing 3 hours, 10 minutes per day. This is an addiction that has swept through the American population in barely a decade, and it has changed everything.

The ironic surprise in all this is how the Silicon Valley’s tech companies have dealt with their incredible power. They have embraced a reactionary politics which is reflected in the choices they’ve made. Who they promote. Who they erase. What online behaviors they reward, and where they direct the herd. To understand why they have a reactionary political agenda, one must understand how the American Left, over the past 10-20 years, moved from opposing globalization to fully endorsing it. This shift, gradual but steady, came into the open with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump Catalyzed the Revolution Against Globalism

Donald Trump’s heresy was to focus on the negative impact globalism was having on Americans. He catalyzed a revolution by challenging what had become truisms for the establishment—trade deficits don’t matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, mass immigration helps more than it harms.

What the establishment had ignored was that the benefits of trade deficits are financial bubbles (as American asset prices are bid up by foreign investors) that only enrich wealthy speculators. Free trade isn’t free when other nations cheat. Mass immigration only benefits businesses who want cheaper labor. Meanwhile, homes become unaffordable debt traps, good manufacturing jobs migrate overseas, and immigrants take away jobs from America’s most vulnerable workers.

Trump clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Left’s only concern was how globalization affected the developing world, and exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations.

You can make a moral case that globalization should harm the workers of the developed nations more than it harms the workers of developing nations. You can turn that unavoidable truth into an altruistic virtue, although one that is rather hard to defend in the nations that are being harmed. You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the bidding – and attracts the generosity – of the wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by “free” trade and open borders.

America’s progressive Left did both. They’ve disguised the agenda that disenfranchises American citizens within their own nation by attacking “white privilege” and by accusing those who object of being “white nationalists.” They’ve come to accept the premises of free trade economists that they’d once despised, with the caveat that climate activism and all that it entails—namely, the mass redistribution of wealth—will mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations which had once bothered them so much.

The Silicon Valley, which by 2019 had a tech workforce that had reached an incredible 75 percent foreign born, epitomizes a culture where leftist globalism is perceived as not just inevitable, but already here. Close behind, fully embracing globalism in all its ramifications, and scrambling to become as woke and worldly as the tech monopolies, are every other major corporation in America, every elite academic institution, every influential entertainer, every so-called mainstream media property.

These are the new empire. These are Big Brother. This is the Brave New World the online censors are protecting. Their path to power was smooth and relentless. And in the face of an alt-right, nationalist insurgency, they are the reactionaries, and Trump, along with his supporters, are the revolutionaries. Everyone in the world who questions globalism, whether they are right-of-center or left-of-center, are revolutionaries, with all the moral frissons and enticing glamour that being a revolutionary implies.

No wonder Milo Yiannopoulos was so dangerous. He demolished political correctness and revealed its tyrannical hidden agenda, all the while making people laugh. No wonder Alex Jones was a threat, when in between his riffs on human/pig hybrids, he was methodically exposing the supranational networks that are supplanting national governments. No wonder their flourishing electronic footprints were deleted. No wonder they never happened.

The Inconvenient Truths That Must Be Silenced

When considering what truths are inconvenient enough to silence, globalism vs. nationalism is the context in nearly every case. An excellent example of this is the experience of Carey Wedler, who has, so far, hung onto her YouTube channel, but was recently banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

Wedler is a left-leaning critic of the mainstream media and an outspoken opponent of America’s so-called endless wars. She infers that Facebook and Twitter are both working closely with the shadowy Atlantic Council, and that the media and social media giants are engaging in “soft censorship” to remove content that isn’t illegal but the government doesn’t like. Facebook and Twitter never told Wedler why she was banned from their platforms.

Could it be that the active deplatforming and soft censorship being practiced by the social media monopolies, while correlated with their leftist bias, is more accurately described as focused on suppressing anti-globalist content?

If you examine the list of channels, compiled by the Red Elephants Vincent James, that are either banned, demonetized, or algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, there is a common thread, and it isn’t stereotypical right-wing content, or “hate speech.” The common thread, stretching from the acerbic James Allsup to the erudite Stefan Molyneux are ideas that question the globalist agenda. The narratives of globalism skeptics are dangerous to the reactionary empire. That is the threat.

But what if the majority of ordinary people don’t want open borders? What if they would like the facts, not a bunch of skewed BS, regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity” and social justice? What if they sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

What if the phony gravitas and one-sided outrage that pours forth from the overpaid thespians who masquerade as top tier news journalists – think David Muir, Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and the like – is transparently false to anyone who views alternative media? What if the uncanny unanimity of all these mainstream media sources, at the least, exposes a disturbing degree of consensus, if not actual conspiracy? What if fake news is indeed fake news? So fake, in fact, that it insults the intelligence of anyone paying attention?

If the mainstream offline media spins the same controlled, agenda driven stories year after year, and they do, it’s not hard to conclude that social media companies are trying to influence public opinion in the same manner, in favor of a globalist progressive agenda. No national borders. Anti-racist racism. Anti-sexist sexism. Anything to combat “climate change.” Gender “fluidity.” Corporate socialism. And of course, that tasteless, ubiquitous stretch, “Trump is Hitler.”

Which brings us back to Lana Lokteff and her cohorts at Red Ice TV. Are they racist? Are they anti Semitic? Are they “white nationalists?” In the interview to follow, Lokteff claims she is not racist or anti Semitic, although she acknowledges that she is white, and that she is a nationalist. But she asks why those labels are allowed to be used to stigmatize anyone critical of groups claiming to represent a particular race or religion, or to stigmatize anyone critical of an individual who belongs to a particular race of religion. This is a fair question, but it doesn’t necessarily get to the heart of the matter.

To silence her critics, or at least to silence a few of the honest ones, Lokteff and others who are white and who are nationalist may want to strive to visualize an America where they win. How would this nation look? It is reasonable – or should be – to expect a nation to defend its culture, its language and its borders, to care for its citizens, to respect its traditions. So how would people fit in who aren’t white, or who aren’t Christian? To accept someone as an American citizen, what constitutes an acceptable range of behaviors and beliefs? What are reasonable terms for inclusion in the American family?

The Difficult Conversations That Must Be Had

This is one of the most important questions of our era. If corporate globalism, primarily pushed by the Left, is poised to erase national and ethnic identities, then what sort of push back can preserve nations and ethnic groups in a way where the solution isn’t worse than the problem? What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? Can nationalism be inclusive without becoming meaningless? Can nationalism be compassionate, offering a better model for the evolution of global civilization, and still be authentic nationalism? Is there a version of economic nationalism that nonetheless nurtures global prosperity?

One thing ought to be certain: Denying people like Lana Lokteff the ability to voice her observations and opinions on YouTube is a dangerous mistake. Because the concerns voiced by the globalism skeptics are based on hard facts and sound logic, no matter whether they are expressed with grace or with fury. To silence them defers a much needed debate about globalism and its consequences, at a time when current globalist policies are becoming increasingly unsustainable.

You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as the welfare state grows. You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as environmentalist laws make it nearly impossible to build the enabling housing and infrastructure to accommodate them, and instead mandate rationing and a higher cost of living.

You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as the unionized public education system, dominated by leftist globalists, teaches immigrant children that they have arrived in a hostile, racist nation. You can’t fundamentally change the ethnic proportions in the nation within two generations, yet demand perfectly proportional representation of all ethnic groups in every facet of American life, from wealth and income to geographic distribution to hiring, promoting, college admissions and contract awards.

All of these things are socially and economically unsustainable; all of them weaken America. To enforce them requires the soft tyranny of Pavlovian conditioning, backed up by a ruthless and pervasive police state. Small wonder that dissident glitches in the online matrix become merely rumors, caricatures, channels that don’t exist; channels that never happened.

In the lengthy interview to follow, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, Lana Lokteff, expresses opinions that in everyday public discourse are repressed. For most people, the opinions Lokteff expresses generate a conditioned response and are dismissed without further consideration. In reality, the issues she’s confronting are extraordinarily complex and carry epic consequences. By suppressing discussion about them, and by demonizing people who bring them up, these issues, and the policies that have created them, remain unresolved.

After speaking with Lokteff, two things relating to internet censorship seem especially noteworthy:

First, whenever monopoly platforms like YouTube decide to wipe out one of their channels, they ought to publicly disclose specific examples of what that channel did to get itself wiped out. Is YouTube afraid that such disclosures would reveal and expose its bias?

Second, if online censorship moves beyond just enforcing explicit violations of the First Amendment, and it has, then, as Lokteff pointed out, we risk “creating desperate people doing radical things to be heard.”

Here, then, is the story of Red Ice TV, in Lana Lokteff’s own words. Readers are invited to identify, if they can – and since YouTube would not – exactly where she engages in “hate speech” that is too dangerous to be permitted public discourse. And if all her opinions are not opinions we would share, do we really want to drive these opinions underground? Was the First Amendment only designed to protect the speech we agree with?

Interview with Lana Lokteff, co-host and co-founder of Red Ice TV

1 – Red Ice TV has been banned from YouTube. What happened? What outside groups may have pressured YouTube and what are their tactics?

We had no “strikes,” we were in good standing with YouTube. Then one morning we woke up and our channel was gone. The outside groups that pushed YouTube to ban us include the corrupt and communist Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters, the Anti Defamation League, along with Antifa outlets such as the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post. Their tactics are to lie, defame, and snip together partial quotes out of context to justify why you should be banned and then get you banned on the platforms you’d use to defend yourself. Their friends at Google also rig the search results so when you search for us, you only find the lying defamatory sources. That’s one of the reasons it’s aggravating when conservatives, who know that the media lies, nonetheless rely on the media to look for information on us. None of this ever applies to the other side.

2 – Did you anticipate this, and were there any warnings or last minute indications that this was going to happen?

We were expecting it. Many of our top videos (we had several videos with a million views or more) were deleted. We even had a video featuring the Dali Lama’s comments about refugees ultimately having to go back home to rebuild, which YouTube deleted. Anyone on our side of politics is going to eventually be banned and have to go elsewhere. They have deleted a few channels, then brought them back after there was an outcry from their supporters, sometimes even months later. People made a ruckus for us too, but we haven’t received any response from YouTube. In general, YouTube appears to have more leniency for people who are extra careful to censor themselves and who knowingly tone it down, or are vague in their vocabulary. Well, I thought we were doing that lately too. Some of their reinstatements may be so they can create the illusion of tolerance and it’s also possible that their programmed AI systems are flagging channels and holding them for review.

3 – How many subscribers did you have? What recourse is there?

We had 334,000 subscribers despite having the algorithms rigged against us. There’s not a lot you can do if you’re up against YouTube and their parent company Google. They are a beast of a company with way too much power and they receive government subsidies too. It would take a class action lawsuit or government stepping in to change their treatment of us.

4 – Leading up to this, what other steps had YouTube taken? When and how were you demonetized? When did algorithmic suppression begin and how much did your views fall?

We started producing video content in 2016, so all of this happened in a matter of a few years. Prior to that we were doing mostly podcasts. We never monetized the channel as we didn’t want our viewers to see commercials, nor did we want to become dependent. The trouble really started after Trump’s election. YouTube realized that the most popular political channels were on the right (because you can get the leftist narrative everywhere else). So they started fiddling with our ratings, search results, notifications and we stopped coming up in recommended videos. They have stated that they are trying to ‘disrupt people from going down the rabbit hole.’ To some extent this has backfired on them, because when they try to ‘deradicalize’ viewers by recommending videos such as one by a transgendered liberal with pink hair pushing a SJW message, people only feel more extreme against the left. They are helping to create their own worst enemy.

5 – What other platforms have you been banned from?

It’s an unbelievable list and this includes not only Red Ice but my small online clothing store and in some cases us personally. YouTube, Paypal, Braintree, Venmo, Zelle, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Wells Fargo, Coinbase (yes the supposed anti establishment crypto wallet), Skrill, even Pinterest and iHeartRadio. There’s others too.

When Wells Fargo banned all of our accounts, they sent letters saying we will not do business with you anymore. People in their service department said they had never seen this before, that the directive came from high up and the reason was ‘sealed,’ meaning only higher levels of management could find out what happened. The SPLC, ADL, and other leftist activist groups are tied in with bankers, have connections and put pressure on all of them to ban us.

6 – Did YouTube state what specifically led to your deplatforming? What exact content crossed their line?

Despite days of fans hammering them with messages demanding a response as to why were banned, they did not respond. Meanwhile they respond on Twitter to other tiny accounts asking petty questions. If you go to the channel now a banner might still show that says something about this channel is gone for multiple and excess hate speech. But of course they never prove that nor were there any strikes that we could appeal. It’s not hate speech but speech they don’t like.

7 – Do you believe you have ever engaged in hate speech or advocated violence?

No. We have never advocated violence or specifically targeted anyone with violence. If anyone says we engage in hate speech they cannot prove it. For example, there are never any examples of so-called hate speech in the negative articles about us.

However, there are countless channels openly saying they hate white people or hate Trump and that is never hate speech. Hate speech is a lie used by leftists to silence their opposition.

8 – Are you a white supremacist?

I did a funny video about this titled ‘Am I A White Supremacist’ to respond to this which you can find on BitChute and RedIce.tv. The definition of a white supremacist keeps changing, now it seems to mean a white person who doesn’t hate themselves for being white. It also seems to mean that if you say something like ‘I want European nations to remain European’ that is also somehow a supremacist view. If you’re asking if I want to lord over nonwhites with a stick, of course not.

No other race gets attacked for loving their people and not wanting them to become a minority in their own nation. No other people would accept this. In fact, non-Europeans write and support our cause often and think white people have lost their minds advocating for suicidal immigration policies. It was called genocide in Tibet, Palestine, and now Kashmir.

We frequently hear from other nationalists around the world who aren’t white. They write and ask why are you doing this to yourselves? When it happened in Tibet it was called genocide. The Dalai Lama knows exactly what it feels like and that is why he defends Europeans and their right to not become a minority.

I have yet to meet an actual white supremacist, that is, someone who thinks they are better than all the other races and wants to oppress them. I don’t know where those people are.

9 – Are you a white nationalist?

I am a European, white and a nationalist. I want European people to remain a majority in the countries their ancestors built and an immigration policy to protect the nation’s founding demographics. Demographics are destiny. I don’t care what people want to call me.

But no one ever charges blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, or any other people for being a black nationalist, Jewish nationalist, Asian nationalist, and so on.

In Europe they call themselves Swedish Nationalists, German Nationalists and so on because they aren’t a generic white, they are a specific ethnicity with their own culture and language and history. They do not like the term ‘white nationalist.’ A European nationalist is one who wants their country to remain the country of their people, an ethnically homogeneous nation, the way it always has been. To carry on their tradition, heritage and culture.

Most European nationalists are fine with a small percentage of nonwhite immigration but not to where it upsets the core demographics of the nation. America’s founders would not have accepted this. All of this demographic transformation is new. We rapidly began changing with the Hart-Celler act of 1965, which was pushed on Americans without their consent. And by the way, the founders of America were also white and nationalist. They didn’t need to call themselves white nationalists because it was self evident or how about the Naturalization Act of 1790 which stated ‘free white person[s]… of good character.’ They founded the country with European people in mind. The thought of one day becoming a minority was unthinkable.

10 – Are you a white separatist?

We’ve been so programmed to hear this loaded phrase which is never applied to any other people on the face of the Earth even when they are violent racial separatists like Africans in South Africa.

People seem to think that just because one wants a homogeneous nation for white people that it means they don’t have friends of other races or can’t travel or have them come visit or trade. That’s a strawman absurd argument. This is never thrown at any other people but whites.

A homogeneous nation doesn’t mean you are cut off from the rest of the world, it just means you don’t support mass migrations of people to other countries displacing the natives.

If you don’t support mass migrations of people as a white person, you get called a separatist. Nobody is calling the Chinese or the Saudis separatists. We have always been separate nations but found ways to get along.

What needs to happen is a halt to immigration in the West. Legal immigration is an even bigger threat than illegal in terms of numbers. Countless studies like Robert Putnam’s have revealed that multiculturalism creates less trust and social cohesion. As if we need a study to tell us that. Mass immigration is dividing us as a people. We were once united. The problems we face with various groups fighting for their own is new, and a product of globalism.

11 – You once interviewed Jesse Lee Peterson. How would you describe that experience?

Jesse is great. We all love him. Sure we may have some points of disagreement but he too does not want European Americans to become a minority as he fears it would turn us into South Africa. His best interests coincide with whites being the majority. If all were like him, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.

12 – In the Peterson interview, he said to you that “if you had an all white nation, you would just start fighting each other.” How do you respond to that?

The most homogeneous white and some Asian countries always top the list of the safest and most peaceful nations in the world. I never said it would be perfect but it would be much better than what it is now. White people will always have their differences but it’s the devil we know. Now we get to fight each other AND millions of foreigners in our country who also fight each other.

Now we have skyrocketing violence, a rape epidemic, and divisions like we’ve never seen before. Jesse also agreed that America was a better place before mass immigration. He also said he too didn’t want whites to become a minority as it wouldn’t serve his best interests either. He brought up Detroit and South Africa as examples of what would happen if white people were out of the picture.

13 – Do you believe it is possible for a multi-ethnic nation to preserve its European culture?

No, people are tribal, especially incoming foreigners who are ruthlessly ethnocentric pushing their interests, culture and religion. The mass majority of them align along ethnic and racial lines. It’s just the way it is and no free markets and liberal programming is going to change that.

White people are the most tolerant and the least ethnocentric. It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. It’s why our statues are being torn down, traditions and holidays attacked, and ancestors who built the country being constantly denounced. It’s why white kids are learning about white privilege, white guilt, and being taught to hate themselves. It is child abuse and it is the worst racism we are witnessing today.

14 – There are millions of nonwhites who embrace America’s European culture and consider themselves fully American, sharing traditional values. What about them?

What about them? No one’s saying they have to be deported. If they love what made this country what it is… European culture, then they should be louder in our defense because that which they love is being torn down and it won’t be the same country anymore.

15 – How do you define globalism?

The total destruction of homogeneous nations, cultures, languages, people and the implementation of a global rootless, materialistic and degenerate culture that makes people dumbed down and easy to control. It means total control by a small group of elites. It also means the death of true diversity. These elites favor a people that is one race, one culture, one language and in one system. It is anti-diversity. It is the destruction of everything beautiful that nature and the Gods made.

16 – Are you anti-Semitic?

I wish white people had a word to shield their group from any and all criticism.

No, criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish or powerful elites and interest groups with massive power and influence does not mean you hate that entire group. We criticize anyone trying to infringe on our rights and freedoms, no matter their race or religion. We’ve also been critical of Islam and of course other white people. No groups should be off limits from criticism but if they are, it tells you the power they truly hold.

Awhile back, Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni said of the term anti-Semitic, ‘it’s a trick, we always use it.’ Meaning Jews who don’t want to be judged for whatever they may be doing or saying, use it as a weapon to silence opposition. And it’s still being used for that purpose. Truth fears no open discussion and investigation.

There are a few individual Jews including rabbis who are critical of mass immigration into Europe but most do not speak up in our defense when Europeans are constantly defending Israel. I’ve heard Jews say they feel safer in multicultural societies because of their history of expulsion from Gentile societies in the past. They feel less likely to be singled out or noticed in a multicultural society. They are also very against nationalism in white countries because they think it is going to lead to a holocaust, meanwhile they have the ethnostate of Israel.

17 – Aren’t Jewish communities split on these issues just like white communities?

That’s what they say but at the end of the day they still have a very strong ethnic bond and support one another. They are highly loyal to their group. Yes, leftist Jews are critical of Zionism because they hate nationalism but I find it interesting that the Jewish Zionist Right also attacks us for wanting ethnic nationalism for Europeans. It is very hypocritical. Why don’t the Zionists, including Christians, support the same type of Zionism if you will for white countries? We are always trying to bridge out and have round tables and open discussion and debate on this subject but none of them will even talk with us. They just call us Nazis and white supremacists, just like the left.

18 – How do you respond to accusations that you are racist and anti-Semitic?

Does anyone really care about being called a racist anymore? It’s not racist to love your own people, not racist to want your culture, heritage and language to be preserved. It’s definitely not racist to say ‘it’s ok to be white’ and not feel guilty and not want your children to grow up and be a hated minority (thanks to cultural Marxist agitators).

And it’s not anti-Semitic, not judging or hating an entire group of people, to criticize or question elites who hold a lot of power and influence. I’m sure they see it that way, but then they call me a racist for pointing out things that are anti-white and defamatory to white people. Jews have thousands of organizations dedicated to only their interests. White people do not.

I never thought about race until everyone started blaming and hating white people for everything. If people are kind to me, I am kind to them.

19 – Can you imagine a future where America does assimilate its new arrivals and becomes a cohesive multiethnic but unicultural nation? How would that happen?

Not going to happen. Even in a country like Brazil that had years of migration from various places (without constant anti white indoctrination), they have all sorts of problems including one of the highest murder rates on Earth.

Throughout history, whether Rome, Egypt, or any place today where we see multiculturalism even in places like India/Kashmir, China/Tibet….multi racial, multi ethnic societies do not work and they do not last. People are different and we should just accept that. It’s just the way nature made us. In order to maintain true diversity, it requires some separation and division. That doesn’t mean we go to war, it means we respect each other’s differences and spaces. European nations learned to make peace with each other and we were prospering before we opened the door to globalism.

Yes America was a melting pot but a European one and we had shared European values and cultural understanding, and even then we had some issues.

In America white people are the glue that holds the current form of multiculturalism together (although countless studies show how multicultural societies create less trust, less social cohesion), but with us out of the picture, various groups will begin to fight each other for power. You can’t replace the people of a nation with 3rd world foreign peoples and think it’s going to be the same country. If it’s so great, why isn’t any other country pushing this ideology?

In order for something like what you’re suggesting to work (I still think it’s a utopian fantasy), every group must sacrifice everything; their heritage, their history, their language, anything that roots them to their people …. and surrender to a new rootless religion of globalism but even then there will still be divisions. Elites pushing globalism don’t want diversity, they’re just using it to destroy it (mainly in white countries). They ultimately want everyone to be the same. They want a mixed race man of the future where all true unique differences are erased forever. A man with no connection to his ancestors, and his past, is easy to manipulate.

I think it is probably too late for America. The damage has been done and we’re in for hard times BUT if all leftist agitation disappeared, if immigration stopped, if forced diversification stopped, you would see freedom of association and you would see people self segregating into their own pockets around the country. People are tribal and they will ultimately choose to live with others like them. Sure, there will be a few hipster multicultural pockets in the cities but that wouldn’t be the norm if people had a choice.

20 – What do you consider to be the taboo topics online?

Being a nationalist, loving white people, saying that white people are being demographically replaced, that white people should have nations that are their own, anything questioning the so called official view of historical events such as 911, any conspiracy theories, anything critical of Jewish elites and also anything fun and edgy making fun of libs or shitlibs as the kids call them. YouTube is even going after alternative health channels and those questioning vaccines and big pharma.

21 – Where would you draw the line on free speech? Anywhere?

No, I wouldn’t. I think the best course of action is to talk about everything out in the open, more talking. If an idea is harmful or just awful, best to talk about why that is and air everything out from every angle. The best argument wins. The truth should not fear any inquisition. If we do not, that is what creates desperate people doing radical things to be heard.

I also think we just need to uphold U.S. law and the UN declaration on human rights.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Boondoggle Archipelago

Across California, there is a growing string of islands, exquisite gems in the urban ocean. Dredged from the pockets of taxpayers, constructed by elite artisans, these pristine islands have been created at stupefying expense. But their beauty is seductive. Spend more!

Each time an island is completed, or even proposed, glowing reports are logged across the land. So fortunate are those who shall live on these islands! So wonderful are those who shall build these islands, and care for their inhabitants! What a magnificent, marvelous thing we have done!

Or have we? From deep within the ocean a seismic wave is building, triggered by reality and propelled by common sense. Because these islands, more properly referred to as homeless shelters, supportive housing, and “low income housing,” are far too small, and far too precious, to ever, ever accommodate every castaway that needs a roof over their heads. They will never offer the required land mass to solve the problem. Instead, history shall know them as California’s Boondoggle Archipelago.

The builders of the Boondoggle Archipelago hide behind laws they won’t try to change, and behind court rulings they won’t challenge, and happily follow the rules. Happily, because the rules are rigged to ensure that the vast majority of California’s homeless and low-income families shall remain forever adrift, and so long as there are castaways, there’s money for the builders.

A short cruise across the urban ocean from north to south, visiting various typical islands in California’s Boondoggle Archipelago, should offer ample evidence that no amount of money will ever solve the problem, and therefore billions and billions of dollars, year after year, shall continue to line the pockets of the builders.

In Oakland, the “Estrella Vista” project, at a cost of $64 million, offered 87 units of affordable housing. That’s $736,000 per unit. An analysis of the project costs debunks the misleading notion that the only public money invested in these units came from Alameda County’s Measure A1, passed in 2016 to allocate $580 million to “affordable housing.”

While Alameda County’s Measure A1 Bond only contributed 3 percent to the cost of Estrella Vista, matching loans from the City of Emeryville (7.2%), the City of Oakland (3.2%), plus other federal and state sources (17.6%) constituted much of the remainder. The biggest source of funds, “LIHTC Equity,” at 42.9 percent, bears further explanation.

LIHTC stands for “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit,” and these tax credits, which can be bought, sold, and traded, represent a one-to-one reduction of a corporate tax bill. They are not a tax deduction, they are a tax credit, meaning that for any profitable corporation that pays taxes, their face value is equivalent to that same amount of cash in the bank. Who pays for tax credits? Taxpayers, since whenever taxes are avoided in one place, the resulting shortfall in tax revenues has to be covered by other taxpayers.

This is typical.

San Jose’s Measure A, approved by voters in 2016, allocated $950 million to construct affordable housing. Supposedly this beast of a bond will fund the construction of 4,800 units of affordable housing. That would come out to a supposedly reasonable average per unit cost of $198,000 (“supposedly reasonable,” because the national average cost to construct an apartment unit is only around $75,000). But not so fast. Courtesy of the County of Santa Clara Office of Supportive Housing, let’s examine this island chain.

The “Veranda” will offer 19 units at a total development cost of $11.9 million; that’s $626,000 per unit. The “Villas on the Park,” 84 units for $476,000 per unit. The “Gateway,” 75 units for $406,000 per unit. The “Crossings,” 39 units for $586,000 per unit. “Quetzal Gardens,” $706,000 per unit. “Leigh Avenue,” $780,000 per unit. Wading through the 15 new housing projects that have disclosed funding details, San Jose’s Measure A is part of a larger funding package – nearly all of the money coming from taxpayers – that will construct 1,357 units at a cost of $748 million. That’s $552,000 per unit.

On November 5th, San Franciscans approved Prop. A, which means their home owners will be paying principal and interest on another $600 million to build “affordable” housing. A careful review of the actual text of the ordinance indicates this money may not actually construct a single unit of new housing. Instead, the terms of this bond could be fulfilled merely by rehabilitating existing housing.

An October 7th, 2019 report in the San Jose Mercury offers a vivid example what “rehabilitation” accomplishes in the real world. The article describes how an apartment building in Antioch was converted to affordable housing, but when the renovations were completed, the tenants actually ended up paying more in monthly rent. To stay in their homes, they had to win the subsidies lottery, and rely on ongoing government assistance. Most moved out, replaced by the lucky few.

How is this helping anyone?

Rehabilitation of existing units brings us to our first island in the southern seas of California’s Boondoggle Archipelago. On October 24, Curbed LA reported that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to provide an additional $24 million in homeless housing bonds to “repurpose a building on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles for housing for veterans.” According to the article, the rehabilitated building would provide 59 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless and chronically homeless senior Veterans.

According to Ryan Thompson, writing for VeniceUpdate.com, the developer’s budget for this rehab project is $54.6 million, which equates to a per unit cost of $926,000. In his write-up, Thompson not only questions the astronomical per unit price tag, but the entire process whereby these contracts were awarded and how the designated developers were selected. It warrants close reading.

Political patronage to the well connected builders who are generous with their campaign donations. Nonprofits exploiting their tax exempt status and hiding behind their benevolent public image while they rake in hundreds of millions. Endlessly growing flotillas of public bureaucrats. A lottery to anoint the lucky occupants of the few, but spectacularly expensive, island refuges. Market rate builders setting sail for new, more competitive oceans, far, far away. Millions of castaways remaining adrift in the urban ocean. These are the consequences of the Boondoggle Archipelago.

Spending up to one million dollars per unit to not even create new housing, but to upgrade an existing structure, is not an outlier. These astronomical costs are common. In Venice Beach, a new structure being proposed to accommodate homeless and low income residents is budgeted, including the value of the land, at over $200 million, in order to create 140 new apartment units. That’s a cost of $1.4 million per unit.

In order to assist the homeless, in 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Prop. HHH, authorizing $1.2 billion to construct “supportive housing.” As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the total project cost, on average, for the few thousand units that will eventually get built is $550,000 each.

What’s really going on here? Are the builders who take taxpayer money to build these island paradises smooth sailors or brazen pirates? And with tens of thousands of homeless and literally millions of “low income” Californians, who do they think they’re kidding? After all, at a price tag of $500,000 each, and evidence suggests that is on the low side, it would cost $65 billion just to house California’s existing homeless. It would cost orders of magnitude more than that to build “affordable housing” for all of California’s qualifying low income families. And are these actually island paradises, or state administered wards?

The most evocative use of the word “archipelago” in the 20th century was not used in a benign context. It was “The Gulag Archipelago,” the title of a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that called the world’s attention to the network of prisons and labor camps that absorbed millions of Russians during the Soviet era. And during the second half of the 20th century when Solzhenitsyn was writing his book, across America we built our first Boondoggle Archipelago – housing projects. They were built, they were occupied, they demonstrably failed to alleviate poverty in the inner city, and now they’re being demolished.

What did we learn? Apparently, all we learned was spend more. Do it again.

The Boondoggle Archipelago is defined primarily by the corrupt patronage it exemplifies. But it’s worth stepping back and asking the question – are we not only wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayers money, but also condemning hundreds of thousands of Californians to dependency?

If the builders and supporters of the Boondoggle Archipelago are sincere in their desire to help the homeless and the needy, they would first try the following solutions: Overturn the court settlements that prevent arrests for vagrancy, and repeal Prop. 47 so users of hard drugs and petty thieves will again face jail time after repeat offenses. Do that, and see how many “urban refugees” suddenly find shelter again with their relatives or their friends.

Then construct tent cities, taking advantage of the knowledge the U.S. Military has gained in setting up these compounds all over the world. Round up the homeless and put them into the appropriate facility – one type for substance abusers, one for petty thieves and other minor offenders, one for mentally ill, and one for families and individuals who are genuinely down on their luck. Over time, if appropriate, move these people into better shelters – but put a cap on the costs.

At the same time, to make housing affordable for low income Californians, end the environmentalist war on land development. Repeal the California Environmental Quality Act, since federal law provides ample protection. Repeal SB 375 and similar laws that have made it nearly impossible to develop open land. Start using public money to build more enabling infrastructure. Quit forcing developers to spend more money preparing permit applications and paying fees than they spend in actual construction. Then turn private investors loose to again build market housing at affordable prices. Today, developers either turn crony, or move to other states. They have no choice. The laws are rigged.

Or just stay the course on the urban seas, filling your drift nets with billions in taxpayer cash.

California’s policymakers, state and local alike, can keep throwing money into the Boondoggle Archipelago. But recognize what these facilities really are. They’re housing projects; a failed model.  When people are drowning, you don’t build them an island. It takes too long. It costs too much. You throw them a life preserver.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of California’s Political Establishment

To be fair, California’s politicians aren’t alone in their quest to destroy America’s rights, freedoms, prosperity, culture, traditions, and pride. They’re just more advanced in their quest. But since what happens in California often ends up happening later in the rest of America, it’s important to highlight just how bad it’s gotten in the Golden State.

Just as a theologian might argue there are more than seven deadly sins that are fatal to spiritual progress, there are more than seven policy areas where California’s political leadership have fatally undermined the aspirations of ordinary Californians. But in the interests of brevity and clarity, here are what might be the most damning seven deadly sins of California’s political establishment.

Law and Order – Californians have prided themselves on being trendsetters in human rights, but the pendulum has swung too far. Thanks to Prop. 47, the “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative” approved by California’s voters in 2014, it is nearly impossible to arrest and hold anyone for possession of hard drugs, so long as they claim the drugs are for personal use. Prop. 47 also downgraded the punishment for property crimes if the value of the stolen goods are under $950 per offense.

The consequence of these laws are public drug use and rampant theft to support these drug habits. Other ridiculous laws include AB 953, the “Racial and Identity Profiling Act” (2015), that requires police to fill out an extensive questionnaire after every encounter with a member of the public, even if it doesn’t result in an arrest. The purpose of this is to prevent disproportionate encounters with members of disadvantaged groups, and the consequence of it is fewer stops, fewer arrests, and more crime.

Environment – It’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to environmentalist extremism that tyrannizes ordinary Californians. Central to California’s central planning state is AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act” (2006), and follow on legislation. These laws aim to reduce California’s net “greenhouse gas” emissions to zero by 2045.

To accomplish this, it is becoming almost impossible to develop land outside of existing cities in California, which is driving the price of land and housing to unaffordable levels. Next on the “climate change” agenda is to charge Californians for “vehicle miles traveled,” wherein everywhere people go in their cars will be monitored and taxed.

Well before AB 32 came along, though, California’s gone overboard with environmentalism. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed by the state legislature in 1971, requires environmental impact reports to accompany any building permit. Since a separate report is required for every permit application, and since major building projects require approval from dozens of agencies, in California, the costs to file applications and pay fees often exceeds the cost of the actual construction itself.

Then there’s forestry management, taken over by environmentalist zealots who prohibited logging, suppressed controlled burns with byzantine application gauntlets and endless litigation, and turned California’s forests into tinderboxes.

Energy & Water – Californians pay among the highest prices for gasoline, electricity and natural gas in the United States, despite the fact that California has abundant reserves of oil and gas.

But instead of approving new refineries, more connecting pipelines, oil and gas drilling, and clean natural gas power plants, California’s policymakers are shutting down conventional energy in favor of “renewables.” Even clean, emissions free nuclear power is forbidden, as California’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to be shut down by 2025.

Not only does this leave Californians without affordable energy, as they’re herded to the nearest retailer to purchase “demand response” appliances that don’t work very well, but utilities investing in renewables don’t have money left over to upgrade their power lines to better manage wildfires.

As for water, instead of storing more storm runoff behind dams and within aquifers, and investing in reuse and desalination, California’s turned to rationing. Starting in 2020, Californians will be restricted to 55 gallons of indoor water use per person per day, with that amount being lowered in subsequent years.

Transportation – Freeways in California are among the most congested in the nation, but instead of widening roads and building new freeways, California’s policymakers have declared war on the car. Never mind that cars are the future of transportation, destined to be entirely clean, autonomous, capable safely driving at high speeds while their occupants work, sleep, or entertain themselves.

Instead California’s political leadership remains committed to a high speed train that will never pay for itself, light rail when light rail ridership is in decline, and zoning that will make it impossible for people to park their cars where they live. California’s transportation policy is misanthropic and misguided. Meanwhile, ordinary Californians cope with super commutes on neglected roads.

Housing – Despite the fact that most young married couples, given a choice, would prefer to raise their children in a single family home with a yard, California’s elite have decided that single family homes and suburbs are “unsustainable.” This despite California sprawling over 160,000 square miles, of which only around 5 percent is urbanized.

Californians instead are expected to construct all new housing via high density “infill,” where there is minimal open space, parking is unavailable, and prices are sky high thanks to the artificially created shortage.

As noted, the costs to prepare permit applications and pay fees often exceeds the construction costs, notwithstanding the fact that high rise and mid rise construction always costs far more per square foot than what it costs to construct one or two story wood frame homes.

Homeless – In a state where you can’t build anything without paying fees that cost more than the construction costs, and where utility bills and other hidden taxes make the cost-of-living the highest in the nation, it should be no surprise that California has a homeless crisis.

Add to that the best weather on earth, and laws that permit public consumption of hard drugs and prevent detention of petty thieves, and you have a recipe for a homeless population explosion. Moreover, court rulings make it impossible to remove homeless encampments unless you can offer them “permanent supportive housing,” and rampant (totally legal) public sector and nonprofit corruption have driven the costs for such housing to exceed on average $500,000 per unit.

To top it off, state laws make it, for all practical purposes, impossible to incarcerate the mentally ill. If these laws and court settlements were overturned, overnight, half of California’s homeless would find shelter with relatives and friends, and the rest would get cost-effective help. But it’s a meal ticket for the corrupt public sector.

Education – Save the worst for last. This is perhaps the most unforgivable sin of all in California. Instead of teaching children to read and write, they are being indoctrinated. Instead of being held accountable, incompetent teachers are protected by union labor laws, and disruptive students are kept in classes in order to fulfill quotas designed to prevent “discrimination.”

The University of California, which – under threat of lawsuits – is about to abandon using SAT scores entirely, has already engineered its admissions policies to circumvent federal prohibitions on affirmative action. From higher education down through the K-12 public schools, leftist propaganda and identity politics are the goal of California’s unionized public education system, instead of teaching children the skills they will need to become more productive graduates.

This is the future that awaits America. It is a future abetted by a complicit media, an activist entertainment industry, a unionized public bureaucracy and public education system, and nearly every significant corporate and financial player. The political model it embraces is often labeled as socialist, but might more accurately be described as economic fascism – a merging of public and private, a partnership of corporations, oligarchs, and the public sector.

While people typically cringe at use of the term “fascist,” the fascism we’re seeing in California is not the hardcore fascism of WWII era Germany, but rather a soft fascism as envisioned by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World. California’s citizens are being channeled into high-density apartments, forced to use mass transit, and increasingly made dependent on government subsidies, in exchange for the illusory freedoms of legal drugs and anything-goes gender exploration.

At the same time, Californians are deluged with fearmongering propaganda – a classic fascist tactic – concerning the rise of the oceans thanks to “climate change” and the rise of “white nationalism” thanks to President Trump. Both of these threats are preposterously overstated, but when that’s the only message you ever hear, it feels very real.

This 21st century fascism being pioneered in California touts itself as “anti-fascist” at every opportunity, but the system nonetheless fits the definition of fascism. It is corporate, collectivist, centralized, and autocratic. With an equally unhealthy and excessive fervor, it exalts the planet instead of the nation, and celebrates “diversity” instead of one culture. It punishes dissent, protects the oligarchy, and deludes the overtaxed, over-regulated, overpaying majority.

In a world where truth, justice, and the American Way still exist, an America that believes in God, or at least believes in good, evil, and some sort of ultimate accountability, what California’s elites are doing is literally sinful. Their path to salvation is simple:

Enforce common sense drug laws and punish thieves. Quit using environmentalism as a punitive religious faith and start logging the forests, building roads, drilling for oil and gas, and approving nuclear power plants instead of shutting them down. Stop extorting more money in permitting costs than it costs to construct homes, and start building them again on open land. Get vagrants off the streets, build cost-effective shelter for the truly needy, and put the mentally ill back into institutions. Fire incompetent teachers and hold our students to immutable, objective academic standards instead of filling their heads with divisive nonsense.

Americans would do well to look to California today, and whatever they’re doing, do the opposite. Before it’s too late.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Cost to Taxpayers of Enhancing Sonoma County Employee Pensions

In the early 2000s, along with many other cities, state agencies, and counties in California, Sonoma County enhanced their employee pension benefits.

As of 6/30/2018, Sonoma County’s pension system had $2.7 billion of invested assets, but nearly $3.1 billion in actuarial accrued liabilities. To what extent is its $400 million unfunded liability attributable to the pension benefit enhancements? Put another way, how much have these enhancements cost Sonoma County’s taxpayers?

Just as it is impossible to know with perfect accuracy the amount of a pension fund’s actuarial accrued liability, it is impossible to precisely calculate the cost to taxpayers of Sonoma County’s pension benefit enhancements. There is enough data available in the financial statements provided by Sonoma County’s pension fund, however, to provide credible estimates.

To improve the credibility of these estimates, the assumptions made herein are designed to understate the costs. For example, the impact of the increased cost is not assessed until the year the enhancements were fully implemented. In the case of general Sonoma County employees, that was 2005, and in the case of public safety employees of Sonoma County, that was 2006.

Sonoma County’s original pension benefits were based on the typical annual percentage accrual, multiplied by years worked, with the total percentage multiplied by the final pension eligible salary to calculate the retirement pension. For example, up until 2005, Sonoma County’s general (non-safety) workers would accrue their pension benefit at a rate of 2 percent per year. An employee who worked 30 years would have a pension equivalent to 60 percent of their final salary (2 percent times 30 years). As of 2005, that percentage was raised to 3 percent, and the age of eligibility to receive a full pension was increased from 57 to 60.

For public safety employees, the increase was even more dramatic, because not only did the annual percentage accrual increase from 2 percent to 3 percent, but the age of eligibility was lowered, from 55 to 50.

By assuming a typical case for a Sonoma County general employee, and another for a Sonoma County safety employee – before and after the pension benefit enhancement – it is possible to calculate the required annual contribution as a percent of payroll. The method to do this, along with all calculations related to this analysis, can be downloaded here.

Because the pension eligible payroll for Sonoma County since 2000 is disclosed in their Consolidated Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs), it is a simple matter to multiply these hypothetical contribution percentages by the actual payroll that was issued to Sonoma County employees. In this way, the differing costs – with or without the pension enhancements – can be calculated.

As it turns out, an employee working 30 years collecting a “2% @ 57” pension, retiring at age 60, requires an ongoing annual pension contribution equivalent to 14.7 percent of payroll. If that benefit is increased to a “3% @ 60” formula, the required contribution increases to 22.1 percent of payroll.

Similarly, for a safety employee working 30 years collecting a “2% @ 55” pension, retiring at age 55, requires an ongoing annual pension contribution equivalent to 16.8 percent of payroll. If that benefit is increased to a “3% @ 50” formula, the required contribution increases to 25.2 percent of payroll.

Using this method, between 2005 and 2018, if Sonoma County had not enhanced their pension benefits, they would have needed to contribute a total of $686 million to their pension system. Taking into account the cost of the benefit enhancements, they would have needed to contribute $1.02 billion to their pension system. This suggests that at the least, the pension benefit enhancements enacted by Sonoma County cost their taxpayers $331 million over the course of 14 years.

This is a very low estimate, however, for the following reasons.

1 – Sonoma County didn’t increase the value of their pension benefit accrual just for work yet to be performed. They increased the value retroactively. This has profound financial consequences. Employees who were nearing the ends of their careers suddenly had their pension benefits increased by 50 percent, from 2 percent, times the years they worked, to 3 percent, times the years they worked. But no extra money had been set aside for this over all the years prior to the enhancement. Sonoma County’s taxpayers had to make up that shortfall in the years after 2005.

2 – The shortfall, or unfunded liability, caused by the retroactive increase was itself a source of increased costs, because of the cost of not having those assets earning interest. While Sonoma County issued a $289 million pension obligation bond in 2010, there were the interest costs on the unfunded liability prior to 2010, plus the new source of interest expense required for the County to pay off this new bond. Moreover, even after this pension obligation bond was issued, at the end of 2010 the pension system’s unfunded liability still stood at $249 million (down from $402 million the year before).

3 – Sonoma County projects a long-term annual rate of return for its pension fund of 7.25 percent. But according to their latest CAFR, for the last 20 years, they have only managed to earn an average of 6 percent per year. This lower rate greatly increased the costs to fully fund the pension system. It also greatly increased the cost of the pension benefit enhancements.

To fully explore these additional variables is possible, but beyond the scope of a preliminary summary of the impact. But the baseline estimate, plus accounting for these additional factors, makes it virtually certain that Sonoma County’s pension benefit enhancements cost their taxpayers at least a half-billion dollars over the past 15 years, with ongoing costs into the future.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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Saving California From Wildfires Requires Cooperation With Trump

President Trump recently tweeted “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.

October 29th, former Governor Jerry Brown addressed the U.S. Congress, sayingCalifornia’s burning while the deniers make a joke out of the standards that protect us all. The blood is on your soul here and I hope you wake up, because this is not politics, this is life, this is morality. You’ve got to get with it – or get out of the way.

Despite that California’s current and former governors are both ardent members of the catastrophe chorus, climate change has almost nothing to do with California’s recent wildfires. These fires are the result of a century of successful fire suppression, combined with a failure to remove all the undergrowth that results when natural fires aren’t allowed to burn. Not only does excessive undergrowth create fuel for catastrophic super fires, but these excessive trees and shrubs compete with mature trees. This is the real reason why our forests are not only tinderboxes, but also filled with dying trees.

Forest professionals who were consulted for this article were in agreement that despite the antagonistic rhetoric, and notwithstanding the misplaced “climate crisis” scapegoating and fearmongering, state officials are working with federal agencies on practical solutions. But it isn’t easy to reverse a century of forest mismanagement overnight.

While a consensus has quietly formed that forest thinning is absolutely necessary going forward, California’s timber industry has atrophied to a fraction of what had been its capacity even up until the early 1990s. While fire suppression was ongoing and, overall, was increasingly effective, environmentalist restrictions put more and more timber out of reach. The capacity of California’s timber industry is now nowhere near the size required to deliver the scale and pace of timber thinning needed to restore health to the forests and safety to communities in proximity to the forests. And in most cases, controlled burns are too risky until some of the timber and underbrush is first thinned.

In order to rapidly address the challenge of thinning California’s forests, there are several steps that have to be taken simultaneously. Environmental regulations need to be rewritten. Rules and conditions governing timber exports need to be revised or scrapped. Enabling financing such as revolving lines of credit, and long-term harvesting contracts need to be offered. The process to acquire timber harvesting permits needs to be greatly streamlined. Investments need to be made in sawmills and chippers, along with electric power plants running on biomass. Finding laborers to assist with forest thinning is a challenge that might be met by employing some of California’s homeless population.

Biomass power plants can be a big part of the solution. Running on wood chips from biomass that has no value as lumber, they can be sited close to their fuel source, the national forests. Because there will be dozens of them in a decentralized network, they can feed continuous, distributed power into the grid in the same wooded areas where power is most likely to be cut on days with high fire risk. And there is no reason why the California legislature might not consider these power plants to run on renewable energy, since they are “carbon neutral.”

California has roughly 20 million acres of forest. About half of that is federally owned. Of the other half, about 40 percent, or four million acres, are owned by private timber companies. The other six million acres are held by private, nonindustrial owners. All of these forested areas need thinning operations. Here are some of the steps that can be taken:

Revise environmental regulations that inhibit active forest management:

The U.S. Forest Service needs to recognize and admit that in California, between one-half and two-thirds of the vegetation has to be removed before these forests will be returned to a historically “resilient” condition that can resist insects, disease, and wildfire. The unnatural high density of trees and undergrowth, because of a century of successful fire suppression, is destroying the health of forests and making them far more combustible.

In particular, the U.S. Forest Service needs to get away from “single species management,” a management concept which often leads to standards and guidelines requiring “no-action” to the vegetation, i.e., no forest thinning. Spotted Owl, Northern Goshawk and Pacific Fisher examples of single species that have the largest impacts on permissible forest management using this system.

“No action” restrictions have led to more than half of California’s national forests unavailable for active management. But “no action” designations, combined with fire suppression, is fatally undermining these forest ecosystems even before super fires strike. These restrictions must be lifted.

In addition to no-action restrictions, in the national forests where thinning and other active management operations are permitted, they are limited in what times of year they can operate. In many cases these limitations last from the beginning of February through the middle of September. But in most of California’s forests, the weather only permits operations between the middle of May and the end of October. This means that in many thinning projects, the operator is only permitted to work for six weeks a year, from Sept. 15th through October 31st.

While restrictions on when and where forests can be thinned may have sound ecological justifications in some ways, they are also making it impossible to thin the forests. The ecological cost/benefits have not been properly weighed. Thinning operations need to be allowed to run for several months each year, instead of several weeks each year, and they need to encompass a far greater percentage of forested areas.

Change the rules and conditions governing timber exports

The export of raw logs from federal lands in the Western United States is currently prohibited. Lifting this prohibition would help, because sawmill capacity is not capable of handling the increase in volume. With the new thinning programs already in place, logs and undergrowth are being burned or put in landfills.

The trade war with China has stopped much of the flow of California’s wood exports. While even Trump’s critics often agree with him on the necessity to confront China’s abusive trade practices, to the extent there is an opportunity to reauthorize timber exports to China, this will help restore demand for a higher volume of wood products.

Facilitate investment in the timber and biomass industry

The federal government can set up a revolving loan fund for investors to build sawmills, as well as biomass energy facilities, as well as chippers and other equipment, that would allow the industry to quickly ramp up operations and capacity.

The federal government can accelerate granting of long term stewardship contracts whereby qualified companies acquire a minimum 20 year right to extract wood products from federal lands. This will guarantee a steady supply of wood products which, in turn, will make investment viable in logging equipment, mills, and biomass energy facilities.

Make it easier to get permits to extract timber and biomass from federal lands

In the ten national forests just within California, the U.S. Forest Service has over 100 vacancies. They need to somehow fill these positions, through transfers from other states, offering better compensation packages to attract more applicants, or by hiring private contractors. This staffing shortage is slowing the process for qualified licensed timber operators to get permits to extract wood products.

The EPA needs to streamline the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) application process so it is less expensive and time consuming for qualified companies to get permits to extract timber from federal lands. They can also grant waivers to allow thinning projects to bypass NEPA, or at the least, broaden the allowable exemptions.

Rehabilitate able-bodied homeless substance abusers – put them to work thinning the forests

The California national guard has set up and occupied encampments from which the troops are literally going into the forests to pick up cut brush. These troops could be redeployed to the US/Mexico border, or they can return to their bases. Instead, able-bodied homeless people, arrested for drug or property crimes, could be brought to these camps to work.

Cal Fire has dozens of camps that are occupied by firefighting crews which are otherwise vacant and could be occupied by homeless people to clear brush from the forests. Cal Fire is also hiring laborers to clear brush, and these laborers could be replaced with homeless people serving sentences for drug and property crimes.

Making California’s forests safer can also be an economic engine

California imports around 80 percent of the cut lumber used in its construction industry or sold through retailers to consumers. If there was an assurance of wood supply, which the national forests can certainly offer, investment would be made in expanding mill capacity. Suddenly the money that is being sent to Oregon, Washington and British Colombia to purchase their cut timber would stay here in California, employing thousands of workers in the mills.

As California’s forests are thinned, and kept that way, and the annual supply of wood is permanently increased, in-state demand would become increasingly unable to absorb in-state supply, and the surplus could be exported, earning additional profits and supporting additional jobs. Biomass plants, burning carbon neutral wood chips, could profitably generate safe, affordable, distributed electricity to rural markets, employing additional thousands and delivering returns to private investors.

Less obvious and perhaps less certain, but possibly of enormous benefit, would be the opportunity to offer redeeming work to tens of thousands of homeless people. With only modest reforms to California’s criminal code, or perhaps via a state or federal state of emergency, homeless people convicted of drug or minor property crimes could serve their time working on labor crews thinning the forests.

Cal Fire, the California Dept. of Corrections, and the California Conservation Corps are all equipped to train and house people to do this work. It might be the best thing that ever happened to thousands of young homeless Californians who, once they are freed from substance abuse, are sane, able bodied people. Thousands might recover their dignity and their future in this manner, at the same time as they help restore health to California’s forests.

Practical solutions need to replace verbal jousting and climate fearmongering

If California’s politicians feel obligated to create a public perception that they are in a permanent state of war with President Trump, that’s just politics. But they’ve been braying on about climate change for decades, and far too many of the things they’re doing in the name of fighting climate change are just plain stupid and wasteful. One may hope that reports of behind the scenes cooperation with the Trump administration on forest management are true. Much needs to be done.

Domestically, California’s insurance commissioner, the woefully unqualified ideologue Ricardo Lara, needs to prove that he’s not simply trying to depopulate California’s rural counties by driving out private fire insurance companies and forcing consumers to instead purchase the far more expensive government mandated coverage. He needs to allow private insurance companies to use forward looking risk models, instead of forcing them to base their rate increase applications on the past twenty years of fire claim data. Or, alternatively, Lara could admit that there is not anything unique about the deadly firestorms of 2017 and 2018, and that they are not the “new normal.”

Lara also needs to stop preventing private insurers to from passing their much higher – since the fire claims of 2017 and 2018 – reinsurance costs from being passed on to the ratepayers. This is particularly egregious since California’s government ran alternative fire insurance coverage – the FAIR Plan – cost far more than the private insurers will ever charge, and the FAIR insurance plans do pass on reinsurance costs to consumers, and then some.

If Governor Newsom, and his predecessor Governor Brown, insist on invoking the climate catastrophe trope at every opportunity, and if they truly believe carbon dioxide emissions constitute a mortal threat to humanity and the planet, then why aren’t they publicly advocating for lumber mills and biomass power plants in California?

Wouldn’t producing in-state timber eliminate the CO2 emissions inherent in importing timber from the Pacific Northwest and Canada? Wouldn’t biomass plants generate carbon neutral, renewable energy? And why aren’t they willing to disclose expert estimates of how much CO2 was emitted in the wild fires of 2017 and 2018? Could it be that the quantity of CO2 belched out from those fires would dwarf how much California’s economy generated over the past decade? Imagine if all that carbon, thanks to forest thinning, had instead been sequestered in lumber, or turned into carbon neutral electricity.

And why, one most never forget to ask, aren’t Newsom and Brown trying to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power station operating, if “climate change is real.”

Could it be that Governor Newsom, despite his public posturing, doesn’t really believe in climate change? Should Newsom be “excused” from the conversation? And what about former Governor Jerry Brown? California’s forests turned into tinderboxes on his watch, and gigatons of CO2 were expelled in the resultant superfires. Perhaps the “blood” of which he speaks with such moral certitude, is on his soul.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Long-Term Solutions for California Wildfire Prevention

Nobody knew how the fire started. It took hold in the dry chaparral and grasslands and quickly spread up the sides of the canyon. Propelled by winds gusting over 40 miles per hour and extremely dry air (humidity below 25 percent), the fire spread over the ridge and into the town below. Overwhelmed firefighters could not contain the blaze as it swept through the streets, immolating homes by the hundreds. Even brick homes with slate roofs were not spared. Before it finally was brought under control, 640 structures including 584 homes had been reduced to ashes. Over 4,000 people were left homeless.

Does this sound like the “new normal?” Maybe so, but this description is of the Berkeley fire of 1923. In its time, with barely 4 million people living in California, the Berkeley fire was a catastrophe on par with the fires we see today.

When evaluating what happened in nearly a century since this fire, two stories emerge. The story coming from California’s politicians emphasizes climate change. From former Governor Jerry Brown: “In less than five years, even the worst skeptics will be believers.” From current Governor Gavin Newsom, speaking on the threat of wildfires in the state: “If anyone is wondering if climate change is real, come to California.”

The other story, which comes from professional foresters, emphasizes how different forest management practices might have made many of the recent fires far less severe, if not avoided entirely. Specifically, California’s misguided forest management practices included several decades of successful fire suppression, combined with a failure to remove all the undergrowth that results when natural fires aren’t allowed to burn.

Back in 1923, forest fire suppression was in its infancy. But techniques and technologies improved apace with firefighting budgets, until by the second half of the 20th century, an army of firefighters coped, overall, very effectively with California’s wildfires. The result is excessive undergrowth which not only creates fuel for catastrophic and unmanageable super fires, but these excessive trees and shrubs compete with mature trees. This is the real reason why California’s forests are not only tinderboxes, but also filled with dying trees. Now Californians confront nearly 20 million acres of overgrown forests. Behind the climate change rhetoric and political posturing, a consensus has quietly formed that California’s forests need to be thinned.

In order to rapidly address the challenge of thinning California’s forests, there are several steps that may be taken simultaneously. For starters, many environmental regulations need to be rewritten. The state is already beginning to grant CEQA exemptions to property owners that want to engage in thinning operations. But half of California’s forests are on federal land. At the federal level, the EPA’s “no action” restrictions, usually based on the “single species management” practice, have led to more than half of California’s national forests being off limits to tree thinning, brush removal, or any other sort of active management.

Another required change is the U.S. Forest Service guidelines which only permit active forest management, even in the areas that are not off limits, for as little as six weeks per year. While restrictions on when and where forests can be thinned may have sound ecological justifications in some ways, they are making it impossible to thin the forests. The ecological cost/benefits need to be reassessed. To be effective, thinning operations need to be allowed to run for several months each year, instead of several weeks each year.

The EPA needs to streamline the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) application process so it is less expensive and time consuming for qualified companies to get permits to extract timber from federal lands. They can also grant waivers to allow thinning projects to bypass NEPA, or at the least, broaden the allowable exemptions.

The federal government can accelerate granting of long term stewardship contracts whereby qualified companies acquire a minimum 20 year right to extract wood products from federal lands. This will guarantee a steady supply of wood products which, in turn, will make new investment viable in logging equipment, mills, and biomass energy facilities.

Rules and conditions governing timber exports need revision. The export of raw logs from federal lands in the Western United States is currently prohibited. Lifting this prohibition would help, because sawmill capacity is not capable of handling the increase in volume. Just with the new thinning programs already in place, logs and undergrowth are being burned or put in landfills.

As it is, California imports around 80 percent of the cut lumber used in its construction industry or sold through retailers to consumers. If there was an assurance of wood supply, which the national forests can certainly offer, investment would be made in expanding mill capacity. Suddenly the money that is being sent to Oregon, Washington and British Colombia to purchase their cut timber would stay here in California, employing thousands of workers in the mills.

The state or federal government can set up revolving loan funds for investors to build sawmills, as well as biomass energy facilities, as well as chippers and other equipment, that would allow the industry to quickly ramp up operations and capacity.

As California’s forests are thinned, and kept that way, and the annual supply of wood is permanently increased, in-state demand would become increasingly unable to absorb in-state supply, and the surplus could be exported, earning additional profits and supporting additional jobs. Biomass plants, burning carbon neutral wood chips, could profitably generate safe, affordable, distributed electricity to rural markets, employing additional thousands and delivering returns to private investors.

Finally, California has an opportunity to rehabilitate able-bodied homeless substance abusers by putting them to work thinning the forests. With only modest reforms to California’s criminal code, or perhaps via a state or federal state of emergency, homeless people convicted of drug or minor property crimes could serve their time working on labor crews thinning the forests.

Cal Fire, the California Dept. of Corrections, and the California Conservation Corps are all equipped to train and house people to do this work. It might be the best thing that ever happened to thousands of young homeless Californians who, once they are freed from substance abuse, are sane, able bodied people. Thousands might recover their dignity and their future in this manner, at the same time as they help restore health to California’s forests.

The Right and Wrong Responses to California Wildfires

Many of the recommendations here are already in progress. Others should be considered. To make them happen more quickly and effectively, California’s state officials should be working with the Trump administration behind the scenes, even if they savage each other in the public square. But there are other steps California’s policymakers are taking which are harmful to working Californians.

For example, there is the growing conventional wisdom that people should not be living in the “Urban Wildland Interface” (UWI). While common sense indicates people living in the UWI cannot have the same expectations regarding fire risk as people living in the urban core, it would be a tragic mistake to deny people the ability to escape urban areas and find affordable options in rural areas.

California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, could with a stroke of his pen, allow private insurance companies to pass on the escalating costs of reinsurance for fire prone areas to the customers who live in those areas. Because they can’t do that, private insurers are cancelling policies. California’s state run insurance which remains available to people in fire prone areas is far more expensive, which is driving people out of their homes.

There are three layers of protection against fires for people living in the UWI. The first, forest thinning, needs to involve multiple agencies cooperating based on community needs and land topography, rather than stopping at arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries. The second layer of protection requires removing combustible material along access roads, ensuring safe evacuation routes. Roads need to be wide enough to allow cars to evacuate one way at the same time as oncoming firefighting vehicles pass in the other direction. Third, homes themselves need to be hardened against embers, with brush and other combustible materials cleared away from the structures. With these conditions met, insurance against fires can be affordable, even if it still costs more than fire insurance outside of the UWI.

The threat of wildfires is not only being used to amplify panic over climate change, it is being used to justify and accelerate policies designed to combat climate change. Many of these policies are misguided and extreme. The example of prohibiting new construction in rural areas based on the wildfire threat is one of them. Another is the fast tracking of legislation aimed at achieving the 2030 targets for California’s aggregate greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the latest bits of pending legislation pursuant to California hitting its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target is the intention to charge automobile owners based in their “vehicle miles traveled.” If one reflects on who will be impacted by a law of this sort, it is revealed as one of the most misanthropic, regressive laws ever proposed in California. The people who live on the outskirts of cities and have super-commutes, the people who are gone from 7 a.m. till 8 p.m. every day so they can keep their family under a roof, will now have to pay extra for the privilege of enduring that super-commute.

The equally misanthropic alternative that California’s climate activist legislators propose is to construct high density condominiums and apartments located by light rail stations and bus stops. These residences will have their parking requirements waived. Imagine, if you will, a parent of three, still barely able to pay rent, living without a car in one of these “transit villages.” Without a car, exactly how will they pick up their children from school, deposit them at soccer practice, do the dinner shopping, go home and drop off groceries, then pick them up from soccer practice, all while riding various buses? It’s impossible.

Ultimately, perhaps California’s wildfires, and the two very different responses they generate, are emblematic of the entire climate change debate. On one side you have the righteous climate activists, determined to save the planet at all costs. On the other you have working practitioners with expertise earned in the real world, with empathy for real people.

How will we look back at this era? How will history judge our responses to the challenges of our time, in 2123?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How Trump Can Declare War on the Homeless Industrial Complex

California’s homeless crisis is now visible to everyone living in the state. Along with tens of thousands of homeless who are concentrated in various districts of the major cities, additional thousands are widely dispersed. If you drive into most major urban centers, you will see their tent encampments along freeway junctions, under bridges, along frontages, beside drainage culverts. Even in very small towns, they congregate by the dozens in parks and parking lots, along the streets and in the alleys. In California’s largest cities, by the tens of thousands, they erect makeshift housing along sidewalks, using tarpaulins draped over shopping carts, tents, boxes. It is completely out of control. Billions have been spent to ameliorate the situation, and these billions have only served to make the situation worse than ever.

It’s hard to identify ground zero for California’s homeless crisis. But the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County host, between them, well over 100,000 of California’s estimated 130,000 homeless. And in both of those metros, local government policies have utterly failed. This failure is partly because local elected officials are hampered by state laws which make it nearly impossible to incarcerate petty thieves and drug addicts, or institutionalize the mentally ill, and court rulings that prohibit breaking up homeless encampments unless these homeless can be provided free and permanent “supportive housing.”

The state and federal governments have even mandated that providing “housing first,” and getting every homeless person under a roof prior to any allocations of funds for treatment to overcome drug addiction or manage mental illness, is a condition of  receiving government funds to help the homeless.

As if these laws and court rulings that have made homeless populations unmanageable weren’t enough, California’s state legislators have crippled the ability of developers to cost effectively construct any type of housing. State laws designed to prevent “sprawl” have caused land prices within cities to skyrocket. California’s environmental laws, most notably CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), require a dizzying, time consuming and expensive, seemingly endless array of reports from developers seeking project approvals. There are literally hundreds of various applications and fees that developers have to file with dozens of state and local agencies, and often these agencies will take months if not years to process the applications.

But instead of challenging these laws, local elected officials have used them as an excuse to engage in one of the most corrupt misuses of government funds in American history. Without first changing these laws, the problem cannot be fixed. But a special interest movement has been created to spend the money anyway. This alliance of special interests constitutes what has now become a Homeless Industrial Complex, comprised of government bureaucracies, homeless advocacy groups operating through nonprofit entities, and large government contractors, especially construction companies and land development firms.

They have used money from the state general fund, from state bond funds, from special local taxes and fees, and from local bond measures, to construct housing for the homeless, heedless of the per unit cost. While a few thousand units of actual housing units have been constructed so far, billions have already been spent.

An audit recently released by L.A.’s City Controller Ron Galperin exposed the City’s inability to build enough homes with the $1.2 billion in Prop HHH voter approved bond funds to address the crisis of homelessness. At an average cost of $550,000 per apartment unit of “permanent supportive housing,” small wonder. Similar or even higher average per unit costs are typical of previous efforts in Los Angeles as well as throughout California.

Diverting nearly all funding to “Housing First” at the expense of treatment, and elevating the costs of that housing through legalized corruption, guarantee that billions more will be wasted as homelessness in California only gets worse. California’s local, county, and state governments have demonstrated themselves to be administratively and ethically inept. It is time for the Federal government, under the vision and leadership of President Trump, to intervene and solve this problem with a comprehensive interagency response.

If several federal agencies launched a coordinated effort to get California’s homeless crisis under control, it could be accomplished in months instead of several years. As it is, California’s homeless crisis is out of control and getting worse every day. Federal action would not solve the homeless crisis overnight, but it would prevent something truly catastrophic occurring such as a disease epidemic, and it would set the stage for Californians more swiftly implementing permanent solutions, for which there currently is no end in sight.

For example, the IRS could reform the laws governing nonprofits to curb the legalized waste of billions that pour into what have become special interest behemoths.

The SEC could classify the taxpayer as having investor rights, in a long-overdue move that would make it a lot more difficult for public projects to squander public funds.

The SEC could also require consultants to public agencies to register as financial advisers and be subject to the same restrictions on political donations that govern these consultants in the private sector.

The Justice Dept. could investigate some of the more egregious wasteful projects allegedly launched to help the homeless to possibly uncover cases of collusion or racketeering.

The Justice Dept. could also send in DEA agents to break up the criminal gangs and drug traffickers who exploit California’s lenient drug laws and hide among the homeless encampments.

The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development could reform the Low Income Tax Credit program to put a cap on per unit costs for housing projects to qualify. They could repeal the disastrous “housing first” mandate that prevents homeless programs from prioritizing treatment equally to constructing shelters.

The Dept. of Education could get even more aggressive against the teachers union which resists competition in K-12 education, and is consequently responsible for thousands of students graduating into homelessness instead of productive lives.

The Centers for Disease Control could declare a health emergency and sweep through the homeless encampments, cleaning up the trash and human excrement.

The EPA could participate in that effort by declaring – quite accurately – homeless encampments to be Brownfields, in order to save California’s soil, water, and runoff to the ocean.

The Dept. of Labor could implement an executive order preventing Project Labor Agreements from being used to inflate the cost of housing projects, as if with the shortage of construction laborers in California, there is any need for PLAs.

And the Dept. of Veterans Affairs could house homeless veterans on unused sections of California’s abundant military bases.

These and other suggestions are covered in detail in the remainder of this article.

How Federal Agencies Could Work Together to Tackle the Homeless Crisis

Treasury Department/Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

One of the biggest sources of legalized corruption that victimizes the American taxpayer is the fact that there has been no reform to nonprofit tax law. A nonprofit is the most tax-advantaged way to legally launder profits and act as an advocacy wing of major corporations. The US Tax code has been greatly abused by large national nonprofits who have turned charity work into a bankable industry, the power of which now rivals the private sector. 

Today’s large charitable organizations are part of the Homeless Industrial Complex. These nonprofits outrival many small businesses today by using the tax code to their benefit. Why pay taxes if you can find a loophole in the tax code? According to one report the nonprofit sector – 10% of the American workforce or 11.4 million jobs – is the third largest workforce in the U.S., behind retail and manufacturing. Total charitable giving in the U.S. in 2016 was about $390 billion, a 2.7% increase from 2015.

One of the most tax advantaged ways to legally embezzle public dollars is via a nonprofit entity, which then creates a for-profit subsidiary. All of the revenue goes directly to the nonprofit controlling entity, wherein there are no caps on salaries and everything is effectively a write-off, and it becomes a zero sum game to show zero profits. They can pay consulting and contracting fees to for-profit entities, which often can result in additional pay if the same employee is on the payroll of both entities. Why use a for profit business to own property when you can create a nonprofit entity, therefore excluding yourself from property taxes? The really savvy nonprofits know how to use the tax code to their advantage by hiring the most sophisticated tax attorneys and accountants, and creating multiple entities in order to do this.

Recommendations: The IRS should comprehensively reform the regulations governing nonprofits. For example:

  • Set a threshold for annual (pre-tax) revenue from all sources of income and contributions, and once that maximum is exceeded, the IRS will automatically reclassify the nonprofit as a for profit entity, and tax accordingly.
  • Require all tax-exempt organizations to file public consolidated financials to replace current 990 requirements. Currently, under IRS guidelines, whether or not a tax-exempt organization has a parent, affiliate, subsidiary, and/or related entities, only the tax-exempt organization needs to file a public tax return. This is how they avoid disclosing their true assets and total salaries paid to employees. When an organization has multiple entities, an employee can work for any of these entities, with different titles and roles, while also receiving a salary from each of them. Without consolidated financials, it is impossible to determine how much a nonprofit executive, board member, or consultant makes. Additionally, Private Foundation tax-exempt entities are not required to disclose current 990’s to the IRS, which every other tax-exempt entity is required to do.
  • Make the above requirement effective to-date, with a 2 year retroactive look back provision in order to be in good standing and maintain its tax exempt status. By doing so, you would likely see a sudden drop in organizations seeking a tax exempt status, and find many entities suddenly converting to traditional for-profit organizations. If an entity was not in compliance within a certain time frame, you could freeze its tax exempt status until it was able to do so, ultimately cutting off their fundraising ability.
  • Impose a tax on excess executive compensation among tax-exempt organizations. Even a limit of $500,000 for any individual or executive pay would have a huge impact. While a limit of $500K per year may seem high, some of these nonprofit executive salaries are much higher. At these rates of compensation the entity is no longer a public benefit, as it now benefits a specific employee.
  • Tax all public charity organizations in the same manner, as private foundations. While there are 30 types of 501(c) organizations, there are two different types of 501(c)(3)s, Private Foundations vs. Public Charities. Private Foundations pay taxes on net investment income which generally includes interest, dividends, rents, royalties, and capital gain net income, and is reduced by expenses incurred to earn this income. In reaching the asset threshold, the assets of related organizations are considered. A 501(c)(3) public charity follows different taxation rules from that of a Private Foundation.
  • Disallow Private Foundations from 501(c)(3) exemption. A Private Foundation consists of nonprofits that don’t qualify as public charities. Foundations may be sub-classified as private operating foundations or private non-operating foundations and receive some of the advantages of public charities. Well-known foundations include the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. In essence, highly profitable, multinational corporations have figured out how to take advantage of the tax code, and the creation of a private foundation is THE best and most tax advantaged way to do so.
  • Tax tax-exempt organizations for any business activity outside of their chartered IRS exemption.
  • Hold all 501(c)(3) organizations to the same lobbying disclosure rules. Other tax-exempt organizations that lobby, must either notify their members as to how much of their dues are nondeductible because they’re spent on lobbying or pay a proxy tax at the highest corporate rate, yet this rule does not apply to 501(c)(3) organizations.

Nonprofit organizations have become corrupt and politicized, and gone far beyond the charitable missions for which their tax exempt status was originally conceived. Reforming the tax laws governing nonprofits will not only result in leaner, more effective nonprofit advocacy for the homeless, which translates into less expensive homeless shelters and less expensive housing for the homeless. It will remove the incentives for individuals and organizations to abuse the nonprofit exemptions in all segments of American society.

Securities and Exchange Commission 

Affordable housing developers are not disclosing the value of City Land, therefore engaging in what is arguably taxpayer backed fraud by not disclosing the full project costs to the investor, which in this case is the taxpayer. All real estate – whether it is single family, commercial, or investment – is an investment made by an individual, who pays property taxes to local governments. Property taxes are allowable deductions for investment properties, therefore, the property owner is an investor.

Recommendations: Use the SEC Act of 1933 and 1934 to do the following:

  • Recognize the American taxpayer as a protected class of investors by the SEC.
  • Recognize any interest in real estate meets the definition of a “security.”
  • Apply insider trading laws to real estate investing.

If the American taxpayer is afforded the same rights that investors are accorded in private investment transactions, it will become far more difficult for public agencies to get away with waste and fraud. This will not only lower the costs for public homeless shelters and public housing for the homeless, it will lower the costs for all taxpayer funded public projects.

Securities and Exchange Commission / Division of Enforcement 

Local elected officials accept campaign donations from special interest groups, and in return, give them the rights to large redevelopment projects. This is a pay to play scheme. These groups are not registered as investment advisers, yet they provide investment advisory services to municipalities. 

Recommendation: Apply Section 206(4) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to all industries who partake in municipal contracts, requiring that investment advisers are subject to a two-year timeout from providing compensatory advisory services or political contributions. 

Why should investment advisers have to register and adhere to campaign finance restrictions in the private sector, but not in the public sector? Holding them to the same rules as in the private sector will eliminate obvious conflicts of interest, and make the bidding process for homeless projects and services more competitive.

Justice Department / AntiTrust Division

The special interest movement known as the Homeless Industrial Complex may be engaging in collusive practices to substantially lessen competition, and this may include price-fixing schemes where one person holds property for the benefit of another. We are facing a manufactured crisis today by special interest groups and elected officials, who stand to benefit financially from the crisis, thus potentially making this a racketeering case.

Recommendation: Invoke the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, to prohibit cartels and the abuse of monopoly power.

Taking these steps will make all the stakeholders involved in helping the homeless, where billions have already been spent, far more careful in what sorts of partnerships they form, and what sort of “arms-length” transactions they execute.

Justice Department / Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

In California, voter enacted Propositions 47 (downgraded property and drug crimes) and 57 (early release of nonviolent inmates) have worked together as a perfect storm only to perpetuate a constant cycle of drug use and the need to commit crimes to pay for them. Drug dealers now operate their businesses with minimal deterrents. Organized drug traffickers are able to hide under the guise of homelessness within homeless encampments. 

Recommendation: Drugs are still illegal on a federal level, and the DEA needs to get involved in fighting drug trafficking that is camouflaged within the homeless communities. 

California’s policymakers have abandoned their citizens to an epidemic of drug use. State laws make it nearly impossible to stop public use of hard drugs. Traffickers and users operate with near impunity, and the state has become a magnet for both. With rampant drug use comes organized crime, exacerbated mental illness, property crimes to support drug habits, and public disorder. A federal crackdown will get this all back under control.

Justice Department / Law Enforcement Agencies 

The State of California and City of Los Angeles no longer enforce the core responsibility of any government, which is to guarantee public safety. Private property is no longer respected under this diminished rule of law, thus violating the civil rights of law abiding residents victimized by a state of lawlessness. 

Recommendation: Activate and deploy Federal Law Enforcement Agencies such as the US Marshals and Federal Bureau of Investigations to restore law and order to citizens. 

With federal agencies cooperating with local law enforcement to enforce federal crimes, including robbery and larceny, the deterrent against property crimes that went away with the enactment of Prop. 47 will be reestablished.

Housing and Urban Development / Federal Housing Administration

Federal tax credit programs and taxpayer-backed dollars are being abused by special interest groups, under the guise of social redistribution policies. Specifically, the LIHTC (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) program may be unduly influenced by non-profit housing developers with no incentive to build cost effective solutions, and are now reaching “affordable housing” per apartment costs that can exceed $750,000. These high costs are due to California’s state and local governments requiring hundreds of permits with exorbitant fees and lengthy processing times, excessive environmental regulations, and prevailing wage requirements. Very few developers are capable of complying with this punitive array of obstacles, ensuring that the “subsidy” goes to powerful and favored special interest groups, defeating the underlying policy of the program in general.

Recommendations:

  • Repeal “housing first” which prevents funds from immediately being shared with treatment programs.
  • Federal tax credits must be prioritized towards projects that are cost-effective.
  • Withhold Community Developer Block Grants from the State of California.
  • Require the exemption of state prevailing wage requirements in order to use the Federal LIHTC.
  • Set a maximum costs per bed/unit in order to receive public funding.
  • Reform the LIHTC program so that it only financed “affordable housing” within 60-120% of area median income, but require developers to prove that residents could afford to live there, using household budgeting tools that take into account utilities and surrounding expense factors.
  • Reform LIHTC so that deeper LIHTC subsidy models in the 30-50% of AMI have their own program, similar to HUD programs like Section 8.
  • The HUD Office of Inspector General should identify examples of abuse of federal subsidies and prosecute offenders.

By setting conditions on federal funds for homeless projects, and by removing the “housing first” rule that prevents treatment from getting equal priority to shelter, for more assistance will be possible with the same amount of funding.

Department of Education

Where you live determines where you go to school, so California’s inner city youth are most impacted. For a child education is destiny, and it is the only way out of poverty. We are spending billions of dollars on the homeless crisis and job training for the uneducated, and public schools in California rank 40th in the nation. Unless we provide opportunities to Americans, they will fall victim to substance abuse. We have witnessed a market failure in public education, and the only way to correct market failures is to open up competition.

Recommendations:

  • We need an “Education First” policy that recognizes that the teachers union is the primary barrier to improving educational outcomes in the United States;
  • We must improve our failing public education system by allowing competition via new charter schools and allowing for a robust opportunity scholarships (AKA, voucher) programs. 

California’s public education system has been fatally undermined by the teachers unions, which oppose any sort of competition to traditional public schools. Breaking their monopoly through charter schools or even vouchers will provide opportunities to students who today are graduating to homelessness instead of living productive lives.

Health and Human Services / Centers for Disease Control

Our homeless crisis is in large part a mental illness and drug crisis, masked as an “affordable housing” crisis by special interests. The mentally ill are our most vulnerable population, requiring our most help as they are a danger to themselves and others. A recent study by the Los Angeles Times has found that 78 percent of the unsheltered homeless in the City of Los Angeles suffer from mental illness.

Recommendations:

  • Declare a health emergency to address mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless, and,
  • Create a federal tax credit to build and reopen mental healthcare facilities, for locations based outside of urban areas. We are witnessing a mental health and drug addiction epidemic afflicting tens of thousands of homeless, making Los Angeles’ “Housing First” policy ineffective.
  • Subsidize the costs and regulate addiction treatment programs which can cost $30-60K per visit. Funding on these programs needs to revised criteria that creates an incentive for providers who can do it cost-effectively.
  • Directly pay individuals who directly provide care for and house a family member with a severe mental illness.

Getting people back into mental health treatment, either through more cost-effective publicly funded programs, or by making it easier for family members to care for their mentally ill loved ones, would ameliorate some of the most tragic consequences of the ineffective approach to-date.

The homeless crisis is also creating a risk of a disease epidemic. The trash and human excrement accumulating in homeless encampments has spawned an exploding population of disease carrying animals and insects that thrive in these conditions: rats, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, mites, lice. Los Angeles already has outbreaks of typhus, hepatitis and tuberculosis, as do other cities in California. Shigella, a communicable form of diarrhea, is now common among the homeless. There have even been outbreaks of trench fever, spread by lice.

Recommendation: The Centers for Disease Control should declare a health emergency to swiftly clean up the trash and human excrement. The out-of-control populations of rats, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, mites, and lice should be exterminated.

California’s policymakers have utterly failed to protect the public from the diseases being spawned and spread by the trash and excrement piling up in homeless encampments. Declaring a health emergency and applying federal resources to the problem can fix it before it’s too late.

Environmental Protection Agency

California’s state legislature recently passed AB 1197, and it was quickly signed by Governor Newsom. The new law only pertains to the City of Los Angeles, and exempts any homeless housing project from the California Environmental Quality Act. Yet because of the homeless, our streets are littered with feces, needles, and trash. While many are campaigning about climate change, far more imminent threats to public health and quality of our oceans is linked to the growing homelessness crisis in California with thousands of tons of human excrement and drug paraphernalia runoff flowing directly in our oceans and water systems. California’s environmentalists have somehow forgotten that all drains lead to the ocean. Equally troubling, the trash and human excrement in these homeless encampments has lead to an explosion of disease carrying rodents. Now there are issues with homeless related fires.

Recommendations:

  • Declare areas where the homeless are concentrated as Brownfields, via the EPA Brownfields program;
  • Mandate a community EPA liaison on any state project given an environmental exemption in order to deter environmental crimes.

Using Brownfield status to bring financial resources and regulatory leverage to bear on homeless encampments may be the only way to stop ongoing degradation of California’s soil, water, and ocean runoff.

Homeland Security

Today we are witnessing organized crime hiding within the extensive homeless encampments, taking advantage of permissive laws to conduct many illicit actives in broad daylight. Criminal organizations are growing among the homeless, understanding our laws and using them to their benefit, in order to diminish the role of law enforcement.

Recommendation: The Department of Homeland Security needs to infiltrate these homeless encampments and root out organized criminal networks.

If the DHS and the Justice Dept. work together to bring federal power and federal statutes into what have become lawless areas of California, the laws that tie the hands of local law enforcement can be overridden.

Department of Labor

States with the highest homeless populations, such as California, are run by special interest groups which require union memberships to work. 

Recommendations:

  • Implement a presidential executive order that exempts housing programs from prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements.
  • Require At Risk Targeted Persons (ARTPs) Employee Hiring Mandates;  ex-felons, persons with mental illness, chronically homeless individuals; sober ex-drug addicts;
  • Develop meaningful federal tax incentives and tax abatements to small business to incentivize employment of ARTPs and provide on-site workforce housing.

By exempting housing programs from prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements, the Dept. of Labor can lower the per unit costs of shelter beds and units of housing. California’s labor market is so tight that these exemptions will not harm the workers. Similarly, by creating incentives for employers to hire at risk individuals, more of the homeless will begin to reenter society. Organized labor should compete for projects and should not hinder the ability of organizations and companies to hire at-risk individuals as nonunion workers, and the Dept. of Labor can ensure that through executive order.

Department of Veterans Affairs

Veterans experience homelessness at a higher rate than the civilian population. About 7 percent of people in the U.S. can claim veteran status, but former service members make up around 13 percent of the country’s homeless population, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Recommendations:

  • Use military bases to house homeless veterans.
  • Work with Department of Labor/ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Veterans’ Employment and Training.

Offering on-base housing to homeless veterans is an idea whose time has come. Giving them this respect after their service to our nation is fitting, and could make use of surplus facilities throughout California’s extensive network of military bases.

Federal Intervention Could Quickly Get America’s Homeless Crisis Under Control

The objective of these recommendations is not to presume they offer the complete set of answers, or even the complete list of federal agencies that can be involved. These solutions that involve the federal executive branch are limited only by how conscientiously and how creatively they can be crafted. But the impact of the recommended changes would be immediate and profound.

If these recommendations were implemented, California’s homeless crisis would quickly improve. Criminal drug traffickers would be looking over their shoulders. The CDC and EPA would declare an emergency and clean up homeless encampments. Homeless veterans would find immediate shelter. And the power of the Homeless Industrial Complex, a special interest movement that has been enriched by going slow and overspending on everything, would be shaken to its foundations.

Nonprofits would no longer be able to legally squander funds intended to help the homeless. Taxpayers would have the same rights as private sector investors, making it less likely public agencies could waste money on projects. Federal funds would be contingent on cost-effective projects. Unions would have to compete to participate in projects, and with the shortage of construction workers in California and the many projects awaiting funds, that would not be a hardship to them. Over time, maybe a sustained effort by the Dept. of Education to introduce competition to the monopolistic union controlled public schools might even change both the aptitude and the attitude of students graduating into California’s workforce.

Eventually, maybe the other root problem connected to homelessness, prohibitively expensive housing, could get addressed. Not only through many of the reforms proposed here, which could apply to low income housing as easily as to permanent supportive housing, but through a loosening of the requirements to run building permit applications through an obscene gaggle of local and state agencies. Projects that take as little as 20 days in Texas to get approved, and at most 20 months in most states, can take up to 20 years in California. Small wonder there’s a housing shortage. These countless applications with their exorbitant fees and endless delays constitute criminal negligence and naked, insatiable public sector greed, masquerading as a public service.

In California, at the state and local level, despite well-funded rhetoric to the contrary, there is a shortage of creativity and a shortage of conscientiousness. The residents of the most hard hit cities facing this problem are trailblazers, pointing out that Emperor Newsom has no clothes, yet their cries for help have been ignored.

California’s policymakers are puppets of special interests. Those special interests include their own bureaucracies, which are controlled by public sector unions that gain membership dues and power whenever a public sector challenge worsens. Similarly, the other special interest members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, developers and nonprofit corporations, gain profits and revenues when the homeless crisis worsens.

It is time for the federal government to take decisive action where our public servants on the state and local level have utterly failed the public. It must never be forgotten that this failure victimizes not only the taxpayers and the members of the public who live in areas overran with homeless people. It also victimizes the homeless themselves, who are not getting shelter, and who are not getting treatment.

The power of the special interests who have turned homelessness into a self-serving, taxpayer funded industry, must be broken.

An executive order from President Trump declaring a state of emergency, followed up by an interagency effort according to a blueprint patterned after this checklist, could get America’s homeless crisis under control. And it could happen in months instead of interminable years.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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