2020 - Page 3 of 19 - Civic Finance

Orange County Classical Academy Excels Despite COVID

December 1, 2020/by Edward Ring

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck hard back in April 2020, California’s teachers’ unions went into overdrive. The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) released a lengthy document outlining what they believed to be “Safe and Equitable Conditions for Starting LAUSD in 2020-21.”

In a report published by the California Policy Center that same month, Larry Sand explained the deal struck between the school district and the UTLA:

“The deal engineered by UTLA boss Alex Caputo-Pearl requires teachers to provide instruction and student support for just four hours per day and also to ‘host three office hours for students’ every week. So instead of a 40-hour work week, teachers in L.A. only have to be available for 23 hours. Additionally, teachers can create their own work schedules ‘and not be required to teach classes using live video conferencing platforms.'”

The consequences of deals like this on the lives of California’s public school students, especially those in low income communities, has been disastrous. But there is an alternative.

The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), a new charter school that was approved to operate in a 4-3 vote by the board of the Orange County Unified School District back in January, opened its doors this fall to 360 elementary school students. As described in a report published by the California Policy Center in July, it was evident that this school was going to be no ordinary charter school. But how have things progressed, now that the school has been in session for three months?

To answer this, I recently spoke with the co-founder and board chairman of the Orange County Classical Academy, Dr. Jeff Barke, a practicing primary care physician and former 12-year elected school board member for the Los Alamitos Unified School District. He immediately confirmed that, unlike LAUSD, their school had opened on schedule with in-person instruction. Compliant with all COVID mandates including wearing masks, Barke said “the school is full with 360 kids and we still have a waiting list of another 200.” While the school offers distance learning as an option, only a few parents have made that choice for their children.

An immediate question with respect to in-class instruction is whether or not there were outbreaks of COVID infections. Barke was unequivocal on this, stating “out of 360 kids we only had one kid test positive and they had very mild symptoms. We have had zero teachers or staff test positive. All persons entering the school are asked about symptoms and temperature checked. Our classrooms and school are routinely and thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. Hand washing stations are located throughout the school. Testing is offered to all teachers and staff.”

As a charter school OCCA receives public funds, but their per student remittances are less than what traditional public schools receive. Parents of public school children enrolled in LAUSD and other closed or partially closed school districts should ask why OCCA can safely open for in-class instruction, but their schools cannot. But this distinction, while huge, is only one way OCCA is different from a typical public school in California.

What truly differentiates OCCA is their instructional approach. They have thrown away recent “innovations” such as Common Core and returned to traditional methods of teaching reading and math. For guidance they have licensed the curriculum and teacher training programs created for K-12 charter schools by Hillsdale College, a program that is used so far by 24 charter schools in ten states. The Hillsdale curriculum offers a fascinating alternative to progressive education, based on classical education techniques perfected over centuries.

For example, the curriculum architecture is defined by the “Trivium,” which consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the “Quadrivium,” which consists of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

How these concepts translate into practical instruction is not all that complicated. The Trivium encompasses subjects in the human sphere such as history, where the grammar phase emphasizes memorization, the logic phase teaches how memorized facts fit together, and the rhetoric phase teaches students how to express and evaluate facts and logic.

The Quadrivium focuses on subjects in the natural world, where arithmetic teaches about numbers, geometry teaches about numbers in space, music teaches about numbers in time, and astronomy teaches about numbers in time and space. These unifying concepts, which date to teaching methods employed in ancient Greece, offer students a way to consider in a very early and very profound way who they are in relation to the world.

The advantages of memorization should be obvious, despite being deemphasized in modern progressive curriculums. OCCA students learn the multiplication tables by heart, something all students used to do, a skill that will benefit them for the rest of their lives, and a process that naturally leads to students developing the numerical intuition that Common Core so clumsily leapfrogs to without requiring traditional memorization.

It is a few months too early to see how the OCCA students perform on standardized achievement tests, but parent feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. For example, and again dodging Common Core for more time-tested approaches, students learn to read by memorizing the phonetics of the most common syllables. Parents have reportedly been astonished at the sudden rapid progress in the reading ability of their children.

Establishing OCCA wasn’t easy. It was approved in a narrow vote by the local school board, over the strenuous objections of the teachers’ union. The fact that OCCA is non unionized, with a generous 401K plan instead of belonging to CalSTRS, represents a threat to the union grip on public education in California. The school’s rejection of progressive education in favor of a classical education also represents a threat to the teachers’ union, a threat that will greatly increase if the school delivers academic outcomes that surpass the performance of traditional public schools.

Once OCCA began operations, Barke said various types of intimidation began, although to-date it is impossible to prove who is behind it. “We have people driving by our school raising their middle finger out the window during pickup and dropoff,” he said, “we had someone on a motorcycle without a license plate on it stopping by and video taping our school, trying to find evidence of a COVID violation.”

The question everyone interested in the welfare of California’s children should be asking, however, is not what the impact of a truly innovative, non-unionized public charter school might have on the future of the teachers’ union. The relevant question is do the practices being pioneered at OCCA work? In terms of educational outcomes, do they offer a significant improvement over traditional public schools? The beauty of charter schools, or, in a perfect world, school vouchers, is that parents can choose from an assortment of educational options, and the ones that are successful can be replicated and the ones that fail go out of business.

To the future of OCCA and classical education, Barke only had this to say: “We now have our eye on opening additional schools.”

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Edward Ring

Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.

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Trump’s Nationalism vs Biden’s Empire

December 1, 2020/by Edward Ring

The patriotic, “America First” fervor embraced by President Trump and his supporters has been relentlessly attacked by his political opponents and their media allies as a menace. Critics of America First populism allege that it is racist and xenophobic, and they point to historical examples of toxic nationalism as evidence. They frequently accuse Trump’s followers of being “white nationalists,” comparing them to the German Nazis who overran Europe in the 1940s and slaughtered millions.

These historical comparisons are useful, but can be more accurately interpreted as refuting Trump’s critics. Instead of comparing American nationalism in the era of Trump to toxic nationalist movements in history, it should be compared to the globalist alternative which asserted itself with a vengeance in this recent presidential election. The American elite who oppose Trump’s America First movement are globalists, protecting their gains and promoting the further expansion of what has become the American empire. Joe Biden is their latest figurehead.

Considered in this context, Trump’s “nationalism” has little in common with the nationalist movements to which it is frequently compared. The German Nazis did not emerge as a populist movement because Germany had conquered the world. They emerged because in 1918 the German empire was defeated, with its colonial possessions confiscated, its disputed borderlands seized, and its remaining territory split in two. The Nazis emerged because in this dismembered nation, the victorious foreign powers made impossible claims on Germany’s wealth, driving millions of its citizens into breadlines.

How do any of these details regarding Germany in the decades leading up to World War II compare to America today? They don’t.

A more apt comparison would have to consider a scenario wherein Germany prevailed in the Great War, carved up Europe, confiscated the colonial possessions of France and Great Britain, and ruled the world in the 1920s and through the decades thereafter. In that alternative version of history, as Germany fought endless wars to maintain its global empire, along came a populist leader who recognized how the benefits of empire accrued only to an aristocratic elite.

American Empire

America today is an economic, military, and cultural empire dominating the world. Its close allies include members of NATO and the British Commonwealth. Its economic reach is best expressed in the status of the U.S. dollar as the reserve and transaction currency in the world. The English language is the global lingua franca. American culture, its movies, music, fads, fashions, consumer gadgets, and social media platforms are adopted and emulated everywhere. Opposing the American empire is the Russian Federation, reduced in the aftermath of the Cold War, and rising China, a nation determined to replace America as the global hegemon.

This reality puts America’s internal political debate into its proper context. What is the price of maintaining the American empire? Who benefits and who loses? When President Trump, often indelicately, called for other nations to share the burden of their military alliance with the United States, and called for other nations to engage in trade reciprocity with the United States, it had nothing to do with xenophobia, or toxic nationalism. It was his recognition that thousands of ordinary Americans were dying in brushfire wars around the globe at the same time as millions of their jobs were migrating offshore.

The universal hatred for President Trump as expressed by opposition from every establishment institution in America, backed by multinational corporations, ought to concern every American. Trump’s bellicosity provided cover for his opponents, allowing them to point to his behavior as the problem, when in fact the threat he posed to their interests ran far deeper. Examples from recent history illustrate why America’s empire builders had to get rid of Trump no matter what.

Recall the days leading up to the second Iraq war in 2003. Saddam Hussein’s regime was bottled up. No fly zones protected the Kurds in the north and the Shiite communities in the south. To the extent Sunni-controlled central Iraq still had an army, it was an effective counterweight to Iran. Hussein had not nurtured the 9/11 terrorists, that culpability fell to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even to the Saudis.

Nonetheless, there was President George W. Bush on national television, formally declaring that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave Iraq, or the Americans would invade. Watching Bush deliver that speech, his diction and demeanor even more awkward than usual, one might have gotten the impression he didn’t really want to do this. And perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he was just doing what he was told to do by his expert advisors.

Similarly, consider President Obama’s feckless acquiescence to the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. What threat did Gaddafi represent, a leader who thoroughly neutered and renounced his nation’s role in international terrorism nearly a decade earlier?

To possibly answer this question, two historical facts bear mentioning. In 2001, Iraq began receiving oil export payments in Euros. This action threatened to spiral into all of the OPEC nations moving their oil-export payments into Euros. While that threat seems absurd today, given the subsequent financial fragility of the European currency union, it might have seemed a very real threat to dollar hegemony back in 2003.

Moving forward to 2010, Gaddafi in Libya had begun to make genuine progress on a dream to unite the African continent in a single currency union. He proposed to create an independent hard currency in Africa. Despite his reputation in the West as a mad despot, he was respected as a leader of the pan-African movement and, as the BBC later reported, “Colonel Gaddafi pushed for a United States of Africa to rival the U.S. and the European Union.”

Questioning the Scope and Purpose of the American Empire

Americans who question the rationale and trajectory of the American empire are not just Trump and the people who voted for him. They range from leaders like Tulsi Gabbard to Antifa insurgents, whose allegiances and priorities remain frighteningly malleable. How this opposition will coalesce if a new war starts is anybody’s guess.

Trump, whose foreign policy of “principled realism” was far more coherent than his detractors ever recognized, refused to start new wars. When Iran shot down an expensive American military drone in the Persian Gulf, against the advice of his advisors Trump refrained from massive armed retaliation. When Trump was advised to escalate America’s involvement in Syria, he refused, an action which probably kept Turkey in the NATO alliance. When Trump’s military presented him with no options in Afghanistan that didn’t include an endless, costly occupation, Trump dismissed them and told them to come back when they had other options.

These are Trump’s true crimes. “Nationalism” according to Trump means he is unwilling to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to aggressively maintain an American military empire.

The biggest flaw in America’s elite rejecting Trump, ultimately, is not simply that they are imperialists and Trump is not. It’s their complete misunderstanding of America’s best long-term interests even if American hegemony is the best path forward for Americans. Examples of these misunderstandings are numerous.

Fighting tactical wars that cost trillions of dollars takes away resources to rebuild America’s military for the 21st century. Strategic and technological supremacy ought to be the primary goal of the American military, but that objective may be fatally undermined when every year, America’s military budget is overwhelmingly committed to expensive overseas operations using legacy weapons and tactics.

Fighting wars to guarantee the ongoing hegemony of the U.S. dollar is also problematic. The Euro turned out to be a paper tiger. An African currency union was a distant dream. If the underpinnings of fiat currencies are the wealth, economic resiliency, and established trading relationships of the nations that issue them, then does anyone actually think China’s Yuan can replace the U.S. dollar? China is a thin pan on a hot fire, with a restive population, ridden with even more debt than the United States, utterly dependent on imported food and fuel. And nobody wants to live in a world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. There’s no other nation even worth mentioning.

So what else makes Trump such a threat to the American empire? It isn’t his foreign policy or defense priorities. Is it his trade negotiations? Why? Does anyone seriously believe America can continue to hollow out its strategic industries without jeopardizing not only the welfare of the American worker, but also the viability of the American empire? Does anyone honestly claim that importing refugees from chaotic regions where American bombs have destabilized, enraged and decimated entire nations will either help those nations or contribute to America’s internal stability? What if instead we just stopped bombing them?

Maybe it’s Trump’s skepticism regarding “climate change” that has made him a threat to America’s empire builders. That would make sense, but not because climate change is an imminent threat to human survival and Trump is standing in the way of taking action. The real reason America’s elites promote climate alarmism is because it is an instrument of domestic repression and international imperialism.

Denying people in Africa and other developing regions the ability to develop natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power is denying them the ability to emerge economically. It’s also a horrifically short-sighted fraud, even from an environmental perspective, because prosperity is the surest guarantee that people will collectively, and entirely voluntarily, reduce their birthrates.

The true conflict in America is not between toxic nationalists and benevolent defenders of democracy. It is between people who want America to look after its own citizens and stop aggressive military interventions overseas, versus people who have gotten very wealthy and very powerful by abandoning their own people, while trying to conquer the world.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Edward Ring

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Why We Fight Government Unions

November 28, 2020/by Edward Ring

The California Policy Center, established in 2013, exists to expose and undermine the destructive power of government unions. Most Californians still don’t understand the threat these unions represent to the integrity of our democracy, the agenda of our politicians, and the solvency of our public institutions.

Government unions, sometimes also referred to as public sector unions, have very little in common with unions that represent employees in the private sector. While there is debate over what sorts of regulations should govern private sector unions, there is general agreement that they have played a vital role in protecting the rights of workers. Government unions are completely different.

Unlike private sector unions, government unions do not have to be reasonable when they negotiate pay, benefits, and work rules. In the private sector, if a union demands too much, the company can become unprofitable and go out of business. But government unions operate in the public sector, where politicians can simply increase taxes and cut services in order to pay whatever the unions demand.

Also unlike private sector unions, government unions do not negotiate with an independent management team. In the public sector, government unions often are the main contributors to political campaigns. Government unions “negotiate” with politicians they helped elect and whom they can easily target and defeat when they run for reelection. In California alone, government unions collect and spend nearly one billion dollars per year in dues, and of that, they use hundreds of millions, per year, to fund political campaigns.

Finally, government unions operate the machinery of government. It’s easy to overlook the significance of this obvious fact. But owners of small businesses who must comply with regulations, manage inspections, pay fees, and apply for permits, all to government agencies, cannot afford to be on record as contributing to candidates and causes these government unions oppose.

The negative consequences of government union control over the vast majority of California’s local and state elected officials cannot be overstated. Major corporations and wealthy individuals, by and large, have acquiesced to the government union agenda, greatly narrowing the scope of political debate and limiting the options offered voters.

One predictable and very serious result of government union influence in California’s politics is out-of-control rates of pay and benefits for public employees. For example, the average public sector retiree in California now collects a pension of $70,000 per year for 30 years of fulltime work. The pension systems that collect and invest money to fund these generous pensions are all facing bankruptcy, and demanding tens of billions of additional payments from taxpayers to stay solvent.

Another major negative consequence of unionized government in California is their almost universal partisan bias towards progressive policies. This finds expression in the curricular agenda pushed into the public schools by the teachers’ union. This union relentlessly lobbies for classroom material that prioritizes progressive topics such as ethnic studies and gender studies, along with coursework that disparages American history, the American founding, and free market principles.

Government unions also undermine accountability for public employees. This is seen across all agencies. Unionized public school teachers are granted tenure after less than two years of classroom observation. In layoffs, good teachers must be let go in deference to teachers with seniority. Incompetent or negligent teachers are almost impossible to fire. In every unionized public agency, from public schools to police departments, government unions protect the bad apples, causing needless public anger and damaging their credibility.

It wasn’t always this way. Government unions are a relatively recent phenomenon. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, a friend of labor, had this to say about government unions back in 1937:

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

Not quite 20 years later, in 1955, none other than George Meany, founder and long-time president of the AFL-CIO, flatly stated that it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” and that the AFL-CIO did not intend to reach out to workers in that sector.

But where common sense and propriety inhibited some of the most illustrious supporters of organized labor from unionizing the public sector during the first half of the 20th century, circumstances changed during the century’s latter half. Corruption, opportunism, and a chance to achieve decisive power for the Democratic Party gave rise to new laws that enabled unionized government.

The modern era of public sector unionism began in the late 1950s. Starting in Wisconsin in 1958, state and local employees gradually were permitted to organize. Today, there are only four states that explicitly prohibit collective bargaining by public employees.

The vision of the California Policy Center is a California where public sector unions are illegal. Public employees have all the same rights that protect private sector workers. As members of the civil service, they also have protections against arbitrary firing by incoming elected officials. They don’t need unions.

In the short run, the mission of the California Policy Center is to make California’s voters aware of the self-interested power of government unions. If you see a politician endorsed by a government union, vote for their opponent. If you see an initiative or ballot measure endorsed by a government union, vote no.

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

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Edward Ring

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John Kerry, Climate Czar in Waiting

November 28, 2020/by Edward Ring

Never mind ballots arriving by the hundreds of thousands at 4 a.m. after “counting was stopped for the night,” but only in swing states. Never mind voting machines that, apparently, any moderately talented nerd can hack and cook. Never mind “tranches” of votes, by the thousands and all for Biden, erroneously stacking the tallies because of “upload malfunctions.” Never mind same-day registration, ballot harvesting, no voter ID requirements, or missing signatures and postmarks. Never mind that Trump earned nearly 6 million votes in California, a 35 percent improvement over his 2016 performance, actually increasing his share of total votes from 31.6 to 34.3 percent, yet lost in fracking Pennsylvania.

Never mind. Prepare for a Biden presidency, and a Biden cabinet.

In other words, just rely on the “nonpartisan” experts and ignore your lying eyes. Assume Joe Biden really is speaking from the “Office of the President-Elect” and assume what he proclaims today will become policy on January 21. Consider the gang that will surround this amiable but senescent old crook. In particular, consider Biden’s incoming cabinet, undoubtedly destined to include a mandatory assortment of race-baiting blowhards, gender obsessed fanatics, gun grabbers, abortion extremists, government union overseers, ambulance chasers, corporate cronies, Chinese operatives, bankers, billionaires, and grasping bureaucrats.

And while you’re at it, consider Biden’s choice for “climate czar”—John Forbes Kerry.

The first thing to understand about Kerry is that he is an inside member of the establishment uniparty that was horrified by Trump’s impudent decision to actually take seriously his job as president of the United States. Kerry, who married into the aristocratic Heinz family, has a personal net worth estimated in excess of $250 million. Unlike Trump, Kerry is both a partner and a puppet in the American oligarchy, which means he will do whatever is in his personal best interests, as well as whatever he is told to do. Rarely if ever will those agenda items diverge.

Whether it involves prosecuting yet another endless overseas war, or, more to the point, morphing the great American COVID lockdown into phase two—the great American climate lockdown—Kerry will put the oligarchy first, and America last. Count on it.

The beating that ordinary Americans have taken over the past year understandably has diverted their attention from the coming “climate emergency.” Americans have watched helplessly as well-funded, violent mobs pulled down symbols of their heritage, while looting and vandalizing property, sometimes burning buildings to the ground, bellowing intense hatred for every cherished American institution and tradition. Americans watched as the media either ignored this orchestrated nationwide mayhem, or downplayed it, or even pretended it was caused by Trump and his supporters.

Americans have endured a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands, prompted an endless “lockdown,” and driven hundreds of thousands into bankruptcy and madness. There’s no end in sight.

So Americans can be forgiven for not putting the impending “climate emergency” front of mind. But if and when Biden takes charge, and turns John Kerry loose, that will change.

The True Motivation for the Climate Emergency

Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty who bothers to read dissenting expert viewpoints on the issue of anthropogenic climate change knows that debate still rages as to the severity, the causes, and the appropriate responses. Excellent recent books on the topic, contrarian but scrupulously researched, include Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger, and False Alarm, by Bjorn Lomborg.

Shellenberger, a lifelong progressive who was once honored as a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” argues, using the IPCC’s own data, that the projected severity of climate change is greatly overstated, and explains how much environmental damage occurs when people in the developing world are denied access to conventional energy including hydroelectric and nuclear power.

Lomborg, a Danish economist with impeccable credentials, argues not only that climate change is a phenomenon that humanity can adapt to with relative ease, but that the policies being advocated in the name of fighting climate change yield absurd cost/benefit ratios, and explains how directing money and resources to other compelling global objectives would be far more productive.

There are plenty of other reputable climate skeptics, or climate realists, or, perhaps most transgressive of all, optimists, who still patiently argue for practical spending on cost-effective infrastructure instead of a mad, panic-stricken rush into political and economic tyranny. Listen to these voices of reason while you still can. Because the real reason for climate alarm is all about money and power. People like John Kerry have plenty of both, but they want it all, and the “climate emergency” is how they’re going to get it.

Artificial Scarcity Empowers the Oligarchy

There are obvious upsides to “climate mitigation” for several powerful special interest groups. It’s a gold mine for the public sector, which expands its ranks in order to intrude into every segment of our lives and help us “manage” our consumption. Everything we do becomes the business of government enforcers, from when and how much water or electricity we consume to where and how much we travel. Even the size of our windows or the types of outdoor landscaping we tend will come under their scrutiny.

But when it comes to coping with the “climate emergency,” industry is a willing partner to government.

Think about it. Everything has to be reinvented and replaced, because everything is suddenly obsolete, wasteful, exploitative, and immoral.

The homes we live in, our workplaces, our home appliances, our vehicles, all of it has to be rebuilt.

“Planned obsolescence,” something that leftists used to decry back in the days before they merged with corporate America, is now considered a virtuous feature.

Joining manufacturers to supply critical components is the tech sector, ready to ensure that everything we use, from our car to our coffeemaker, is wired to the internet. And to help us out, the software that is suddenly necessary to run a toaster will have to be updated periodically, requiring us to no longer own our appliances, but to lease them. Permanent revenue streams. Micromanaged consumption. The planet is saved.

But there’s a deeper motivation at work behind the public narrative of the climate alarmists. It’s connected to the financialization of the American economy. The debt binge that began in the 1980s under Reagan and which has enjoyed bipartisan continuity ever since, depends on federal deficits and trade deficits to maintain America’s economic growth. The primary beneficiaries of America’s debt binge have been government workers, very large corporations, banks and billionaires, while real wages have gone down for ordinary workers.

But to keep the debt party going, America needs more collateral to borrow against. Enter artificial scarcity. It starts with real estate, America’s biggest asset.

The Synergy of a Financialized Economy and Climate Alarm

In the name of environmental protection, and now even more urgently in the name of fighting “climate change,” and on a fraudulently thin but nonetheless unchallenged scientific basis, America’s cities are being cordoned off.

As America’s population grows by millions each year, the preponderance of new real estate development occurs within the footprint of existing cities, causing the value of housing and commercial properties to rise because demand is increasing but supply is forcibly limited. As assessments go up, additional borrowing collateral is created.

The equation is simple: When politically contrived artificial scarcity is imposed on a market, an asset bubble is formed. As long as the scarcity can be maintained, the bubble will expand. The beneficiaries of a real estate bubble are public entities, which collect higher property taxes based on higher assessments, thanks to the inflated values.

Public sector pension funds also benefit, because their real estate portfolios benefit from the asset appreciation. Needless to say, private speculators and investors also benefit from a rising housing market, but its impact on the average homeowner is a slow train wreck.

When consumers borrow, home equity is their collateral. It might seem logical that rising home values would benefit consumers. But people trying to buy homes cannot afford them, or they manage to buy them anyway, enduring punishing mortgage payments. And an often unavoidable debt trap is imposed on those people who bought their homes when they were still affordable.

If they are typical middle-class Americans, their property values have risen, as has the cost-of-living (including property taxes), while their inflation-adjusted wages have fallen. So they borrow against their rising home equity in order to pay their bills, and America’s financialized economy keeps spinning. Caught in an unavoidable spiral of debt accumulation, by the millions, Americans sink further into financial servitude.

This is the consequence of artificial scarcity, designed to sustain a financialized economy that is addicted to debt accumulation. Climate change is just the moral rationalization that enables a few more innings of this unsustainable game. And the imposition of artificial scarcity is not confined to real estate.

A similar profiteering opportunism underscores the renewables and conservation mania. Not only do high tech companies capitalize on fantastic opportunities to sell gadgets to create a panopticon of energy surveillance a la the “internet of things,” where every home appliance is wired and monitored by the utilities. At the same time the highly regulated public utilities are offered spectacular new avenues for higher profits, because while their profit percentages are fixed, and the units of energy they can generate are fixed, when they sell expensive renewable energy to the consumer instead of inexpensive natural gas or nuclear power, they can still double their revenues and profits.

The Green Enabling of Scarcity Profiteers

In the name of saving the earth, a collection of special interests share the same goal: make water, energy, transportation, and housing as scarce and expensive as possible. Increase regulations and unleash an avalanche of lawsuits so only the biggest, most resilient corporations survive and emerging competitors are crushed.

In California, and increasingly in other states, a punitively high cost of living is the result of conscious political choices, and the primary force behind these choices is not desire to protect the environment, it is greed. The people who profit by artificial, contrived scarcity don’t want anything to change. They are government employee unions, utility companies, trial lawyers, Silicon Valley “green” entrepreneurs, and billionaires who already own the artificially limited supplies of land and housing. Does that sound like the potentially incoming Biden cabinet?

And if a “climate emergency” is declared, expect this so-called “great reset” to take place without any constitutional checks to slow its implementation or its scope.

Here’s a recent quote from John Kerry:

“Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases—70 percent of all human infections—are impacted by climate change and its effect on animal migration and habitats.”

Got that? Climate change will not just be a “climate emergency,” it will be a “health emergency.” Good luck falling back on the Bill of Rights when you’re up against two declared federal emergencies. Climate change mitigation is a scheme to take from the have nots, and transfer it to the haves. To accomplish this, epic, world-class creativity has been harnessed. Perhaps among all the methods by which this redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super rich will occur, nothing tops the proposed sale of carbon credits.

If “carbon emissions auctions” trading ever takes hold nationally, it will launch the biggest skim operation in the history of the world. In this extraordinarily comprehensive system of economic control, every molecule of carbon embodied in every joule of energy will have to be reported, using a preposterously complex, eminently corruptible if not completely fraudulent new form of financial accounting. Every “carbon unit” will have to be tracked, so that rights to produce and consume them can be traded on an exchange, with Wall Street brokerages taking a cut, time after time. All of this will be implemented and operated at stupefying expense. Imagine the tens of trillions of dollars in annual transactions that will pass through this gauntlet, and you can better understand the slavering lust with which the financial community anticipates a Biden presidency.

John Kerry represents not the lunatic fringe of Biden’s budding entourage of administration insiders, but rather its larcenous core. Kerry, because of the “climate emergency” measures we may expect him to implement, is the most dangerous man in America.

There is an alternative to this madness. The government could partner with unions and private civil engineering firms in a grand bargain to construct cost-effective conventional energy infrastructure, along with upgraded water and transportation infrastructure. Instead of rationing, produce more. Instead of enforcing artificial scarcity, create abundance. Build enabling infrastructure and let the private sector compete again to profitably build homes that ordinary workers can afford. This is a virtuous, public-minded scheme that Joe Biden is old enough to remember. It worked back in the 1950s and 1960s and created a capital endowment we’re still living on. That is the “build back better” investment that could be a genuine gift to the American people.

Don’t hold your breath. You will be fighting, like Trump was, against the bureaucrats, the bankers, and the billionaires.

The privileged elites are doing just fine, feeding off the dying remains of the American middle class. They aren’t about to let a populist movement, including any practical public policies that such a movement might support, spoil their meal. And as they stigmatize their critics as “climate deniers,” they are the true deniers, ignoring a debt tsunami that is a far more imminent threat than rising oceans.

They weren’t just coming for Trump. They are coming for you.

It is terribly ironic that the militant wing of the Democratic Party, soon to militantly back whatever John Kerry proclaims as our “climate czar,” bills itself as “anti-fascist.” Because the “climate emergency,” ultimately, is itself fascist both in a political and an economic context. As political fascism, it relies on crisis, fear, scapegoating, and simple but transformative “solutions.” As economic fascism, it concentrates power in the hands of the state, with industrialists and bankers as senior partners. Remember that, if the day arrives when you have to listen to John Kerry, “climate czar,” spew forth self-righteous exhortations in the name of supposedly protecting the planet.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Edward Ring

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Harmeet Dhillon: THIS Recall Gavin Campaign Has Over 800,000 Petitions

November 25, 2020/by Edward Ring

Harmeet Dhillon doesn’t need national publicity. She’s frequently invited onto the national stage by conservative television hosts. By the time you’ve been on television as many times as Harmeet Dhillon has, you’re not appearing for the thrill of the experience, you’re appearing because you have a duty to spread the truth and motivate millions of people to fight the good fight.

So why would Harmeet Dhillon, one of the finest and most eloquent conservatives California’s got, make an epic misstatement of fact, one that throws cold water into the faces of thousands of activists who have worked tirelessly since June to recall Governor Newsom?

In an appearance on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle last week, Harmeet Dhillon was asked about the signature gathering campaign which could very well force Gavin Newsom into a special recall election, and a fight for his political life by the spring of 2021. Ingraham mentioned that according to one of the leaders of the effort, Tom Del Beccaro, the effort to recall Newsom has gathered over 700,000 signatures so far.

Ingraham asked Dhillon, “how would this work, if the signature number, 1.5 million was actually reached?”

To which Dhillon answered, “first of all this is the third such recall effort, there are two prior efforts, so I think the signatures you are mentioning are with some other recall efforts.”

Where is Dhillon getting her information? If she had talked with anyone connected with the recall campaign, she would know that 700,000 is actually an outdated number, and that the latest estimate has total signed recall petitions at well over 800,000. Not including the “two prior efforts.”

Last week, a few days prior to Dhillon’s appearance on Fox, I spoke with Paul Olson, principal at GoCo Consulting. Olson’s firm, which has years of experience in this business, are verifying that the signed petitions are valid. They are checking signatures, names, and addresses against a file of California’s registered voters. They are making sure signatures match, names are correct, that there aren’t duplicates, and the forms are filled out correctly.

In a telephone conversation with Paul Olson on 11/18, he confirmed that his firm has already processed 494,000 signed petitions which have either just been turned in or are now being delivered to the county clerks around the state. Olson also confirmed that his firm is currently processing another 230,000 signatures. That’s 724,000, Ms. Dhillon. All gathered for this effort, and not including previous efforts.

When combined with the 55,000 – for this effort – that were turned in earlier in the year, and the ones signed but still on their way to GoCo, conservatively estimated at 60,000, this campaign has already collected an estimated 839,000 signed recall petitions.

Lead proponent for the recall, Orrin Heatlie, reached for comment on 11/23, was enthusiastic. “There are many good developments over the last few days. We are talking with people who have just now decided to support and endorse the campaign. On all fronts, signature gathering, web traffic, and donations, our momentum continues to build.”

To force a recall election, the campaign will need to turn in not quite 2.0 million signatures, in order to be certain to yield a net quantity of approved petitions numbering at least 1,495,709. They have 114 days left to gather another 1.0 million signed petitions. When one considers the fact that two weeks ago, 5.9 million Californians voted to reelect President Trump (a number set to increase since they’re still counting votes), and every one of those voters would probably sign a petition to recall Newsom, finding people to sign is not the problem.

What will challenge the recall campaign is earning additional publicity and managing logistics. The volunteers who have gathered over 800,000 signatures can continue gathering signatures at an accelerating rate, but they need help. Some of that help will come from a new committee formed to assist on the recall, headed up by former California State GOP chairman Tom Del Beccaro. But where are the rest of the troops?

Where is the California State GOP, which endorsed the recall effort early in the summer? Now that the November elections are over, why aren’t they putting their resources in every county into the recall? Almost every email the CAGOP blasts to their list disparages Newsom. Do they really mean it? Because the state party, fully committed to the recall, could make a big difference.

As for Harmeet Dhillon, she is invited to call Laura Ingraham’s senior producer (his name is Roman Cofini), and request a new interview where she can tell America – most certainly including Californians – the true measure of the recall campaign’s accomplishments so far.

That one gesture would go a very long way towards motivating volunteers who have already made history. It would also attract national attention to a movement that strikes at the heart of the progressive fraud in America, King Newsom, California’s endangered governor.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Edward Ring

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What Gavin Newsom’s Inevitable Political Doom Means for Democrats

November 22, 2020/by Edward Ring

Just in time for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered 38 California counties moved to the “purple tier” of coronavirus prevention mandates. This means Californians are now subject to a curfew, wherein “non-essential work, movement, and gatherings must stop between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.”

Including all the major population centers in the state, this curfew comes on top of a reestablishment of a ban on eating indoors in restaurants, as well as a requirement that people wear masks whenever they leave their homes, and “limit mixing, practice physical distancing and wash their hands.” It also comes on the heels of Newsom’s recently updated “Mandatory Requirements for All Gatherings,” which specifies in preposterous detail exactly how families and friends may gather during the holidays.

The irony in all of these mandates coming from Newsom is that despite enraging millions of Californians who are not convinced they are at all necessary, the pandemic and Newsom’s aggressive response to it are providing political cover for Newsom among those other millions of Californians, more numerous, who believe lockdowns and curfews are necessary. Once this political cover goes away, that equation, favoring Newsom, is going to change. And the speed and ferocity of that change, when it happens, is going to surprise a lot of people.

Nowhere to Hide

When the pandemic is over, Newsom will have nowhere to hide. Newsom, along with the Democratic Party he represents, will preside over an economy battered beyond anything Californians have ever seen. Apart from the tech billionaires who have shamelessly profited as an entire population was driven into the virtual world, California’s economy will be a smoking ruin. The COVID-19 shutdown will expose the fragile foundations of California’s alleged prosperity, and blast it to smithereens.

Before COVID-19 came along, California had the highest rate of poverty and nearly the highest income inequality in America. It had the highest cost-of-living and some of the highest taxes. It had crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, devastating wildfires caused by negligence, avoidable shortages of water and electricity, a housing industrydestroyed by overregulation, and an explosion of the homeless—people who could be helped if it weren’t for the toxic progressive combination of misguided compassion and rampant corruption.

All of these problems will be worse when people are allowed back on the streets. The homeless encampments, unregulated and not subject to the pandemic mandates affecting everyone else, will have become permanent. Small business owners everywhere will survey the financial wreckage, and move elsewhere. Tech companies, their bubble valuations topped out, will not be sufficient sources of tax revenue to make up for the imploding tallies from everyone else. The only thing standing between state and local government agencies and financial catastrophe will be a federal bailout.

Newsom is more than just an incompetent, hypocritical, corrupt governor. He exemplifies the entire fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party in California.

California’s voters are at a tipping point. Newsom’s polling numbers, still high back in September and October, were mostly just a reflection of an anti-Trump electorate being supportive of anything that seemed to defy Trump. When mismanaged and neglected forests burned down half the state, and Trump said Californians needed to revive the timber industry, Newsom instead signed an executive order requiring electric cars, and California’s anti-Trump voters cheered. When COVID-19 struck, and Trump said we must be careful not to let the cure become worse than the disease, Newsom instead imposed a statewide lockdown, and California’s anti-Trump voters cheered again.

The problem with all this anti-Trump enthusiasm in California is that it only buys time for Newsom. In the recent election, with votes still being counted, Californians edged out Texas to cast the most ballots of any state in America—5.9 million so far—for President Trump. And in this high-turnout election, Trump even improved his percentage performance, rising from 31.6 percent in 2016 to 34.2 percent in 2020.

It’s a safe bet that every one of those Californians are ready to throw out Newsom and every other Democratic lawmaker. In fact, the ongoing populist movement to recall Newsom, fresh on the heels of a 120-day extension up to March 17 to gather signatures on a recall petition, has a very good chance of making him fight for his political life in a special recall election in the spring of 2021. And while Trump voters provide ample prospects to sign these recall petitions, the ranks of Californians who’ve had enough of Newsom are growing.

The Hypocrisy of the Party of the Rich

The apparent perpetual nature and increasing severity of what amounts to martial law are driving voters away from Newsom, a process exacerbated by Newsom himself, when he failed to comply with his own mandates. In a faux pasthat will go down in history, on November 10 Newsom and his wife joined at least 10 other people, sans masks, for a dinner paid for by lobbyists at the French Laundry in Napa County, one of the most expensive restaurants in the United States.

Newsom is going to have a hard time talking his way out of this. The hypocrisy of a man who built his image on his aggressive mandates to cope with the pandemic; the brazen display of privilege, lobbyist patronage, and stupefying wealth at this elite restaurant while small business owners, including restaurateurs, have no privilege, have no customer patronage, and must helplessly watch a lifetime of hard-earned wealth slip away rightly enrages many Californians.

Newsom’s initial response? “I should have modeled better behavior.”

Californians, whether they’re Left, Right or centrists, like most people everywhere, dislike hypocrisy. The Democratic litany, which claims Republicans are the party of the wealthy, is about to be broken, and Newsom’s hypocrisy is helping that along. While the vast majority of Californian parents are watching their children try to learn while being locked out of their public schools for nearly a year, Newsom’s children go to a private school, where attending classes was never seriously disrupted.

This reality, that the wealthy are exempt from the consequences of curfews and lockdowns, and these same wealthy are providing the backing and the agenda for the Democratic Party, is a ticking time bomb. Republicans already understand this. Republicans understand that their party is now the party of the worker. And every time a Democratic politician slips up—like Newsom with his dinner, or Pelosi with her two freezers filled with $12-a-pint ice cream—more voters realize that identity politics and environmentalist panic is a smoke screen, a con job, a way to get them to keep voting for the party of the rich.

Ultimately, when Californians emerge from their “dark winter” and try to resume their lives, they are going to have less tolerance than ever for the rhetoric of the Left. For example, compassion for the homeless is going to wear thin when your business is ruined and your bank is foreclosing on your mortgage, and meanwhile, thousands of homeless people took over the streets where you live and trashed them. They’re stoned out of their minds and shitting on the sidewalks.

And what is the answer? Round them up, put them in tent shelters in inexpensive parts of town? Get them off drugs? Dry them out? Help them? No. Of course not. Democrats will propose to spend additional billions to give them free housing on the beach at a cost of between $500,000 and $1 million per unit, and not even require them to stop using methamphetamine.

Of course they’re homeless and high all the time. Democrats reward them for it.

Similarly, next summer, when another 4 million acres of forest burn in California, and burned out homeowners can’t get fire insurance unless they move into a city where, thanks to overregulation, it costs $1 million to buy a bungalow with a backyard so small you can’t even set up a swing for your kids, Democrats will claim that the timber industry is the problem instead of recognizing it as the solution, and that absurdity will finally be heard for what it is: elitist, quasi-communist, clueless, baseless, misanthropic, opportunistic bullshit.

In every area of public policy, the progressive fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party, led by Gavin Newsom, will be exposed as threadbare posturing, designed to make the rich even richer, while everyone else gets broken financially and herded into subsidized hovels to save the earth and foster “equity.”

But perhaps the most egregious crime of the Democrats, inviting the biggest backlash, will be the performance of California’s public schools.

Returning to the classroom after being almost completely abandoned by teachers who never missed a month of pay despite not having to do much teaching, parents will demand a return to education fundamentals. They will demand a return to classroom discipline and teacher accountability. Who knows, maybe they will even demand school vouchers, to break the Democratic union monopoly that’s turned public education in California into a cruel joke.

One may go on and on. How many of California’s Latinos, who voted for Trump in record numbers, are going to stay loyal to Democrats, led by the likes of Newsom—white as snow and filthy rich—who have decided, without asking, that their ethnic group is no longer known as “Latinos,” but is now “Latinx,” pronounced “Latin-Ex.” Exactly who among the Democrats thought this act of cultural imperialism would be welcomed by Latinos? They’re in for a rude shock, and it’s about time.

There is a seismic wave building in California. It’s still far away, but it’s coming in with the tide. And when it reaches the shore, it is going to sweep away everything in its path. Most definitely including Gavin Newsom, and his rotten, corrupt, wealthy, dirty, grasping, lying, worthless party.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Edward Ring

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Liberal Press Intensifies War on Suburbs

November 21, 2020/by Edward Ring

While conservatives routinely, and accurately, characterize the establishment media in America as being profoundly biased both against President Trump and, more significantly, biased against everything that is even slightly right-of-center, they don’t generally consume this media. Because it is inescapable, they’ll see an example of liberal media bias here and there, find it frustrating, and move on to One America News or the Epoch Times, or their favorite conservatives on Twitter.

This is a mistake. The major networks and the major newspapers don’t just relentlessly poke at President Trump, they reinforce—also relentlessly—every piety and supposed axiom and premise of leftist ideology. Right-of-center people need to be aware of this and understand how it works.

Another powerful example of media bias is found in America’s major cultural magazines: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and New York magazine. Now routinely including feature-length articles on every conceivable public policy issue, these magazines hammer away, establishing certain truths as “beyond debate” where, in reality, there needs to be impassioned debate. The cumulative impact of these articles is a leftist intelligentsia in America that is increasingly closed-minded about an expanding array of issues.

“Suburbs” as Code

A recent article in New York exemplifies the degree to which partisan propaganda has replaced impartial analysis about what is a deceptively mundane issue. In the article’s subtitle in the print edition, “The System—Segregation and the suburbs,” the reader is already subjected to an editorial opinion. The implication is suburbs are inherently racist and unjustifiably segregated.

The cover photograph, of an elderly white man using a gasoline powered mower to cut his front lawn, adds additional context designed to subconsciously reinforce a political message: Old privileged white people live in suburbs, burning fossil fuel to mow their water-wasting lawns. The already indoctrinated will infer even more from this photograph: Who does this old man think he is? What does he contribute? Why is his life so comfortable when so many people are in need? How can we correct this injustice?

Writer Zak Cheney-Rice leads off by stating, “To really understand the suburbs as imagined by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, you first have to understand that neither of them is really talking about the suburbs. They are talking about segregation.” Got that? “Suburbs” is code for “segregation.”

Cheney-Rice goes on to claim that late in Trump’s campaign, the president fell back on appeals to racist suburbanites because he’d failed on the big issue which was to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his article, Cheney-Rice recites arguments that are no longer questioned in polite company: suburbs equate to “white housing exclusivity,” the origins of suburbs were “white flight,” suburbs are a sanitized way to achieve racial segregation, and in turn, segregation is “a means of resource accumulation and protection.”

Most of what Cheney-Rice argues, however, falls short when compared to facts and history.

To support his arguments regarding white flight and intentional segregation, Cheney-Rice has to reach back to the early 1960s. Nobody disputes that segregation was a reality back then, but “back then” was 60 years ago. The author uses Atlanta as a case study in white flight and segregated suburbs, but admits a few paragraphs later that Atlanta’s suburbs are now largely integrated.

And what about California’s suburbs? Most of them were built to accommodate new residents, as California’s population exploded during the 1960s and 1970s. Suburbs in California and throughout the American West were built because people liked living in detached homes with yards, and had absolutely nothing to do with “white flight.”

Big Progressive Lies

The problem with articles that perpetuate the myth that suburbs are inherently racist is that it can be used to justify extreme solutions that are ultimately counterproductive. As Trump repeatedly pointed out in his remarks on America’s suburbs, overall, they are already over one-third populated by ethnic minorities. And while the media never reported it honestly, Trump would always go on to say how everyone living in suburbs, including ethnic minorities, worked hard to achieve that lifestyle, and none of them want to see their quality of life destroyed.

The progressive war on suburbs is one of the biggest issues of our time because this war relies on two big lies—that suburbs are racist and that suburbs are ecologically unsustainable. By accepting these lies, we will not only lose our suburbs, we will lose, in all facets of our lives, our property rights, our prosperity, and our incentive to work and achieve.

Cheney-Rice is correct that not one, but two generations ago, there were still parts of America where institutionalized segregation existed. But what Cheney-Rice and like-minded progressives cite as evidence of racism today is disproportionate outcomes, which they fail to attribute to other causes such as broken homes, corrupt elected officials, public schools ruined by the teachers’ unions, and an overall culture—encouraged by the mainstream media—that devalues education and disrespects law and order. It is perfectly normal for anyone, white or black, to move out of low-income neighborhoods as soon as they can afford to do it. It has nothing to do with racism.

To be clear: Cheney-Rice, writing for New York, is only one voice in a coordinated media assault on suburbs. Here are just a few recent examples from The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Detroit News, Baltimore Sun, NBC, Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Time. It’s a bottomless pit of endless content, with one message: destroy the suburbs. If you object, you’re a racist.

The solutions that progressives are offering, especially when combined with the requirements of environmentalists, spell certain destruction for the suburbs. Basing their urban planning on the antiracist principle of “inclusion,” progressives intend to mandate subsidized housing in every suburb in America. In practice, this means that households where both parents work full time to have enough money to pay their mortgage and take care of their children, will find themselves with neighbors who don’t work, don’t have to get up early in the morning or quiet down and sleep at night, and who don’t have the same care of ownership for their homes.

Who Will Bear the Cost?

How much reasoning does it take, how many psychological studies, how many examples from history are necessary to convince progressives that when people don’t have to work for what they have, they don’t value their possessions with the same care as those who do have to work for everything they’ve got?

“Inclusive” zoning, designed to sprinkle subsidized housing through America’s suburbs, is a form of Communism. It has nothing to do with race. The question should not be, “are you a racist, or not?” The question should be “are you a Communist, or not?”

To pile on the misery that forced “desegregation” would impose on hard working suburbanites of all races, environmentalists have declared suburbs to be ecologically unsustainable. Consequently, they believe we cannot have any more of them. “Urban containment” is their mantra. This, too, does not get the attention it deserves from conservatives.

America’s population is projected to increase from just over 330 million today to more than 400 million by 2060. If the environmentalists have their way, all of that population growth will occur within the footprint of existing cities. Already, in a series of progressive/environmentalist legislation and ordinances passed at the state and regional levels, and spreading around the nation, officials are changing zoning laws to allow multi-family dwellings in neighborhoods that are currently single-family homes.

At this point, the role of libertarian enablers should be mentioned. Libertarians have an argument—not strong, but at least plausible—that owners of single-family homes should be able to do whatever they want with their property. This flies in the face of the zoning laws that everyone living in a neighborhood relied on when they invested their lifetime earnings into home ownership, but libertarians are purists.

How libertarians might adapt more productively to the conversation over urban planning is to first defend the right of owners of open land to develop their properties to build new suburbs, and then, and only then, defend the right of homeowners in existing suburbs to rezone their properties.

In any case, libertarians are not the enemy. They’re just confused. The real enemy is the Communists, hiding behind overblown, distorted ideals of anti-racism and environmental protection. And as these Communists destroy America’s suburbs, rest assured it won’t be the wealthy enclaves of rich liberal idealists that end up with subsidized apartment houses plopped next to mansions with spacious lots and manicured lawns. Those people can afford to litigate. As usual, it will be the hardest working Americans, the middle class of all colors, who will pay the price for progressive idiocy.

It is nearly impossible to counter adequately the agenda-driven misinformation that comes out of America’s establishment media, but their war on suburbs is a war that must be fought. Suburbs are not racist. They are not ecologically unsustainable. They are beautiful, and we need more of them.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Edward Ring

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Recall Campaign Gets Powerful New Ally

November 20, 2020/by Edward Ring

The Recall Gavin 2020 campaign, which took on new life when a judge granted them a 120 day extension, till March 17, 2021, has just acquired the support of a new committee, Rescue California. Headed up by former California GOP Chairman Tom Del Beccaro, this new PAC brings a powerful group of experienced politicians, political professionals, and donors to the front lines of the Recall Gavin movement, bringing help to what is already one of the most impressive grassroots efforts in California history.

Reached for comment on this new development was Rescue California Co-Chair Tony Krvaric, long-time chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party and one of the most formidable political strategists in the state. He said “This new PAC is built with the right people to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, holding him accountable for his erratic leadership and stunning hypocrisy in this crisis. Californians deserve better and we invite everyone to join in this effort.”

The coalition that has now formed is a unique opportunity, long overdue, for establishment Republicans in California to merge their talents and resources with what has become a massive, bipartisan collection of volunteers. Having this new player involved does not change anything with the petition. There is still only one official recall petition, which can be downloaded by anyone with an internet connection and a printer. To ensure there is no wasted effort, both organizations are working with the same firm to collect signed petitions and verify their validity.

In a telephone conversation with Paul Olson on November 18, whose company, GoCo Consulting, is doing the petition verification for the recall, he confirmed that his firm has already processed 494,000 signed petitions which have either just been turned in or are now being delivered to the county clerks around the state. Olson also confirmed that his firm is currently processing another 230,000 signatures.

When combined with the 55,000 that were turned in earlier in the year, and the ones already signed but still being delivered, conservatively estimated at 60,000, this campaign has already collected over 800,000 signed recall petitions.

“From the beginning I have been impressed with the efforts of the original petitioners,” said veteran fundraiser Ann Dunsmore, who assisted the all-volunteer recall campaign through the summer. Dunsmore is now working with the new committee, explaining that “I was pleased to be asked to continue supporting the cause by Republican elected officials and Republican party leaders throughout the state. I hope we will be able to support the recall in a fashion that respects the passion and the efforts of the volunteers which has gotten us this far.”

When reached for comment on this new development, the lead proponent of the recall, Orrin Heatlie, was enthusiastic. “This is happening at exactly the right time,” he said, “we have just gotten the 120 day extension. This new committee, supported by dozens of prominent elected officials and seasoned professionals, is a perfect complement to our volunteers. We are the army, and they are the cavalry. I could not be more pleased.”

It remains to be seen how much energy the California State Republican Party will put into the recall effort. The post-election counting, at least in California, is winding down. The California GOP is riding on the heels of some important victories including picking up two seats in the US Congress. They’re also dealing with a few heartbreaking defeats such as Senator Moorlach, who lost his bid for reelection after being targeted by the prison guards’ union. Right now, with the election over, is a perfect time for California’s GOP, which continues to regularly blast emails sharply critical of “King Newsom,” to get directly involved in this increasingly credible attempt to kick the King off his throne.

Getting the requisite 1,495,709 signatures to force a recall, with over half of them already collected, ought to be easy if a determined and adequately funded coalition steps up. Prospects to sign the recall petition are not in short supply. In 2016, candidate Trump got 4,483,810 votes in California, 31.6 percent. In 2018, with more ballots left to count, Trump has already received 5,884,058 votes in California, 34.2 percent. He not only earned the support of nearly 1.5 million more voters than he’d attracted in 2016, he improved his percentages in what was an election with record turnout. Finding a Trump voter in this state who would be unwilling to sign a recall petition would be a tough job. But that’s only part of this opportunity, because getting rid of this governor is a wholly bipartisan cause, backed not only by Republicans, but by Democrats, Libertarians, and independents.

The strategic value of making Governor Newsom fight to stay in office cannot be overstated. Newsom is more than just an incompetent, hypocritical, corrupt governor. He exemplifies the entire fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party in California. Governor Newsom, and his party, have ran California for decades, and the legacy of their rule is the highest income inequality and the highest cost-of-living in the United States, crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, devastating wildfires caused by negligence, avoidable shortages of water and energy, a housing industry destroyed by overregulation, and an invasion of homeless that could be helped if it weren’t for the toxic progressive combination of misguided compassion and rampant corruption.

A special election that forces Newsom to defend his office would be an opportunity for California’s GOP to redefine itself not just by being anti-Democrat, but by offering real solutions: education vouchers to guarantee universal school choice, reform of crippling environmentalist overreach such as the California Environmental Quality Act, great new infrastructure projects to build new roads, repair the aqueducts, and invest in more water storage, keeping Diablo Canyon open, and reviving the timber industry which could thin California’s overgrown forests.

Several organizations working cooperatively to ensure this recall effort qualifies for the ballot is not easy. But it is not unusual for initiatives and recalls to be promoted by more than one campaign. The Davis recall in 2003 had several independent committees working to gather petitions, and that result is history. Will history repeat itself?

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Edward Ring

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Mandating “Equity” and Mitigating “Climate Change” – The Twin Paths to Socialism

November 18, 2020/by Edward Ring

Supporters of President Trump’s bid for reelection have accurately depicted his agenda as one of America’s last chances to stop, or at least slow down, the nation’s drift towards socialism. The Biden candidacy has been accurately depicted as the attempt by globalist corporations to reassert their complete control of American politics, wherein they will impose socialist redistribution schemes that devastate the middle class and working class, making them dependent on government and rendering their citizenship irrelevant. This, too, is mostly accurate, although slowly-boil-the-frog protocols shall be followed to obscure the transition.

When roughly half the electorate recently chose Biden to be America’s next president, however, they weren’t consciously endorsing corporate socialism. Biden voters, to the extent they believe in socialism, haven’t yet figured out that the socialist movement in the United States is largely controlled by corporations. What they believed, thanks to relentless propaganda and censorship of dissenting viewpoints, was that President Trump is a racist and a climate change denier. As such, President Trump was perceived as a menace, an object of hatred and fear, and anyone would be a better choice for president.

President Trump is not a racist, and President Trump cares about the environment as much as any reasonable person, but these two issues are much bigger than him. The issues of racial equity and environmental protection are marketed as the existential challenges of our time, and that the only effective answer to these challenges is socialism. To fight socialism, you can’t just convince people that socialism is an inherently flawed system. You have to destroy these two premises; that America is a racist nation, and that climate change poses an imminent threat to the survival of humanity. If you don’t, people will take their chances with socialism because they will see it as the only option.

Guaranteeing Equal Outcomes No Matter What

Anti-racism leads inevitably to socialism as soon as you move from offering equal opportunity to mandating equal outcomes. Despite pervasive propaganda to the contrary, equal opportunity has been institutionalized in America for several decades. But despite this fact, there remain significant disparities in aggregate group achievement by race. Conscientious liberal anti-racists look at these disparities and conclude they are the consequence of America’s historical legacy of racism that up until recently denied nonwhites access to jobs and housing and education. They add to that a belief that “unconscious racial bias” and ongoing “systemic racism” further hinders Black achievement, and explains the underachievement by Hispanics.

The problem with demanding racial “equity” to counter alleged ongoing racism is simple: What if the explanation for the underachievement of certain groups has little or nothing to do with racism? And what if, no matter what is done to counter alleged racism, significant gaps in group achievement persist? The only way to achieve equity, if that happens, is via socialist redistribution of wealth.

The good news, or what ought to be good news, is that America is not a racist nation. America is the least racist nation on earth. Many of the people spreading the racist narrative know this, but they are socialists (or corporate socialists) and they understand that complete racial equity can only be achieved via socialism. The end is socialism, and the means is convincing Americans they are racists and must atone. But it is a lie, for many reasons.

One of the most obvious repudiations of the racist narrative is the achievements of Asians, who outperform whites in almost every category of group achievement including educational attainment, household income, and net worth. And Asians are not the only ethnic group that outperforms whites. Indians and Nigerians also outperform whites. American Jews, who are white but who nonetheless endured past discrimination, also outperform other whites. Why is this?

Here is where a critical choice faces Americans. Do they listen to the divisive nonsense coming from politicians like Kamala Harris, and – at hideous cost – embrace socialist redistribution to level the achievements of every identifiable group in America? Or do they openly defy those who purport to speak for disadvantaged communities, and challenge them to either identify and fix those cultural differences that might also explain their academic and economic underachievement, or accept it.

Here also is where well established facts contradict the narrative of racism as the cause of group underachievement. In particular, there is a high correlation between children raised in two parent households and success later in life. Asians top the list, with 82 percent of households with children having both parents present. Whites are in second place at 73 percent. But only 33 percent of Black households with children have both parents present. The only external force, ironically, that might induce a married couple to divorce, would be if doing so led to enhanced welfare benefits. Racism, overt or unconscious, historical or present day, has nothing to do with members of the black community keeping their marriages intact.

Where there are broken homes, there is academic underachievement, there is juvenile delinquency, there is higher unemployment and lower income earnings potential, there are higher rates of arrests, convictions, and incarceration. It all starts at home.

But socialists don’t believe in traditional families. And they don’t believe in meritocracy, instead stigmatizing it as a “code word” for racism. But it isn’t racism that is responsible for Asians having the highest SAT scores in America, or Blacks having the lowest. More than anything else, it is because Asians have the highest rate of intact families, and Blacks have the lowest. SAT scores, currently under withering assault by socialists and possibly headed for oblivion, are one of the most reliable predictors of success in college and lifetime earnings.

These inconvenient truths elude the race baiting socialists, but they don’t elude Black conservatives who actually care about their communities. From elder statesmen like the venerable Thomas Sowell and the aptly named Larry Elder, to young and passionate patriots like Candace Owens, Kash Lee Kelly, and Malcolm Flex, there are Black leaders and influencers who reject socialism and champion the rights and potential of individuals.

If you work hard and with integrity, you can make it in America. There is no such thing as utopia. We do the best we can. That is the healthy way to look at this nation, and it is the healthy way to look at life. If you want your community to log higher aggregate achievements, stay married. While you’re at it, stand up to the teachers union monopoly and implement education vouchers and school choice.

Saving the Planet by Any Means Necessary

If anti-racist socialism will determine whom we can hire, promote, fire, patronize, live with, study with, work for and associate with, all done in a manner designed to take from the overachievers and give to the underachievers, saving the planet will determine where you live, what you eat, what you wear, what you drive (if anything), where you travel; it will micromanage every detail of your life on earth.

As part of the mandate to reduce the human “carbon footprint” to preindustrial levels within a few decades, the climate alarmists and their corporate backers are prepared to destroy the fossil fuel industry and invest in solar, wind and battery technologies that will become obsolescent right about the time they’re finally deployed at any significant scale. And how feasible is it for human civilization to run on “renewable” energy?

The following pie chart, below, relying on data from the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, shows the percentage that renewables contribute to global energy usage. At 5.5 percent, this includes everything, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and biofuel. Imagine this replacing everything else, bearing in mind that the climate alarmists, inexplicably, do not accept nuclear or hydroelectric as viable energy sources to expand.

To further put the potential of renewables into perspective, consider the next chart, below, which reflects the socialist dream of redistributing energy consumption equally among nations. Note the area of this pie chart; nearly twice that of the previous one. This graphically represents how much more energy would be required if every person on earth, per capita, consumed energy at half the rate of current per capita use in North America; that’s the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This illustrates a stark reality: If everyone on earth used half as much energy as North Americans use today, global energy production will have to double. Accomplishing that is impossible without fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel isn’t the only culprit, of course. Anything that results in increased greenhouse gas requires monitoring and regulation, from bovine flatulence to the size of the windows permitted in your home. Suburban “sprawl,” which is the only way to maintain an affordable equilibrium in housing, must be stopped because it leads to more “vehicle miles traveled.” Lawns, gardens, and long showers cannot be tolerated, because the collection, storage, distribution and treatment of water requires energy, and energy must be rationed in order to minimize use of fossil fuel.

The level of micromanagement headed our way if the climate alarmist lobby isn’t stopped is literally unbelievable, but these people are dead serious. “Smart growth” policies will pack people into increasingly dense urban areas, as rural areas are systematically depopulated. “Smart homes” will monitor and manage everything the inhabitants do, controlling and correcting their use of water and energy. To please gullible libertarian enablers, instead of explicitly rationing resource consumption, acceptable thresholds will be set, with punitive pricing tiers designed to “incentivize” people to restrict their behavior. Want to have a lawn? Better be a billionaire.

There’s so much wrong with these policies its difficult to know where to begin. Telling people they’re bigots if their skin is white, and victims if it is not, and training them all to believe this, is not a recipe for social cohesion. It’s a recipe for resentment and hatred. Moving beyond this divisive rhetoric to actually confiscating wealth and income and limiting opportunities to people if their skin is white, and transferring it to people whose skin is not white, will destroy the character of a population by telling them their work and their abilities are secondary to the color of their skin.

Similarly, putting a stop to fossil fuel development at precisely the moment when the entire global population is finally moving beyond poverty is not a recipe for peace and prosperity. It’s a recipe for misery, rebellion and war. Attempting to carpet the world with wind turbines and solar farms, backed up by millions of tons of batteries, when abundant natural gas and clean coal would deliver reliable energy at a fraction of the price, is epic folly. In a wealthy nation like America, it will cause economic stagnation. In emerging economies around the world, to impose such destructive policies would be a form of neo imperialism that only a delusional climate fanatic could fail to recognize.

There is an easier choice. It is the choice that President Trump offered, and its rejection by the elites is more a statement of their avarice than an indictment of his vision. And as previously noted, that vision, and the policies on offer pursuant to that vision, are much bigger than President Trump. Americans must reject the bigotry of reverse racism and without reservations they must insist on a colorblind meritocracy. Similarly, Americans must embrace the concept of resource abundance, supporting projects and policies that develop all forms of cost-effective conventional energy while at the same time encouraging innovations that will lead to leapfrog technologies that render today’s renewables obsolete.

The drawbacks of socialism ought to be obvious, and increasingly, voters are realizing this fact of history. To counter this dawning enlightenment, America’s socialists, backed by corporations that profit from central planning and mandated markets, have come up with the demons of racism and climate change. To stop socialism, Americans must stand up to the alarmists that claim bigotry and fossil fuel are existential threats. They’re not.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Edward Ring

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Placentia’s Independent Fire Dept Saves Millions and Improves Service

November 18, 2020/by Edward Ring

On July 1, 2020, the City of Placentia formally terminated its contract with the Orange County Fire Authority, where the average operations employee in 2018 collected pay and benefits in excess of $241,000. Seeking to create a new model that reduced these unaffordable levels of pay and benefits, as well as made more efficient use of personnel, and despite bitter opposition from the firefighters union, the City Council spent the year prior to July 2020 designing and building an independent fire department.

With over three months of operations now behind them, it is possible to review early results of Placentia’s experiment. According to the city’s “final quarterly update” on Placentia’s Fire and EMS Services, released on October 20th, in their first three months of operation, the new independent fire department serviced 40 percent more daily calls than the prior year with OCFA, reduced local response times by over 3 minutes when compared to OCFA, and reduced the need for mutual aid from neighboring cities by 85 percent.

One of the ways Placentia accomplished this was by using ambulances and paramedic squad units to respond to medical emergencies instead of 55,000 pound fire trucks. To further reduce response times, the city also invested in emergency vehicle traffic signal preemption devices through major intersections. To reduce costs, in addition to relying on ambulances for strictly medical calls, the city contracted with part-time firefighters and fully trained reserve volunteers instead of paying overtime to fill absences and vacancies. The city also replaced the firefighters CalPERS pensions with a 401K plan.

In response, neighboring agencies in Orange County have resisted Placentia’s innovations by not signing automatic mutual aid agreements, an arrangement that is the standard method whereby fire departments with adjacent jurisdictions assist each other. Not only does this allow more firefighting resources to be quickly applied to fires too big for one small department to handle, but more commonly it is the way that the nearest station responds to emergencies regardless of jurisdictional boundaries.

A troubling complication relating to these automatic mutual aid agreements is that even in the case of Fullerton, which did eventually enter into an agreement with Placentia, Fullerton’s fire department is not making full use of the agreement. Reached for comment via email, Placentia’s city manager, Damien Arrula, offered considerable detail on this situation. The next four paragraphs constitute his lengthy response, which merits publishing in its entirety:

“While we have successfully entered into an auto/mutual aid agreement with Fullerton, it doesn’t appear that that agreement is being utilized by the Fullerton Fire Department to its fullest intent. In other words, Placentia’s Fire Department is not being called to assist the residents of Fullerton when we are clearly identified as being closer and available to assist or wherein there’s a need for extra support. In the spirit of the modern fire service, which is known as ‘calls without borders,’ we are supposed to assist residents with the closest available unit with the fastest available response time, regardless of whether they are in Fullerton, Brea, Yorba Linda or Anaheim. This is the system being used throughout Orange County and the nation, and yet it’s not being used locally, to the detriment of the public we took an oath to protect.

What makes this more egregious is that several Chiefs have referred to Placentia as a ‘black hole’ from an operational standpoint. Which translates to ‘don’t call Placentia unless you absolutely have to because we (and our fire unions) don’t like their model.’ This is disturbing behavior from a Command Officer or anyone that is in the business of the fire service.

In OCFA’s case, although their model relies heavily upon auto/mutual aid, OCFA has outright refused to contact Placentia Fire for auto/mutual aid calls. And when they have, they have cancelled those calls very quickly, meaning Placentia never goes into Yorba Linda to assist any more. This is despite the fact that our station on Valencia provided 85% all mutual aid calls between Placentia and Yorba Linda just one year ago to assist Yorba Linda residents. What this translates to is OCFA instead calling Anaheim, Brea and Fullerton for auto/mutual aid, which causes them to leave their cities exposed while they traverse Code 3 all the way through Placentia enroute to a call in Yorba Linda.

This ultimately and undoubtedly has resulted in longer response times by several minutes for the residents of Yorba Linda from just one year ago, all simply because of their refusal to contact us for assistance, nor the other agencies demanding of OCFA to use the system as was intended. When lack of oxygen to the brain for more than four minutes occurs, this can result in brain damage. So when we say minutes count, they do and when anyone, regardless of title, rank or authority plays games with people’s lives, they should be held accountable for such actions or reevaluate the oaths that they took as first responders in protecting people.”

Elected officials in neighboring cities should carefully consider what’s happened in Placentia. According to evidence gathered so far, they have saved money, they have improved service, and in response, neighboring fire departments have incurred increased costs and endangered lives as a consequence of their resistance to Placentia’s innovations. Given these successes, elected officials not only near Placentia but throughout California should carefully consider what’s happened in Placentia.

In evaluating how Placentia’s model might be emulated in other cities and counties in California, local elected officials should recognize there are two very distinct avenues of innovation. One involves exchanging defined benefit pensions for 401K plans, which is a significant source of savings. When Placentia took their firefighters out of CalPERS, the union controlled state legislature responded by passing AB 2967, which forbids agencies from exempting employees from CalPERS contracts. But that law does not take effect until January 2021, and it may be possible that CalPERS client agencies can preserve their rights to opt out of CalPERS in the future if, before December 31, 2020, they submit a notice to CalPERS that they intend at some point in the future to provide services using new classes of city employees.

The significance of this should not be understated, because it isn’t just fire departments that could be affected. The CalPERS system, along with most of California’s state and local government employee pension plans, continues to increase its required annual contributions from employers. But if these employers preserve their right to eventually reclassify city employees out of the CalPERS system, from firefighters to sanitation workers, there is a chance they could avoid being financially swamped in the future. On the other hand, statewide, systemic reforms to California’s public employee pensions is still a possibility. But meanwhile, local governments should have their attorneys investigate the fine print in AB 2967. Simply sending a letter to CalPERS by 12/31 might save millions in the future.

Regardless of whether or not cities and counties can get their pension costs under control, however, they must recognize the many additional innovations that saved money while improving the quality of service for Placentia’s new fire department. In a three part report published by the California Policy Center earlier this year (part one, part two, part three), Placentia’s many operational changes are described in more detail. To summarize two of the highlights, by using a contract ambulance service and by getting overtime costs under control with part-time and volunteer firefighters, Placentia has logged savings comparable to those savings realized by opting out of CalPERS.

In this time when government officials and vocal activists continually remind us all of the opportunity that the COVID-19 pandemic offers for a complete societal “reset,” it is interesting to wonder why such grand reset plans aren’t being extended to the rules and procedures and operational models that govern the public sector.

California’s firefighters, along with all public servants in California, are urged to look at innovations such as what Placentia has done, and recognize that these paradigm shifts are being attempted in the interests of all of California’s citizens, during difficult times. They should use their considerable political clout to offer mutual aid in support of this process.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Edward Ring

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