America’s Cities – Bastions of Progressive Politics

/by

In 2016 the American presidential election was not so much blue state versus red state as blue urban centers versus everywhere else. That pattern repeated itself this year, as voting results in the deep blue cities of Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta spelled the difference between a Trump victory and a win for Biden.

Leave it to others to question the legitimacy of votes in these deep blue cities. Suffice to say it would insult the intelligence of any honest observer of politics to suggest no irregularities occurred, when, for example, you have a state with mail-in ballots, accepting them without postmarks or signature verification, and continuing to collect them until November 6 by a court order in Pennsylvania.

And within the sphere of media influencers and social media sleuths, for all those thousands who question such results, there are millions who do not. As one wag put it on Twitter, “there is no evidence of widespread journalism.”

Four years ago, the New York Times published a revealing graphic, reproduced below. It shows, in shades ranging from deep blue (Clinton) to deep red (Trump), how every county in the United States voted. The quantity of votes in each county corresponds to the height of that county in this 3D graph. Notice the dramatic disparity in demographic impact by county.

As this 3D map makes obvious, back in 2016 only a few cities became decisive factors in Clinton’s popular-vote victory—Seattle, Miami, New York City, and most prominently, Los Angeles and Chicago. In Los Angeles County, Clinton received 1,893,770 votes versus 620,285 for Trump. In Chicago’s Cook County, Clinton received 1,528,582 votes versus 440,213 for Trump. If either of these two counties—either one of them—were taken out of the equation, the popular vote would have been a toss-up.

This pattern repeats itself across the United States, and clearly there is a political and cultural schism today between America’s urban voters and rural voters. If a similar graphic is produced for the 2020 presidential election, it won’t look much different from this one. But what political forces are exploiting and exacerbating this schism? Why is the split between America’s urban voters and rural voters more dramatic than it’s ever been? If you want to answer this question from a historical perspective, look no further than the single most powerful special interest that has dominated nearly every major city in America for over a generation—public sector unions.

In Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and hundreds of other major American cities, government unions have exercised near-absolute control over the political process. This extends not only to city councils but also to county boards of supervisors, school boards, and special districts ranging from transit systems to departments of water and power. Most government funding is spent at the local level. Most government jobs are at the local level. And the more local these jurisdictions get, the more likely it is that only the government unions have the money and the will to dominate elections.

In America’s cities, where the union agenda that controls public education trains Americans to be hyper-sensitive to any alleged infringements on their “identity,” big government is presented as the guardian of their futures and their freedoms. In America’s cities, where poor education combined with overregulation has resulted in a paucity of good jobs, welfare and entitlement programs are presented as the government’s answer. And the more poverty and social instability we have in America, the bigger government gets. When society loses, government unions win.

What Changed Between 2016 and 2020

For years, a precarious balance of power existed, even to some extent in these big cities, between the power of the public sector unions and the power of other corporate and monied special interests. But between 2016 and 2020 that balance of power was shattered. Several causes can be identified, many already well underway even in 2016.

First, corporations increasingly realized their profits and market share were boosted by embracing a leftist agenda. The leftist open-borders agenda allows labor-intensive companies to import low-wage, low-skill workers, and allows the knowledge-intensive companies in Silicon Valley to import low-wage, high-skill labor. The leftist preference for global citizenship over national allegiance allows multinational corporations to export jobs under a cloak of moral authority. The leftist agenda to micromanage the economy in order to address the “climate crisis” is a goldmine for corporations who want captive markets, and a weapon they can wield against smaller emerging competitors lacking the resources to comply with the overregulation.

As for woke politics of all kinds, corporations are indifferent. If spouting these mantras is all it takes for them to maintain their detente with the Left, they’re all in.

In all these areas, Donald Trump opposed the agenda shared by the Left and by corporate America. In a stunning inversion of reality, the people who want to dismantle American institutions joined with institutional America to convince voters Donald Trump was a menace. Almost overnight, the urban political machines, controlled by leftist government employee unions, saw their biggest enemies turned into allies.

There’s more, of course. In 2016, the rapidly consolidating Big Tech companies that controlled social media and search had not finished weaponizing their political bias into actual suppression of pro-Trump online discourse.

In 2016, Trump’s supporters made better use of what were still largely neutral platforms than Clinton’s supporters, which helped the Trump campaign. Between 2016 and 2020, two things happened: First, in a series of escalating waves of deplatforming, deboosting, demonetizing, search results manipulation, biased trending items and news feeds, and, late in the game, blatant censorship, the online momentum of the Trump campaign was decisively undermined.

Second, during the same period, the sheer financial power of the Big Tech monopolies, already almost unimaginably wealthy, increased even more. Four years ago, Amazon shares traded around $760. Today, they’re running more than $3,130 per share. Facebook shares in the last four years have more than doubled from $115 to $276 per share. Google? Up from $760 to $1,752. Twitter? More than tripling from $18 to $43.

Where there’s burgeoning wealth and unbridled political passion, there are donations to candidates. Not only donations from diehard leftist billionaires like Jack Dorsey or Jeff Bezos, but also from hundreds of employees of these companies who have themselves become multimillionaires. Collectively, according to Wired, more than 95 percent of their donations went to Joe Biden. As Vox crowed on October 30, “people who live in the nine counties considered to be in the San Francisco Bay Area gave 22 percent more to Democrats in 2020 than they did in 2016, a jump from about $163 million to $199 million.”

The Next Phase, Urban Anarchy, Has Already Begun

When you’re making so much money in salary and stock options that money is practically an abstraction, you may think you empathize with the consequences of rabid leftism—even if you really don’t. The big corporations and their extraordinarily privileged employees may beat their chests and proclaim their compassion, but the politicians and the policies they’ve supported have accomplished the exact opposite.

The obligations of compassion, unfortunately for the corporate Left and public sector unions, do not mean that anything ought to be tolerated. It is not compassionate to permit heroin and methamphetamine addicts to openly practice their habit, nor is it compassionate to tolerate theft and vandalism because those who engage in these activities may be disadvantaged or feel disenfranchised. And if the hordes of addicts and thieves and rioters who have created lawless enclaves in every major American city were turned loose in the gated suburbs of the leftist elites, who can doubt their compassion would be redirected within hours into more effective avenues?

As it is, however, the Democratic machine is methodically turning over larger and larger swaths of America’s cities to anarchy. The riots of the last six months which convulsed cities across America and look to be ongoing in Portland and Seattle, if not elsewhere, are only the most recent expressions of this anarchy. The out-of-control homeless populations in countless American cities, especially in California, are the true harbingers of anarchy in America.

In the name of compassion, Californians have legalized vagrancy and hard drug use, and effectively decriminalized petty theft up to $950 per day. They have also overregulated the construction industry, making it impossible to build housing without subsidies. In general they have overregulated all economic activity in the state, which has driven out small businesses and created the highest cost-of-living in America. The consequences for California’s cities are predictable: a homeless population of well over 150,000 people, with no effective legal means of separating the truly unfortunate from the criminals and predators. Law-abiding residents of these anarchic zones are terrified and besieged.

In Los Angeles, the 2020 election results indicate these problems will only get worse. George Gascón, a progressive backed by George Soros, has unseated incumbent Jackie Lacey to become the new Los Angeles County district attorney. That Los Angeles voters could choose a candidate who promises to increase and expedite policies that have created this mess is inexplicable, until you reflect on the power of rhetoric and money over cold reality.

This combination, compassionate rhetoric backed up by billions in political donations, remains the reason America’s cities, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, are barely governable and set to get even more ungovernable.

Americans residing in blue cities vote for Democrats because unless the rioting or the homeless anarchy is on their street, or in their neighborhood, they don’t see it. The media doesn’t cover it, or if they do, they frame it so as to highlight the truly disadvantaged instead of the dangerous predators, and to emphasize the genuinely aggrieved instead of the opportunistic vandals and looters. The politicians know that business as usual enriches corrupt developers on the ground, while attracting almost limitless political donations from people too wealthy and too ideologically committed to support any solution that might be remotely construed as right-wing.

And as things go from bad to worse, in order to cope with the disorder, public sector unions demand more money and more members. For them, a breakdown in civil order is a business opportunity. Their interests are inherently in conflict with the public interest. And their new allies add strength to what was already quite strong enough.

There are choices politicians could offer voters and attorneys could argue in court: House the homeless in supervised tent encampments located in inexpensive parts of cities. Require sobriety and job training in exchange for further assistance. Lock up people who commit vandalism or physical assaults. Break up the social networks that have facilitated the extraordinary coordination of rioting, destruction of property, looting, and “peaceful protests.” Lower the threshold at which petty theft is decriminalized. Make public intoxication a crime punishable by jail time. Stop the scam of paying developers over a half-million dollars to construct a single apartment for one homeless person.

These commonsense solutions would solve the problem of anarchy and homelessness within a few months, without costing anything more than the policies currently being applied that are only making these problems worse. But they would have to be sold to voters who have finally had enough. Unfortunately, we’re still well short of seeing that happen.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

 

Sacramento Loses Its Finest Legislator

/by

On November 13, ten days after the election, and facing final counts that made any chance of victory impossible, California State Senator John Moorlach (R-37) conceded defeat to his challenger, Democrat David Min.

Reached for comment, Moorlach said “we worked hard on fundraising, the ground game, the phone calls; we worked hard, and we had a great team, but the Democratic party in Orange County is very organized.”

Moorlach is being polite. His defeat is because the prison guards union spent nearly one million dollars to back the campaign of his opponent. How Moorlach lost exemplifies the political power of public sector unions in California, and how their agenda is inherently in conflict with the public interest.

A revealing article just published by the Sacramento Bee goes through the political spending by CCPOA this election. The pattern is clear: CCPOA supports strong law and order candidates and initiatives, unless they are in conflict with their primary objective, which is to expand their membership and increase the pay and benefits of their members.

The article also explains how the CCPOA’s new president, Glen Stailey, has embarked on a “push to regain the union’s former political might.” But to do that, in this new era where literally scores of newly minted leftist billionaires in Silicon Valley are willing to spend whatever it takes to establish their political might, CCPOA needs allies.

For this reason, it might have served CCPOA’s purposes better if they’d focused more on helping Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey defend her office, since she lost to the progressive George Gascon. The only upside to Gascon’s victory is he will pursue more of the policies that have already turned huge sections of Los Angeles into lawless hellscapes of filth and anarchy, which we may hope will accelerate the past-due awakening of voters to the fact that progressive politics are a destructive fraud.

It might also have served the purposes of the CCPOA better if they’d taken some of the nearly one million dollars they spent to defeat John Moorlach and added it to the $2 million they spent to support failed Proposition 20, which would have stiffened prison sentences and restricted parole. It is difficult to imagine how Californians are ever going to regain control of their streets, so long as hard drug use, vagrancy and petty theft continue unchecked.

With these compelling political priorities, why on earth would the CCPOA also decide to take on John Moorlach, a conservative from Orange County? The answer is disappointing. Moorlach has two qualities that make him a threat to CCPOA, along with all other public sector unions: he is a strong communicator, able to use reason and tact to forge bipartisan consensus on legislation, and he is a Certified Public Accountant experienced in public sector bankruptcies.

These twin attributes mean that when Senator Moorlach talked about the fact that California’s state prisons charge nearly $85,000 to house one inmate for one year, and California’s private prisons can do the same job for less than one-third that amount, other politicians listen. They mean that when Moorlach describes how California’s full time state prison guards make on average $158,000 per year in pay and benefits, more than twice what they make in most other states, other politicians listen. They mean that when Moorlach explains how pension benefit obligations are going to break public sector budgets, and offers solutions to fix the problem, other politicians listen.

That could not be tolerated. Moorlach had to go.

Enter Dave Min, a lifelong Democrat who once served as an economic advisor to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who has minimal experience in the private sector. Min is currently employed as a professor of law at UC Irvine, an institution of higher learning that is probably only eclipsed, and only barely, by UCLA as the biggest academic bastion of liberal insanity in all of Southern California.

As a career public employee, Min will have plenty of company in the California State Legislature. It’s overwhelmingly Democratic members are overwhelmingly lacking in private sector experience. An analysis by the California Policy Center of California’s 2019-20 state senate found that 79 percent of the Democrats have no private sector experience. None. And it looks like come January 2021, Democrats will fill 31 of the 40 seats in the upper house of the California State Legislature.

These financially challenged, union compliant bobbleheads are the people that decide what sorts of laws and regulations California’s residents and businesses will have to live with. And when times are good, or even just good enough, they can go on committing political malpractice, because California’s economy is so big, its high tech sector so wealthy, and its weather so fantastic, that it will take a very long time before a populist rebellion actually overwhelms the power of unions and billionaires. But that time will come.

Californians are not going to accept the ongoing explosion of lawlessness in their state. They aren’t going to tolerate having their streets controlled by vagrants, predators, addicts, thieves, alcoholics, schizophrenics, and anarchists. Their tolerance for those genuinely in need has its limits, and sooner or later, voters are going to demand new forms of supervised incarceration. Not just to get these hundreds of thousands of people off the streets, but to help them in ways that are affordable, practical, effective and humane.

When those hard choices have to be made, California’s Democratic politicians are going to have nothing to offer. They didn’t have to raise money because the unions and the progressive billionaires just laid it out for them. They didn’t have to come up with policies because the unions and the progressive billionaires told them how to think. They didn’t develop the nerves and adaptability that is a prerequisite for success in the private sector, because they never worked in the private sector.

It will be in these times, coming soon, that California’s public sector unions are going to need independent, creative thinkers like Senator Moorlach. When it comes time to balance the needs of the CCPOA with the practical limits of budget realities, and invent new ways to incarcerate and help victims of their own addictions and illnesses, John Moorlach is the type of politician California needs.

Someday, the CCPOA may very well wish they had not worked so hard to send home a man who was quite likely California’s finest state legislator.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

 *   *   *

California Voters Approve Billions in Local Taxes and Borrowing

/by

In March 2020, for the first time in a generation, Californian’s did not approve the overwhelming majority of new tax and bond proposals that were put before them. Out of 125 proposed local bonds, only 31 percent passed; out of 111 proposed local tax increases, only 41 percent passed.

Early returns from the November 2020 ballot show Californians have snapped back towards approving the vast majority of new local taxes and borrowing. As shown on the table below, of the 46 proposals to issue new bonds that have been decided so far, 89 percent passed, and of the 161 proposals to raise local taxes that have already been decided, 82 percent passed. 

Apparently the strong rebuke voters sent the borrow and tax lobby in March 2020 was a blip. The reasons people vote for new local taxes and borrowing are known: it’s for the children, it’s for the seniors, it’s for safety. The mystery isn’t why new local taxes and bonds are approved in overwhelming percentages by California’s voters. The mystery is whatever happened in March 2020 to dissuade them.

This November, along with the perennial appeals to voter concern for children, seniors and public safety, add the massive boost to targeted ballot harvesting facilitated by universal mail-in ballots, and probably a general recognition that the COVID shutdown has left public budgets a mess, which indeed it has. But what was it back in March 2020 that had voters turning down 7 out of 10 new bond proposals, and 6 out of 10 new tax proposals? What happened?

One possible explanation for the California electorate’s ephemeral rejection of more taxes and borrowing would be their dawning recognition of two simple facts: First, Californians suffer under the highest taxes and most crushing regulatory burden of any state in America. Two, California’s public employees are among the highest paid in America. Summarizing data from three recent reports on public sector compensation in California’s cities, counties, and state agencies, the  following chart shows just how much California’s public servants made in 2019:

These averages, some of which are quite stupefying, understate what public employees make in California. Missing from these numbers are the costs of properly funding retirement pensions, as well as the costs of prefunding retirement health insurance. Increase everything by around $10,000 per year to get closer to the true value of a job in public service.

Critics of compilations such as these point to the risks taken by members of public safety, or the higher than average educations required to work as a government bureaucrat. These criticisms are valid, but miss the point. The unions that “negotiated” these stupefying compensation packages with the politicians whose campaigns they funded are also able to exercise almost absolute control over what laws are passed by the state legislature, and what regulations are written and implemented by state agencies. And is the policies, union approved, enforced by California’s state and local governments, that have led to California having a punitively high cost-of-living.

It is in these unions own interest to fix this. Sooner or later – and with the COVID shutdown, sooner is here – these crippling regulations, staggering debt, and absurdly high taxes are going to throw California’s economy into a tailspin. And when that happens, and for a change, it won’t just be the vanishing middle class that suffers.

California’s economy is big and diverse. It will always bounce back. But California’s prosperity would be more evenly distributed without union inspired redistribution schemes and regulatory entanglements. The unions that run California not only need to recognize that deregulation and competition are the best ways to ensure their members continue to enjoy generous pay and benefits, but that only they have the political power to make that happen.

Someday, when things get back to normal, post-COVID, California’s voters may decide they’ve had enough of high taxes, crippling regulations, and public employees that make far, far more than the average private sector worker. They proved they still have it in them to do that, back in March 2020, before everything changed.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

 *   *   *

Progressive Politics Are Based on Fraudulent Premises

/by

AUDIO:  Comments on the 2020 Presidential Election (part one) and why California’s progressive political agenda is based on fraudulent premises (part two) – 25 minutes on KTIE San Bernardino – Edward Ring on the Unite Inland Empire Show with Greg Brittain and Don Dix.

Newsom Recall Granted 120 More Days to Collect Signatures

/by

The Recall Gavin 2020 campaign has been given a 120 day extension to collect 1,495,709 signed petitions, which if validated by the Secretary of State, would force Governor Newsom to defend his seat in a special election. The last time there was a recall election, back in October 2003, California’s voters sent Governor Gray Davis into early retirement.

With this extension, the odds have improved on what was an uphill battle. According to lead proponent Orrin Heatlie, the recall campaign has already collected and verified over 700,000 signed recall petitions. Going forward, they have the momentum of over 5,000 volunteers actively circulating petitions who are now veterans, and they no longer have the distraction of what has been a tumultuous election season.

Even if the Newsom recall campaign does not ultimately succeed in forcing a recall election, they have already made history. No grassroots ballot initiative campaign in California, ever, has gathered this many signed petitions while relying solely on volunteer signature gatherers. And the grassroots army that has been mobilized is getting stronger. Win or lose, this will not be their last hurrah.

When reached for comment, Heatlie said “Given this second wind and new life the campaign has, this will rejuvenate the volunteer effort and gives everybody a chance to refocus and charge ahead.”

Giving everybody a chance has never been easier. The recall campaign’s website provides downloadable petitions that can be printed and circulated, as well as an instructional video that provides anyone who wants to circulate petitions all the information they’ll need to get started. As Heatlie put it, “we need people to stop being keyboard warriors and start to be clipboard warriors.”

Will California’s GOP Now Put Resources Into Supporting the Recall?

As a one-party state that pioneered the now national practice of delivering election results only after weeks of counting mailed in and harvested ballots, it’s too soon to know whether on November 3, California’s GOP lost more ground or held the line. With control of only around 25 percent of the seats in the State Legislature, only 7 out of 53 congressional districts, and not a single Republican holding higher state office, they don’t have a lot to lose. Nonetheless, the argument that California’s Republican establishment had to focus on the election was indisputable.

That argument is gone. It is no longer enough that the California State GOP has formally endorsed the Recall Gavin campaign. They need to either support it with money and infrastructure, from their Sacramento headquarters down to every county GOP organization, or they need to stop sending out millions of emails attacking “King Newsom.”

Choose.

California’s GOP has an opportunity to strike back hard at California’s big tech oligarchy and public sector unions, who have partnered with corrupt Democratic political machines in almost every major American city, and are on the brink of turning America into California. If they are bold enough to seize the moment, they can support this raid into the heart of darkness, and if they do, they will let the nation know that no Democratic politician is safe in their seat, anywhere.

The media in California to-date, and true to form, has virtually ignored the recall campaign despite the impressive progress it has already made, despite events in every city and town, despite a grassroots army that defies precedent. The media also has a choice to make. They can continue their shameful, biased coverage of current events and politics, conforming to predictable pieties and conventions, challenging nothing, or they can start to pay attention, and give the Recall Gavin 2020 movement the attention it deserves.

One wild card that may be decisive is California’s evangelical community, numbering in the millions. Slowly roused to political anger, these Californians have been enraged by Newsom’s policies, as he has pandered to the leftist fringe on social issues, and in these days of COVID-19 has displayed vindictive hypocrisy by condoning all manner of “peaceful protests,” yet closing churches and prosecuting the congregants.

Reached for comment and speaking on background, one influential evangelical explained that “As individuals we need to take responsibility for the future of this state. Look at the close elections we’re dealing with around the country. People need to understand the significance of each individual signature. This is another opportunity for advocates for faith and freedom to get involved.”

Longtime conservative commentator and political activist Stephen Frank, when told about the 120 day extension, said “This allows the people of California to be heard against the totalitarian dictates of one-man government in the one party state. This allows the volunteers to be single minded instead of being distracted by an election. They can now work full time on correcting the mistake made in November 2018.”

With the deadline to turn in recall petitions now extended to March 17, 2021, the possibility that Gavin Newsom will have to defend his position as governor in a recall election has just become serious. With only incremental help in the form of money and infrastructure, a grassroots army, already battle tested and on the march, can strike a political body blow onto Gavin Newsom, who represents and epitomizes the progressive fraud that has hoodwinked half the nation.

A Newsom recall election in early 2021 can become a referendum on everything the one-party state has done wrong, how it has harmed precisely the people it claims to want to help them most – the low income, aspiring millions who have reliably cast Democratic ballots because they have never been told the truth.

California’s GOP, their donors, and their established operatives statewide, have been given a profound gift. They have a chance to make history. They have a chance to take everything they’ve got to offer, and use it to support millions of disaffected conservatives and defecting Democrats. They have a chance, now, well in advance of the next election cycle, to redefine themselves and realign this state.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

 *   *   *

California’s One-Party State, the Blue Wave Machine

/by

As the electorates in political battlegrounds across America endure what may be weeks of turmoil, in California the post-election environment is that of a mature one-party state. The population is quiescent, having at last count rejected President Trump by a more than two-to-one margin.

In California, it doesn’t matter that only 11.5 million votes have been reported, when 21 million voters received mailed ballots. The ruling party has everything working in its favor.

The Republicans had to scrap for every donation, with most GOP donors considering California a lost cause and sending their money out of state. The Democrats, on the other hand, had mega-donors willing to spend any amount, joined by public sector unions that, year after year, collect and spend nearly $1 billion in dues from government workers.

This outrageous financial disparity—all the more decisive because of its perennial, unceasing reliability—pays for a trained field army of public sector union activists who are mustered by the thousands every election season and joined by activists, often paid, from California’s powerful network of environmentalist and social justice pressure groups. There is absolutely nothing remotely comparable on the Republican side.

This translates into ballot harvesting on an epic scale, but it also translates into superior messaging. Political consulting and public relations are a lot like professional baseball. The best players get hired, at astronomical rates, by the richest owners. In California, the A-Team works for Democrats, because year after year, the Democrats throw down more money. A lot more money.

Election observers with decades of experience in California politics are shaking their heads. Nothing is known. There’s a record turnout, but how many people is that? In 2016, 14.2 million Californians cast a ballot. How many of those 21 million mailed ballots will be returned and counted? That will eventually be known, but don’t hold your breath. The California State Legislature has deemed that any ballots postmarked by November 3 can be received up to 14 days later, November 17.

But in California, why worry? In the one-party state, elections are a formality, sort of like they are in places like North Korea. The only difference is North Korea’s tyranny is overt and brutal, whereas California’s remains more akin to Huxley’s Brave New World, with Sexophones and Soma lulling the voters into believing whatever they’re told to believe.

As it is, from the results so far, the one-party state may actually pad its dominance in the state legislature. Half of the state senators face reelection this year, and of the 20 seats, GOP candidates are only leading in two races, with both of those too close to call. One of the brightest GOP Senators, John Moorlach, may be headed for defeat. His story exemplifies what Republicans are up against.

Moorlach, the only certified public accountant in California’s state legislature, made the mistake of explaining to that handful of financially literate Democratic senators (a few do exist) how to reform public sector pensions before they bankrupt the state. For that, and despite his strong record of support for law enforcement, Moorlach earned the enmity of the prison guards union, which poured money into the campaign of his Democratic opponent. Moorlach stepped on the wrong toes, and in California politics, that’s a sure path to oblivion.

Republicans at this point are not doing any better in the state assembly races, where all 80 seats are up for grabs. Only 19 of those races currently show a GOP candidate in the lead, and 13 of those are too close to call. Most of the races aren’t close at all. In four of them, there isn’t even a GOP candidate on the ballot, thanks to California’s “top-two” primary system.

While Republicans have picked up a few congressional seats elsewhere in America, not so much in California. In 2018, the year Tom Steyer and the public sector unions perfected ballot harvesting, California’s share of the state’s whopping 53 congressional seats dropped from a paltry 14 to an abysmal seven. As of noon on November 4, Republicans led in 10 of them, not exactly a complete claw back. And of those 10, only three, the 4th Congressional District held by the redoubtable Tom McClintock, the 22nd Congressional District held by the great Devin Nunes, and the 23rd Congressional District held by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have been called. The rest are cliffhangers.

When it comes to early returns versus final returns, California’s Republicans have little cause for optimism. Harvested ballots, due to the far more professional and pervasive harvesting operations of the Democrats, tend to skew heavily Democratic. They also tend to get counted late. The wild card remains the cache of mailed-in ballots, where some GOP optimists claim the majority of ballots mailed at the last minute came from seniors who skew Republican.

If there is any reason for hope in California, it is with respect to some of the state ballot initiatives.

California’s voters have the ability to pass laws and constitutional amendments, and they voted on 12 of them this election. Notable among these were Proposition 15, which would raise property taxes, and Proposition 16, which would resurrect racial preferences in hiring, college admissions, and state contracts, and Proposition 21, which would allow statewide rent control. Early returns show all three of these losing, which means Californians haven’t totally lost their minds.

Early returns also show voters approving Proposition 22, which would allow rideshare app drivers to continue to work as independent contractors. But even this is a mixed bag. The only reason it may pass is that Big Tech companies spent more than $90 million to promote it, yet in the initiative they wrote and put onto the ballot, they were unwilling to protect the rights of other independent contractors, such as court reporters, real estate appraisers, translators, caregivers, and countless others.

And on the other hand, it looks like Californians will not approve Proposition 20, which would have restored stronger penalties for property and drug crimes. How Californians expect to get their streets back, when they’ve effectively legalized theft and the distribution and use of hard drugs, is anybody’s guess.

All in all, there isn’t much good news coming out of California today.

And will any of it hold up? In 2018, early returns had Democrats trailing in all but one of the GOP-held seven districts they eventually flipped. More recent evidence of how ballot harvesting favors Democratic candidates and causes in California comes from the March 2020 primary, in an analysis of nearly 100 local tax and bond proposals. Early results had 33 percent of local bonds and 31 percent of local taxes leading, whereas final counts showed 39 percent of local bonds and 48 percent of local taxes being approved by voters. Nearly every contest deemed too close to call in the early tallies ended up passing in the final count.

And while Californians in March 2018 did not approve new local taxes and bonds in the percentages they’ve done historically, the Democratic machine just keeps putting them on the ballot until they do get passed. This November, nearly 300 were on the ballot.

The lessons from the 2018 general election and the 2020 primary in California seem to be that ballot harvesting favors Democrats, mail-in ballots are a wild card, and every political advantage that can possibly be deployed—money, professional consulting, paid foot soldiers, and support from all forms of media—overwhelmingly favors Democrats.

California is a blue wave machine. Melded with the corrupt big-city Democratic machines in their urban strongholds from Minneapolis to Atlanta, and with the complicity of every co-opted American institution, they are going to be tough to stop.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

How Much do California’s State Workers Make?

/by

Californians pay the highest overall taxes in the United States, with more to come. The Democratic supermajority in the state legislature is considering AB 1253 that would raise the top income tax rate to 16.8 percent, and AB 2088 that would impose an annual 0.4 percent tax on any California resident’s net worth in excess of $30 million.

On the ballot, voters are being asked to approve Prop. 15, which will reassess commercial properties at current market values to calculate their property taxes, and Prop. 19, which will trigger reassessments of inherited homes unless the heirs intend to live in them.

Also on the ballot in cities and counties throughout the state, are nearly 300 proposals for new taxes and bonds which, if approved, will add billions in new local taxes and tens of billions in new local borrowing.

The reasons that California’s politicians have an insatiable need to raise taxes are many and complex. But principal among them is the fact that California’s state and local government employees enjoy rates of pay and benefits significantly greater than that of the citizens they serve. With the long-term economic impact of the pandemic lockdown likely to put additional strain on public sector budgets, cutting pay and benefits must be an option along with cutting services and raising taxes.

How Much Do California’s State Workers Make?

In two earlier reports, using data provided by the California State Controller, the average annual pay and benefits for full-time county workers in 2019 was calculated, overall, to be $126,000; for full time city workers the average was an astonishing $151,000. Meanwhile, with state agency payroll data now available from the California State Controller, the 2019 average annual pay and benefits for full time state workers was $143,000.

The following table shows average full time pay and benefits, broken out by the 25 largest state agencies in terms of headcount, and sorted with the highest averages first:

The first thing to take into account when studying these averages is the fact that they understate the actual compensation these employees receive. This is because pension contributions are understated, prefunding of retirement health benefits are not included, and the value of more public sector paid days off is not taken into account.

Comparing Public vs Private Sector Compensation

In earlier reports, the (understated) average public sector compensation calculations for 2019 were compiled by select cities and counties, comparing them to the median household income for those same cities and counties. To quantify this relationship, the ratio “TC/MHI” (which stands for “Total Compensation / Median Household Income”) was calculated, with the median household income for each city taken into account as the denominator, and average public employee compensation as the numerator. If the ratio is greater than one, then the average public employee in that city is making more than the median household earns. On the next six charts, that information is presented.

The first two charts present this data for “miscellaneous” employees, which are all public employees that are not members of public safety. As will be seen, these are the lowest averages, but even in these cases, the average public sector compensation is typically more than 50 percent greater than the median household income in the same locales. Here is the data for the cities in California with the highest reported public sector compensation. As can be seen, these are some of California’s wealthiest cities:

And here is the data for the counties in California with the highest reported public sector compensation:

When comparing public and private sector compensation in California, using the available data, it is important to recognize that for four reasons, the reported disparity is understated:

1 – The unreported costs for underfunded pensions, retirement health insurance, and the value of more paid time off result in public sector pay averages that are much lower than what is actually the case.

2 – The difference between average and median compensation results among California’s public sector workers is relatively insignificant, whereas in the private sector, averages are pulled way up by a handful of very wealthy individuals. In fact, median compensation results for public safety employees are often lower than the averages for the same set of records.

3 – The comparison is between average individual earnings in the public sector and median household income in the private sector. California’s households average more than one wage earner, meaning the median (or average) individual private sector earnings are much lower than the household income.

4 – There are 2.5 million public sector workers in California, nearly 14 percent of the 18.5 million total labor force. Their compensation is included in the average household income statistics, pulling the results up higher than they would be if only accounting for private sector households.

Average Compensation for Public Safety Employees

While “miscellaneous” public employees collect pay and benefit packages that are over 50 percent greater than their private sector counterparts – much more if you take into account the reasons their compensation is underestimated – that disparity is dwarfed by the TC/MHI ratio for California’s public safety employees.

The next four charts look again at the top ten cities and counties in terms of public sector compensation, starting with sheriff compensation in California’s counties.

With California’s sheriffs and police coping with the pandemic, social unrest, and political attacks on their ability to do their job, it is not necessary to belabor their compensation issues. Especially since police and sheriff compensation in California is consistently and significantly lower than firefighter compensation, in spite of their jobs delivering more stress, harder work, and equivalent levels of on-the-job injuries and fatalities.

What should be observed, however, is the fact that overall, police and firefighter compensation are at levels that leave very little flexibility to cope with current and future challenges to public safety. Consider the City of Berkeley (below), where the average full-time police officer earned pay and benefits of $280,000 per year in 2019, 3.7 times the median household income in that city.

The next table shows California’s top ten counties for firefighter compensation. Notably absent is San Mateo County, and the reason for that bears further explanation. Unlike sheriffs, for which every county has a department, many fire agencies exist as special districts that are either fully independent or partially independent of county administration. In California, in addition to city fire departments and county fire agencies, there are 102 fire protection districts or fire authorities. In San Mateo County, individual city fire departments provide a large percentage of the firefighting capacity.

When it comes to public sector compensation in California, no job category is more lucrative than working as a firefighter in a California city. The next chart shows average total compensation for the ten highest paying cities in the state. Every one of them report average pay and benefits in excess of $250,000 per year, bearing in mind, again, that the totals do not take into account the true cost to taxpayers to pre-fund their pensions and retirement health insurance benefits.

The intended message underlying the presentation of all this compensation data is that California’s local governments cannot hope to weather the economic storms that have just begun unless they cut pay and benefits, along with cutting headcount and cutting services. While making less is never palatable to those affected, it may be more digestible than coping with inadequate human resources to cope with challenges to the public, whether they’re fires, unrest, or social hardship.

Lower pay and benefits to public employees might also trigger a long overdue political awakening among these people, whose unions are largely responsible for promoting politicians and policies that have imposed on Californians the highest cost-of-living in the nation. Perhaps public employees could afford to make less, if they made less, because they’d start supporting politicians that would create more competitive, affordable markets for housing and energy.

As noted in several reports published earlier this year, one city in Orange County, Placentia, was able to put their fire department onto a financially sustainable path by breaking free of the Orange County Fire Authority. Instead they formed an independent fire department, where they dramatically reduced operating costs through the use of trained volunteers, hiring part-time firefighters to reduce overtime costs, contracting with a private ambulance service, and replacing pensions with a 401B defined contribution plan. The performance of this innovative fire department going forward should be closely watched.

There are analogues to what Placentia did with fire protection services across all public sector disciplines. Where are job descriptions too narrowly defined? Where do opportunities to contract with private sector services make operational and financial sense? What services and functions can be eliminated, such as the ridiculously bloated administrative overhead in public schools?

Asking these questions is unpleasant. Implementing them is hard. But California’s public agencies need to think creatively, and make some hard choices, because now more than ever, it is in the public interest.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

 *   *   *

Flawed Globalist Ideology Underlies Opposition to Trump

/by

There is a reason that nearly every powerful special interest in the United States is doing everything in its power to defeat Donald Trump, and it has nothing to do with the media’s fraudulent portrayal of him as a racist. Nor does it have anything to do with his allegedly abrasive personality.

If the president were willing to put the United States citizens under a total lockdown, allow millions of economic refugees to swarm across the borders, ship more jobs to Asia, and then impoverish whatever was left of middle America under the pretext of fighting “climate change,” he would be cruising to reelection.

Put another way, if Trump were a globalist, instead of a nationalist, there would not be well-funded militants destroying our cities while benefiting from a news blackout. There would not be NPC drones like ABC’s David Muir spewing anti-Trump pablum night after night, and money from Big Tech and Wall Street billionaires would be pouring into his campaign, instead of supporting his opponent.

In January 2018, in a speech of striking clarity, Trump described his vision of American nationalism. Addressing the assembled heads of state and business elite at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland, Trump’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the globalists. For example, he said:

“The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices, including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning. These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers, not just in the U.S., but around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as President of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers.”

These words did not constitute a threat to globalist ideology because Trump’s version of nationalism is toxic, but because it exposes the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.

These words constituted a threat to globalist ideology not because Trump’s version of nationalism is particularly toxic, but because he exposed the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.

In 2016 the World Economic Forum released a brief video called “8 predictions for the world in 2030” which remains an accurate summary of the globalist vision for the future. Here are the key points:

1) You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Everything you’ll want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by drone.

2) The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. Instead, a handful of countries will dominate.

3) You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs. We’ll print new ones instead.

4) You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.

5) A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.

6) Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.

7) You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space.

8) Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.

The essence of this list, or agenda, can be distilled into the following: Private property will be abolished, the United States will lose its sovereignty, food will be rationed, state-supported refugees will arrive by the millions and be dispersed into every American city and town, energy will be rationed, and America’s traditional values and institutions will be obliterated.

This is a deeply flawed vision of the future. It fails on every practical level, but is marketed relentlessly by all the same institutions that attack President Trump. And on the surface, it has a powerful moral appeal. Consider these lyrics from John Lennon’s globalist anthem: “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” This sounds great, until you face the reality of other powerful nations who aren’t about to cede their sovereignty to Western corporations, or deliberately undermine their cultures or their economies.

This means that “climate refugees” will not be pouring into China, or Japan, or Russia, or any other powerful and independent nations. It means those nations will continue to consume cheap and abundant fossil fuel, allowing them to allocate a higher percentage of their GDPs to more productive investments including research, industrial development, infrastructure upgrades, and military spending.

Deliberately hobbling the American economy, unilaterally, in the name of fighting “climate change” will elevate the price of everything imaginable—energy, water, food, housing, transportation, and every product and service that requires those basics for its own production. At the same time, adding tens of millions of “climate refugees” to America’s population without any regard to whether or not they come with productive skills will place additional burdens on an already handicapped economy.

Even worse, this agenda embraces a new dominant ideology, already well established, that attacks the core values that made America great. It justifies American submission to rationing and mass immigration through the underlying claim that American imperialist capitalism is responsible both for the “climate crisis” and the economic misery in other nations. It goes on to reject the most fundamental premise of capitalism, which is individual ownership of property. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

But just as abandoning the fate of the world to rising nations such as China—an implacable police state bent on enslaving the world—is obviously flawed, abandoning capitalist values to a society where “you’ll own nothing” is also a recipe for misery. Taking away the ability for individuals to own property takes away the incentive for people to work hard and strive to improve conditions for themselves and their families. Behind the obvious historical fact that communism and socialism have never worked and have led to nothing but murderous tyranny and economic devastation in every place they have ever been tried, is one simple truth of human nature: people need to have an incentive to achieve, or they won’t bother.

Thus far, America’s influential elites, from Big Tech and Big Media to at least some significant percentage of academia and the corporate community, have been unable to embrace the alternative vision President Trump represents. This is a failure of imagination as much as evidence of corruption. Because there is an alternative future that doesn’t involve American decline.

In this alternative to the agenda of the Davos set, instead of despoiling the landscape with millions of wind turbines, we would have clean fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power that is deregulated and allowed to create cheap abundant energy in America and around the world. This would cause a rapid rise in the standard of living and quality of life in developing nations, which would lead to rising literacy and lower birth rates. In Africa, India, and elsewhere, economic development also fosters voluntary population migration into revitalized and inviting urban centers, taking pressure off ecosystems and wildlife.

This scenario, where sovereign nations are encouraged to develop conventional energy and make big infrastructure investments, has been completely derailed by the Western obsession with fighting climate change. The result is environmental destruction caused by burgeoning populations pouring into protected wildernesses in search of firewood and game meat. And that is a cold, devastating fact. Anthropogenic climate change as an existential threat to humanity, on the other hand, is a theory; a mighty convenient one at that.

President Trump’s policies have encouraged industrial development, especially in the United States, but also around the world. The globalists’ agenda calls for tightly controlled development, massive migration, and socialist redistribution, all under the supposedly benevolent management of multinational corporations and international banks. But even if their intentions were entirely innocent, their plans, should they ever come to fruition, would spell catastrophe.

The irony of globalist ideology is that its ostensible goal, peace and prosperity for all mankind, is better served by Trump’s version of nationalism. What Trump envisions—peaceful competition between nations, all looking out for their own national interests—offers humanity a path into the future that can be realized without trauma, especially if America remains united and prosperous, and able to exercise leadership. What globalists offer is tyranny, masquerading as enlightenment.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

Blueprint for a Multi-Ethnic Anti-Socialist Movement

/by

Even President Trump’s opponents will likely agree that he possesses the stamina of someone 10-20 years younger. But at age 74, the movement Trump started is going to need new leaders to emerge within the next few years, not decades.

On the other hand, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, at age 31, is just getting started. According to Malcolm Flex, a Twitter celebrity and political prognosticator, AOC is just biding her time in Congress. As he puts it, “when it comes to branding, nobody can hold a candle to AOC.” Who, in AOC’s age group, will step up to challenge her?

What AOC represents, to state the obvious, is the socialist wing of the Democratic party. These socialists are the ascendant future of that party, backed up by militant Antifa brigades in every city in America, along with donors large and small, ready to support her next move, and the one after that, and the one after that. Rather than attempting to count and classify angels on the head of an ideological pin, let’s merely describe as “anti-socialist” the leaders, and the coalition, that must form to oppose AOC.

Malcolm Flex, a 27 year old former football player with the University of Alabama, and self-described “athlete, scientist, and dad,” is a recent addition to a robust and growing brigade of right-leaning producers of online video commentary. Formerly libertarian, currently Republican, Flex recently posted a video that is a must-watch for any anti-socialist politician, strategist, and influencer in America.

His tweet accompanying this video reads “Don’t underestimate today’s political power players just because they aren’t playing the same game as you.”

Flex leads off by saying “The paradigm is switching right now and it is switching so fast.” As an example he is referring to the new power of the Twitch platform as a political influencer, stating “Twitch is a hive for young minds, for young, unshapen, very bored minds.” In particular, he is referring to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s recent debut appearance as a player on Twitch, an appearance that attracted over 430,000 online participants.

In a 20 minute livestreamed monologue, Flex explains how the anti-socialist movement is not recruiting the right young talent. He surveys the young players, from Chandler Crump to Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, and explains that while they are saying the right things, they lack the charisma to attract an army. He acknowledges the magnetism of the Hodge Twins, but reminds us that Keith and Kevin Hodge, at age 45, are a generation removed from the future voters that populate, for example, the Twitchosphere.

Displaying a knowledge of Twitch that shouldn’t, but does elude most political strategists, Flex marvels at the fact that AOC used Twitch not as a broadcaster, but as a player, to build a “simp army” (look it up – and don’t laugh, because they’ll all be voting in 2028). As Flex warns, Twitch has now realized they can make money with political content. What if they go in the same direction as the other big platforms and censor or deboost conservatives? Twitch is owned by Amazon, so if they do, it should come as no surprise.

One of Flex’s main points appears to be that live streaming is a paradigm shifting technology that the Left is adopting faster than the Right. In his own words:

“The technology of using Twitch, using streaming technology, AOC has been heavy on this, watch her Instagram, she is on streaming constantly. Think about how many people she has amassed, she is always going live.”

The power of live streaming goes well beyond its initial impact, as Flex explains: “When you go live you can create video clips, you can create endless amounts of content that you can cut up and you can secondarily distribute. That’s a lot of memes, that’s a lot of propaganda – when I say memes, I don’t mean the traditional meme as the joke or the funny picture, I mean the meme as the highly dense, encapsulated transmission as a vector for an idea. A a meme is an idea that can virally spread from one individual to another with very low barriers because it is in a very visually stimulating package. AOC has been mimetically spreading her ideology.”

Perhaps the bigger message in Flex’s video is to return to the question of leadership and influence. Returning to the AOC phenomenon, Flex says “she is reaching out to the youth, she is not playing the same game you guys are playing. People today say she’s too far Left, but do the kids think that? Do the voters of tomorrow think that?”

Elaborating, Flex explains that “young people get older and eventually they do vote, and you know what they remember? If they’ve grown up with a politician, they have those experiences of watching them ingrained upon them, they have political loyalty, just like brand loyalty. They have hard crystalline memories ingrained, blending politics and consumerism.”

To wrap up what is arguably the most instructive 20 minutes of free, spontaneous political consulting dished out in many years for the anti-socialist right, Flex exhorts Republicans to find and support young online talent. The right kind of talent. Dismissing the bulk of GOP efforts to reach the younger generation as “catering to spoiled, hoity toity interns,” he says “they need to start recruiting some of the young minds on social media, there are a lot of good content creators that happen to lean conservative, that if you showed them some love, if you gave them a few breadcrumbs, if you gave them a platform, if you started helping them build, they would become great players for you.”

So who are these young minds? It would be helpful, very helpful, if Malcolm Flex would let us know who he’s found. There’s got to be somebody! Here are a few possibilities: Kimberly Klacik, running for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania, who produced an absolutely amazing campaign ad. Or Anna Paulina Luna, running for U.S. Congress in Florida. Or for someone with an edge, Kash Lee Kelly, a rising star on social media who, with rare credibility, expresses the virtues of conservatism in his own community.

In describing the future of the anti-socialist coalition in America, Malcolm Flex gets everything right: there is a new political marketing paradigm that uses streaming to target children and teenagers, blending politics with games and style. The long-term strategic value of this is epic. Supporting young talent with online influence today can translate into emerging politicians ten years from now with millions of loyal adherents. Finding people with the credibility and charisma to reach their various communities is also critical for the Right, especially since Democrats still command the overwhelming allegiance of the nonwhite electorate.

One may hope Flex is wrong that only the young can influence the future. After all, Trump, and Reagan years earlier, were both septuagenarians with strong appeal to young Republicans. Here is a list of online anti-socialist influencers, mostly young but not exclusively so, that do not conform to Republican stereotypes:

Derrick Blackman, Jermain Botsio, Taleed Brown, Pastor Mark Burns, Anthony Cabassa, Franklin Camargo, Horace Cooper, Chandler Crump, Stacy Dash, Patricia Dickson, Jamarcus Dove Simmons, Dinesh D’Souza, Wayne Dupree, Larry Elder, AJ Faleski, Damani Bryant Felder, Malcolm Flex, Shekina Geist, Ricky Godinez, Bryson Gray, Lynett Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, David J Harris Jr, James T Harris, Zach Hing, Keith and Kevin Hodge, Peggy Hubbard, Mind of Jamal, Emma Jimenez, Will Johnson, Kash Lee Kelly, KingFace, Kimberly Klacik, Anthony Brian Logan, Anna Paulina Luna, Jay McCaney, Jon Miller, Chadwick Moore, Andy Ngo, Mike Nificent, Antonia Okafor, Candace Owens, Star Parker, Robert Patillo, Joel Patrick, CJ Pearson, Jesse Lee Peterson, S.A. Rivera, Omar Rivero, Brandon Straka, Dr. Carol Swain, Enrique Tarrio, Brandon Tatum, Joy Villa, Allen West, Terrence K Williams, Justin Wilson.

This is an eclectic group. Some are candidates, some are commentators, some are edgy, and some are, as Flex candidly puts it, perceived as “cornballs.” Some are old, most are young, but only a few are under 30. Some are classic conservatives, some are Christian patriots, some are libertarians, and some are nationalists. They only have two things in common: none of them are white and heterosexual, and all of them are anti-socialists.

These 56 individuals, collectively, have a Twitter following of over 16 million. And of these 56, a half-dozen have been banned, and a many others don’t make Twitter their priority platform. But how many of these 56 are livestreaming to an audience of children and teenagers? Any of them? AOC is.

Nonetheless, for every person identified here, there are hundreds more out there. The anti-socialist strategists, and their donors, need to find them. They need to find and nurture emerging influencers who are in their late teens and early 20s who have young followers. They need to build a massive farm team, from which some players will become the online titans of tomorrow.

The paradigm is changing. The Left has discovered a new avenue to America’s future voters (they already had the public schools), and they’re barging forward with purpose. AOC is already a populist titan, with half her followers still too young to vote. America’s demographics are changing. But the tech-savvy leaders who will inspire future voters online with anti-socialist ideology are out there. They just need to be found, funded, and turned loose on Twitch, captivating the voters that will swing elections in the 2030s.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

The Unelected Tyrants Who Burned Down California

/by

If this seems like an unfair title, it isn’t, though some of these tyrants were appointed by elected politicians. And all of these tyrants rely on laws that were passed by elected politicians. But while there is plenty of blame to go around, tyranny is what Californians have endured. A tyrannical system is entirely to blame for apocalyptic fires that are wiping out California’s forests, fouling the air, and killing everything in their path.

So who are these unelected tyrants?

We can start with federal and state bureaucrats. Principal among them are the careerist ideologues who dominate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, abetted by the fanatics who run California’s Air Resources Board, along with dozens of other federal and state agencies. Joining them outside of government to assist in the incineration of California’s precious ecosystems are the lobbyists and litigants representing powerful environmentalist nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.

So numerous they escape individual accountability, these tyrants collectively have made it nearly impossible to engage in logging, forest thinning, or controlled burns. The policies, regulations, and judgments these tyrants relentlessly advocate and ruthlessly enforce are the reason California’s fires in recent years have been cataclysmic.

As a consequence, after more than a century of increasingly effective suppression of natural fires, California’s forests are now overgrown tinderboxes. They’re either going to get cleared out mechanically, or they’re going to burn like hell.

Opposing this tyranny does not signify a lack of concern for our natural environment, even though the tyrants routinely make the accusation. If you’ve ever been stirred by the sight of a California condor soaring above the wave-battered cliffs of Big Sur, you should thank an environmentalist. Most Californians agree that the condor, along with other species, was worth saving. But if the entire Ventana Wilderness is incinerated, condor habitat no longer exists. Similarly, if the entire Feather River watershed is reduced to cinder, hundreds of square miles of owl habitat will no longer exist.

By now, one may hope, most honest environmentalists know that when it comes to forest management, they’ve blown it. To paraphrase an old adage, they burned down the forest to save the trees. Maybe now they’ll help push for genuine, far-reaching, and swift reform. Then again, a lot of power and money can be had in perpetuating conflict. And recent actions by California Governor Gavin Newsom offer zero indication that help could be forthcoming from politicians. Newsom’s reaction to the ongoing inferno in California is to ban gasoline-powered cars, and declare that he has “no more patience for climate deniers.”

Let’s settle the climate “denier” issue straight away. If California’s summers are getting hotter, dryer, and lasting longer, then everything these unelected tyrants have been doing has been even more misguided, not less. And comprehensive regulatory reform and relief to start properly managing California’s forests is more urgently needed, not less.

So enough about the climate. Acknowledging climate change, regardless of its cause or trajectory, makes the case for forest management reform stronger, not weaker.

It is a great irony that alarm over climate change is used to justify endless proposals that call for urgent and unprecedented actions across all aspects of public policy, yet it cannot stimulate a swift and effective response to California’s burning forests. So what steps can be taken to quickly mitigate the damage of these catastrophic fires? And what ongoing steps can be taken to prevent them in the future?

In preparing this report, expert opinions were solicited from leaders in the timber, cattle, and biomass industries, professional foresters, and political representatives. All of them were in general agreement on the steps to be summarized here. None of them wanted to be quoted directly. The ire of the tyrants is real, and if you’re in these businesses, the power they wield is to be feared.

How to Revive California’s Forests

For about 20 million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting centuries. Natural fires, started by lightning and very frequent in the Sierras, were essential to keep forest ecosystems healthy. In Yosemite, for example, meadows used to cover most of the valley floor, because while forests constantly encroached, periodic fires would wipe them out, allowing the meadows to return. Across millennia, fire-driven successions of this sort played out in cycles throughout California’s ecosystems.

Also for the last 20 million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes. In the Sierra Foothills, the oaks have invaded the pine habitat, and the pine, in turn, has invaded the higher elevation stands of fir.

Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests.

In a speech before the U.S. Congress last September, Republican Tom McClintock summarized the series of mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th Congressional District covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears the brunt of the misguided green tyranny emanating from Washington, D.C. and Sacramento. Here’s some of what McClintock said:

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, US Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But beginning in the 1970’s, we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber – turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. In the 1950s the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume came in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5.0 billion board feet, and by 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2.0 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Reviving California’s Timber Industry

What Congressman McClintock describes as a working balance up until the 1990s needs to be restored. In order to achieve a sustainable balance between natural growth and timber removals, California’s timber industry needs to triple in size. If federal legislation were to guarantee a long-term right for timber companies to harvest trees on federal land, investment would follow.

The following map shows the locations of California’s 29 remaining sawmills, along with the locations of eight more that are inactive. In addition, there are 112 sites in California where sawmills once operated. In most cases, these vacant sites of former mills are located in ideal areas to rebuild a mill and resume operations. 

The economics of reviving California’s timber industry are compelling. A modern sawmill with a capacity of 100 million board feet per year requires an investment of $100 million. Operating at a profit, it would create 640 full-time jobs. Constructing 30 of these sawmills would create roughly 20,000 jobs in direct employment of loggers, haulers, and mill workers, along with thousands of additional jobs in the communities where they are located.

The ecological impact of logging again in California’s state and federal forests will not become the catastrophe the environmentalists and regulators have suggested as their pretext to destroy the logging industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, we know that logging does more good than harm to forest ecosystems. There is evidence to prove this.

In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests. Even clear-cutting, because it is done on a 60 to 100-year cycle, does more good than harm to the forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted.

While clear-cutting would not destroy most ecosystems, since it is only performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year, there are other types of logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where the utility practices what is called total ecosystem management.

When the Creek Fire burned, earlier this year, an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square-mile island of SCE-managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. The reason is that for decades, Edison has been engaged in timber operations the company defines as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are caught up on logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be utilized in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old-growth merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly this number varies depending on forest type, altitude, and other factors. Overall, however, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result is trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, much less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

The choice before us—thin the overgrown forests or suffer fires that destroy the forests entirely—cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Growing California’s Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s to a sustainable, lower density of trees per acre, mechanical removal of shrub and undergrowth is an essential corollary, especially in areas that are not clear cut. Fortunately, California has already developed the infrastructure to do this. In fact, California’s biomass industry used to be bigger than it is today, and can be quickly expanded.

The next map shows the locations of 22 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of continuous electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Also shown on the map are the locations (blue highlighted) of idle biomass plants. Mostly developed in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak there were 60 biomass power plants in California, but with the advent of cheaper natural gas and cheaper solar power, most of them were shut down.

At a fully amortized wholesale cost estimated somewhere between 12 cents and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, biomass power plants cannot compete with most other forms of energy. But this price is not so far out of reach that it could not be subsidized using funds currently being allocated to other forms of renewables infrastructure or climate change mitigation. The numbers could work.

If, for example, biomass power capacity in California were roughly doubled to 1.0 gigawatt of continuous output, a six cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy would cost about $500 million per year. This must be compared to the annual cost of wildfires, which easily exceeds a billion per year. It also must be compared to the amount of money being thrown around on projects far less urgent than rescuing California’s forest ecosystems, such as the California High Speed Rail project, which has already consumed billions. And if this entire subsidy of $500M per year were spread into the utility bills of all Californians, it would only amount to about a 1.5 percent increase.

Will the Unelected Tyrants Relent? Will Politicians Do the Right Thing?

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time-tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and yet nothing has been done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases likely will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies currently adopted in California have not only ruined the environment they were designed to supposedly protect. They have destroyed California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns. This is tyranny, and perhaps even worse—it is tyranny that lacks either benevolence or wisdom.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and most of the remaining tracts of unburned forest are overgrown and dying. If the goal was to do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests, and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far-reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response.

So California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, can prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber industry, along with the unelected state and federal regulators to devise a plan.

Or they can continue to bloviate about “climate change,” unconcerned that climate change only makes it more urgent that California revive its timber and biomass industries.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *