Firefighters Union Backs Prop. 15 Instead of Forestry Reform

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Thousands of firefighters continue to battle blazes across California. In Orange County, two firefighters are in critical condition after suffering major injuries battling the Silverado Fire. Every year around this time, firefighters risk their lives, and some of them lose their lives, protecting the rest of us from these catastrophic fires.

Deep respect for what firefighters do, however, cannot excuse us of our obligation to criticize the political agenda of the firefighters union. Moreover, it is likely that if the firefighter union leadership redirected their political priorities, it would save lives and property. It would free up firefighting resources, allowing them to be concentrated in remaining trouble spots.

In this fraught political season, California’s firefighters union has decided to endorse Prop. 15, the controversial “split roll” ballot initiative. If enacted, Prop. 15 will require business properties to be reassessed at market rates. If passed, the increased tax revenue is estimated at between $6.5 billion and $11.5 billion per year.

It isn’t necessary to debate the pros and cons of Prop. 15 here. Nor is it necessary to recap why it is the mission of every public sector union in California to increase taxes, despite the fact that Californians already pay the highest overall taxes in the United States.

Most everyone agrees that if you are a victim of a fire, or are injured or killed fighting a fire, no amount of monetary compensation is adequate. But that perspective, which reasonable people acknowledge, has a corollary: If no amount of compensation is adequate, the limits of compensation should be governed by what is affordable.

Here, using 2019 data provided by the California State Controller, is what full time firefighters earn in pay and benefits. These numbers represent the average, the median numbers are even higher. And except in the data for CalFire pensions, these numbers do not include the individual cost of reducing unfunded pension liabilities, or prefunding retirement health benefits. Therefore these averages understate the true cost to taxpayers to pay California’s firefighters.

Notwithstanding the hypocritical nonsense about “closing corporate loopholes” and making “making rich corporations pay their fair share,” one widely broadcast television ad promoting Prop. 15 has a firefighter saying “to fight these fires, we need funding, plain and simple.”

That’s true, of course. And it will always be true, no matter how much money is forthcoming. Because public safety resources cannot possibly be permanently scaled to adequately address truly catastrophic wildfires. Instead, more effective methods of prevention – not just fire suppression – have to be reintroduced.

The Firefighters Union Needs to Stand Up to the Environmentalist Lobby

Debating whether or not full time firefighters should earn well over $200,000 per year, much less reducing it somewhat, may be a futile exercise. The firefighters union, like all public sector unions, exercises political control through campaign contributions. Politicians who are willing to tell a firefighter they make too much money are few and far between. As for convincing firefighters to quit their unions and thus defund them? Yeah, right. Quit a union that is the sole reason you’re making nearly a quarter million per year? Fat chance.

There’s another path, difficult to articulate because it might be interpreted as tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of public sector unions. But that’s a false choice. Public sector unions are an abomination. They have corrupted democracy, allowing government employees to run the government. They should be illegal and disbanded. Voluntary associations of government employees that have no collective bargaining power would be more than adequate to represent the interests of public sector workers. Laws governing all employees, public and private, would guarantee their rights as workers.

In the meantime, while we await a miracle, it still might be productive to suggest the firefighters union use some of their considerable influence to advocate something besides merely raising taxes and increasing their pay and benefits. And precedents for this have been set. In early 2019, the firefighters union marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles, in a show of leftist solidarity that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with fighting fires.

Firefighters belonging to unions ought to question these political priorities. Because the Californian Left may wield nearly all political power in California, but they do so with the consent of public sector unions. And this monolithic Left includes the environmentalist lobby that has all but destroyed the timber industry in California. And the timber industry, properly regulated, could profitably thin California’s conifer forests.

In 1950, nearly 6 billion board feet of timber was harvested out of California’s forests. In 2020, that harvest is down to 1.5 billion board feet. If California’s politicians were committed to lobbying and legislating for new state and federal laws that brought California’s timber industry back up to an annual harvest of 4 billion board feet, much of the super fires that have devastated towns, wildlife, watersheds, and cost lives, would become a thing of the past.

This is proven by the example of Shaver Lake, where 20,000 acres of forest managed by Southern California Edison stayed intact, even as the Creek Fire surrounded and destroyed everything around it. Logging, thinning, and controlled burns (only possible after logging and thinning), are the reason those trees survived. By restoring a timber industry in California, much of the resources necessary to fight fires in conifer forests could be redirected towards controlling fires in chaparral.

Forestry reform has many productive aspects. Along with expanding the timber industry, reintroduce cattle grazing in appropriate areas. Expand California’s network of biomass energy facilities, something that could fund forest and chaparral thinning with ratepayer funded subsidies that are often less than what other forms of renewable energy are costing consumers. But all of this requires standing up to an environmentalist lobby that thrives and profits off conflict rather than solutions.

Everyone is grateful to firefighters for the work they do. But their union needs to decide. Along with fighting for more pay and benefits for their members, are they going to remain an ancillary wing of California’s leftist ruling class? Or will they pick one fight where they defy the conventional wisdom, and perhaps provide the tipping point to change it?

Will California’s firefighting unions fight to reform California’s forest management laws and regulations? That would take almost as much courage as fighting forest fires. And it would help everyone and everything – people, trees, wildlife, the economy, and the tax base.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Announcing Winston84 – A Directory to Suppressed Content

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“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
~ Winston Smith, 1984, by George Orwell

This week the Center for American Greatness is pleased to announce a new resource for lovers of the First Amendment. A searchable directory—Winston84—to online content that has been censored.

The phenomenon of online censorship, which has steadily increased over the past few years, hardly requires explanation. Beginning in earnest in 2016, the censorship disproportionately impacts conservatives and nationalists, who find their social media content “shadowbanned,” “deboosted,” “throttled down,” “demonetized,” or, in the ultimate (and very common) sanction, “deplatformed.” All too often, these content providers even have their websites taken down by their ISP providers, and their online fundraising accounts terminated.

For those of us paying attention, these attacks by online communications monopolies have been unrelenting, but the censorship has reached new extremes. Last week, Twitter made it impossible to post a link to an article about content potentially embarrassing to candidate Joe Biden, published by one of the oldest newspapers in America. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have now censored social media accounts belonging to the Trump reelection campaign 65 times.

The recent wave of censorship goes well beyond presidential politics.

In just the last two weeks, YouTube, following similar actions by Facebook and Twitter, deleted more than 30 channels with significant audiences which they identified as posting “Qanon conspiracy theories,” along with countless smaller channels. But the real threat posed by the Q collective is not just its most sensational and controversial topics, but rather the relentless uncovering of government corruption by thousands of online sleuths. The suppression of Q is one of the most ominous displays of censorship in our time.

Over the summer, we saw blatant censorship of doctors who merely advocated more research and access to hydroxychloroquine as a preventive and early-stage treatment for COVID-19. Does HCQ work in certain cases? We still don’t know. But censoring public debate on this question is wrong.

For example, a video featuring emergency room doctors who offered a dissident opinion from mainstream media and big pharma got over 17 million views within a matter of hours, before Facebook pulled it from its platform. President Trump’s retweet of this video was taken down by Twitter, along with those of other high-profile Americans, including Donald Trump, Jr.

Describing these events, one of America’s last remaining unmuzzled mainstream dissidents, Tucker Carlson, had this to say on July 29: “While the rest of us were sleeping, or in the case of so many of our senators, taking money from Google, a tiny number of left-wing corporations took virtually complete control of all news and information in this country.”

Carlson is right, and this is a problem of historic scope. In America today, when content disappears from the major social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—a huge percentage of Americans, 50 percent or more, will never see it.

This is information warfare, and First Amendment advocates are in a race against evolving AI programs wielded by communications monopolies. People can share links to suppressed content. If the links are blocked, they can put the links into a different article, and share the link to that article. If deep links are banned, they can cut and paste the text into a new article. If text strings are banned, they can avoid using keywords. The truth is like water, and the internet is a river.

Very encouraging is that while alternative platforms have not yet found the audience that the monopoly platforms offer, they are growing in number and popularity. BitChute. Gab. Telegram. Minds. Parler. DLive. ThinkSpot. These and many others provide an alternative for content producers driven off of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The mission of Winston84 is to collect and catalog online voices that have been deplatformed, demonetized, shadow banned, or otherwise suppressed and provide links to their platforms. We may or may not share their opinions, but we support their right to be heard. If someone is thrown off of YouTube, we track their migration. If you search for their record in Winston84, you will see links to all the known platforms where they are active. If you know of platforms where someone is listed that we have not included, let us know. If you want to recommend someone to be added to the Winston84 directory, let us know.

Our criteria to be included in Winston84 is necessarily subjective. The five categories we’ve selected provide some insight into the decision-making process: Christian Patriot, Climate Skeptic, Free Speech Ally, Irreverent Investigator, and Western Warrior. At present, there are just under 300 records in the database, and we don’t intend to expand it much beyond that, but rather continue to refine what is featured.

While everyone in the Winston84 database may be considered politically incorrect by the leftist monopolies that control what Americans can find online, some are more politically incorrect than others. Virtually all the climate-change skeptics are persona non grata. Typically, and this holds true with almost all of the records in Winston84, the only thing you’ll find if you search for them on Google are links to articles disparaging them. Their websites or social media pages may not show up at all.

Probably the least anathema to the Left are those records we have classified as Free Speech Ally, which include many conservative and nationalist websites and their accompanying social media accounts that have broken through, such as Breitbart and, of course, American Greatness. The most offensive category to the Left is probably Western Warriors, and this bears further discussion.

Again, we may not agree with everything that appears on some of these websites, or everything that is said on some of these video channels. But we defend the right of these groups and individuals to say what they are saying. Nevertheless, we don’t have room for truly egregious content. We don’t decline to post some as a nod to the Left, but just as a matter of both practicality and principle.

To the extent someone may question our choice to include, say, a white identitarian, we may counter that there is almost no attempt whatsoever on the part of the social media monopolies to exclude left-wing content that is not merely expressing ethnic pride, but is explicitly anti-white, and far more extreme. Moreover, of the 123 people we have identified and categorized as Western Warriors, 44 of them are black Americans.

Whether or not anyone producing content for a channel or a website that has made its way onto Winston84 agrees with us, we are resolutely, enthusiastically in favor of a colorblind American nationalism. As it is, the overwhelming majority of the people we have included are also colorblind patriots who love America. We find that inspiring.

In previous reports on internet censorship, we received numerous comments and emails expressing a need for a directory such as Winston84. Here it is. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. This project is intended to evolve both to meet the needs of people looking for quality alternative content, as well as to help counter the relentless attacks on freedom of expression by leftist corporations that have acquired far too much power.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Pension Costs Are Not the Reason California’s Schools Fail the Disadvantaged

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A recent guest editorial published by Bakersfield.com entitled “California’s defunding of public education” makes the case that a “pension contribution maneuver” has left school districts up and down the state with shrinking budgets.

The author, Shaohua Yang, gets many of his facts right. For example, he writes that “California 2019 per-capita income tax ranks the fifth highest in the U.S., and we also have high property, sales and business taxes. The lack of public school spending is not due to short revenue.” Yang is also right to observe that pension costs cannibalize funding for public services. But he’s only telling half the story.

The pension “maneuver” Yang refers to is the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013, known as “PEPRA,” and pushed through the state legislature by Democratic Governor Brown. PEPRA was a last ditch attempt to rescue California’s public employee pension systems from insolvency. It was a compromise, balancing necessary increases to employer contributions with modest reductions in pension benefits, reductions that only affected new hires.

The result of PEPRA was a plan that, if CalSTRS investments can earn on average 7 percent per year, will finally achieve full funding by 2046, over 30 years later. Meanwhile, CalSTRS is on thin ice. Its still most recent available actuarial valuation, scandalously out-of-date, shows that as of 6/30/2018 the “amount of assets on hand to pay for obligations” stood at 64 percent. But did PEPRA reduce pension benefits or increase the member contribution rates? Not much.

Before PEPRA, teachers contributed 8 percent of payroll to their pension. Today, they contribute up to 10.25 percent. This must be compared to Social Security, to which employees have to contribute 6.2 percent of their earnings, and self-employed people have to contribute 12.4 percent of their earnings. Here’s how that plays out:

In return for 6.2 percent of lifetime earnings (or 12.4 percent, if you’re self-employed), the maximum Social Security benefit a private sector worker can expect, starting at age 62, and presumably after at least 30 years in the workforce, is $27,888 per year.

In return for 10.25 percent of lifetime earnings, after a 30 year career, here is what the average CalSTRS benefit is for retirees from the three “defunded” school districts that Yang mentions in his column:

Oakland Unified  –  $68,200 per year.

Bakersfield City School District – $70,778 per year.

Cupertino Unified – $82,749 per year.

It doesn’t take an actuary to see that something is wrong with this picture. If Yang, or anyone else who thinks public education is being defunded in California, is serious about getting more money to the school districts, they can call for pension reform that gives teachers the same deal as the taxpayers who support them: Social Security. That would save billions per year which could go right back into those “defunded” schools.

Or, to be completely fair, if these teachers, their unions, and the pension fund actuaries whose gospel-like prognostications have been so accurate so far, really think they can invest and earn 7 percent per year – 4.5 percent after adjusting for inflation – they can roll every dime of the $257 billion in CalSTRS assets into 401K plans for the teachers, so they can share in the risks and rewards of investing just like the taxpayers who support them. That too would immediately return billions per year to the public schools, money that taxpayers currently allocate towards paying down CalSTRS unfunded liability.

It’s not the money, though, it’s the management.

In his column, Yang goes on to highlight how “defunding” education has a disproportionate impact on the disadvantaged. This is only half true. Yang’s right that schools that serve low income communities do not perform as well as schools in high income communities. But he’s wrong to suggest more money is the solution. Notwithstanding the obvious fact that in general, higher income parents are more likely to impart higher academic expectations to their children, which inevitably means some disproportionality will always occur between high income and low income schools, it is management, not money, that harms students the most.

This was demonstrated in the Vergara case, an education reform lawsuit launched in 2013 that attempted to reform California’s union negotiated work rules. In his mesmerizing closing arguments, plaintiff attorney Marcellus McRae proved – citing testimony from witnesses called up by the defense – that rules granting early tenure, prioritizing seniority over merit in layoffs, and the near impossibility of firing incompetent teachers leads to a disproportionate negative impact on low income communities. Vergara was dismissed on a technicality, and California’s disadvantaged students are the ongoing victims.

While fixing these management issues would yield important incremental improvements, the solution that would save California’s system of public education is school vouchers. Give parents of K-12 aged children a voucher they can redeem at any school they choose. Public, public charter, private, religious, secular, homeschool, virtual school or micro-school. If the student bodies of these schools can pass the standardized academic achievement tests, they can continue to accept vouchers. It can be that simple.

To truly appreciate how much money California’s union controlled system of public education has been wasting, refer to a California Policy Center analysis published earlier this year that calculated the true, gross amount of per student spending in California in the most recent fiscal year to be over $20,000 per pupil. Shaohua Yang, who is a “system architect in the semiconductor industry in San Jose,” is invited to review the data to verify this figure for himself.

Imagine what a charter school or micro-school could do with all that money. A twenty student class would have a $400,000 per year budget, easily enough to lease a classroom, purchase educational materials, and hire an amazing teacher. Perhaps the voucher could be for $15,000, still more than enough, and the rest could be returned to taxpayers.

What Yang, and every other conscientious Californian who cares about social injustice should be doing is recognizing that the teachers’ union is the primary reason public education is failing the disadvantaged. They have made it almost impossible for principals to hold teachers accountable and terminate the incompetent. They have fought the expansion of charter schools and convinced reformers that so much as a discussion of vouchers is politically impossible. But that’s not the worst of it.

In an amazing inversion of everything they supposedly stand for, the teachers’ union has embraced one of the most reckless capitalist gamblers on earth, the California State Teachers Retirement System, as a full partner. The teachers’ union demands retirement benefits for their members that are literally twice as good as the Social Security benefits available to the taxpayers they serve, blind to the fact that CalSTRS, along with all the rest of these public employee pension funds, are among the biggest players on Wall Street.

If pension costs are indeed crowding out funding for public education, as Yang alleges, then at the least call it what it is: a Wall Street bailout, designed to reward a privileged class, with children as the victims.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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How to Save California’s Forests

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For about twenty million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting over a century. Natural fires, started by lightening 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, fires would periodically 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 twenty 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 because of gradual warming. In the Sierra Foothills, oaks have invaded pine habitat, and pine have in-turn invaded the higher elevation stands of fir. Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests. This can be corrected.

In a speech before the U.S. Congress last September, Republican Tom McClintock summarized the series of policy 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 DC and Sacramento. Here’s an excerpt from that speech:

“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.

Expand the 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.

Today only 29 sawmills remain in California, along with eight sawmills that are still standing but 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 that environmentalists and regulators once used as the pretext to all but destroy the logging industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, 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, area is 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 will 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 they practice what is referred to as total ecosystem management.

Earlier this year, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define 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, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result are trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative – manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest 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.

Expand the Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s forests 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.

Today there are 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. Mostly built 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. These clean burning plants should be opened back up to use forest trimmings, as well as agricultural waste and urban waste as fuel.

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. Moreover, this kilowatt-hour price necessarily includes the labor intensive task of going into the forests and extracting the biomass, creating thousands of good paying jobs. 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 in California, 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 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. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and nothing was done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and the 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 will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies adopted in California have decimated California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, turned millions of acres of forest into scorched earth, 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 what remains is dying. If the goal was 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.

California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, may prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber, biomass energy, and cattle industries, along with federal regulators, and come up with a plan. They might apply to this plan the same scope and urgency with which they so cavalierly transform our entire energy and transportation sectors, but perhaps with more immediate practical benefits both to people and ecosystems.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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The Battle For California is the Battle for America

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By now, this is a familiar story. California is a failed state. Thanks to years of progressive mismanagement and neglect, the cities are lawless and the forests are burning. Residents pay the highest prices in America for unreliable electricity. Water is rationed. Homes are unaffordable. The public schools are a joke. Freeways are congested and crumbling. And if they’re not still on lockdown or otherwise already destroyed by it, business owners contend with the most hostile regulatory climate in American history.

It is understandable that conservatives in the rest of the United States would be happy to write off California. But California is not writing off the rest of the United States, and therein lies grave danger to American prosperity and freedom.

What if California doesn’t implode, a victim of its own political mismanagement? What if California instead completes its transformation into a successful plutocracy, run by a clique of multi-billionaires in a partnership of convenience with environmentalist extremists and backed by the power of a unionized state bureaucracy?

What if the people who would resist this tyranny leave, and the remaining population peacefully accepts universal basic income and subsidized housing? What if all it takes to be a feudal overlord in progressive California is to proffer to the proletarians a pittance of alms, while reliably spouting incessant, blistering social justice and climate change rhetoric?

Why won’t that work? After all, it’s worked so far. California has the most progressive electorate in America.

Not because of California’s regulatory state, but in spite of it, California is by far the wealthiest, most influential state in America. With 40 million people, a diverse economy, and a gross domestic product of $3.2 trillion, California is almost a nation unto itself. And the progressive zealots who run California have been acting like an independent nation, with the avowed goal of transforming the entire United States to match its image.

What happens in California matters to the rest of the United States because California’s internal market is huge, its political and financial influence is powerful, and it rallies political allies throughout the U.S. If what California does to transform its own culture and economy isn’t stopped, the rest of the U.S. will fall into line. The result will be a comprehensive reinvention of society in all areas, political, economic, and cultural.

The difficult reality that conservative Americans must accept is that while California may be a failed state by the standards Middle America has come to take for granted, California may not fail by its own standards. The society California is building may prove viable, even if it is hideous to contemplate and morally wrong. It may prove viable even though the alternatives that it displaces offer more prosperity and freedom to more people. It amounts to an all-powerful tech plutocracy ruling over a micro-managed, dependent population, with rationing and redistribution in the name of social justice and saving the planet.

This model, which is a modern form of feudalism, may work not merely because it is politically and economically sustainable despite its many shortcomings, nor merely because it offers more power and profit to its handful of resident billionaires who already possess obscene levels of power and wealth. These reasons don’t fully explain the popularity of progressive feudalism. There is one more piece in the puzzle.

The progressive model also becomes viable because of a moral narrative that is flawed but nonetheless compelling: We live in an inherently oppressive society, so we must reduce the privileged middle class in the interests of social justice. We live in an era of limited resources and a stressed planet, so we must reduce everyone’s standard of living. Countering that narrative is the mission that must be sent into California. The misery that Californians have condemned themselves to live is not a moral choice. They are victims of a con job.

What follows are detailed examples of what’s happening in California. These examples are selected based on the level of transformative impact they are having, as well as their potential to be rolled into the rest of the United States. But this compendium, while lengthy, only scratches the surface.

The Labor Movement is the Glue

At the forefront of California’s populist progressive movement is organized labor. Assimilating the progressive battle cries on all the predictable topics—race, gender, climate change—California’s labor movement wields both their billions in dues revenue and a perpetually mobilized field army that reaches into every locale and institution. And in a major escalation of a battle soon to rage across America, California’s unions have taken on independent contractors.

Sailing through the state legislature and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2019, AB 5 outlawed most forms of individual independent contracting and threw most of the rest into legal ambiguity. While aimed at rideshare drivers on Uber and Lyft platforms, it affected all businesses that use independent contractors, from nail salons and graphic artists to thousands of badly needed nurses and other health care professionals.

The most powerful injured parties, led by Uber and Lyft, have funded a ballot initiative that will repeal AB 5 for their specific industries. But small businesses, including sole proprietors, are out of luck. The move to ban independent contractors has now gone national, with Biden and Harris endorsing the policy. The Biden campaign is even running ads against the Uber and Lyft-backed ballot proposition: “Now, gig economy giants are trying to gut the law and exempt their workers. It’s unacceptable.”

The consequences of outlawing most forms of independent contracting are obvious, and disgraceful. Within realistic constraints, people should be allowed to exchange services for money without having to become employees of a company. That such a basic expression of freedom should come under attack illustrates the gravity of the fight we’re in. The motivation for this law is equally obvious and disgraceful; if people can be herded into companies as employees, then they can be organized and put under union representation.

It’s worth reexamining exactly what unions in California represent, rather than leaving it at that. California’s unions exist primarily in the public sector, where their “negotiations” are with politicians whose campaigns they’ve bankrolled, and their wage and benefit demands are paid for by taxes, not by businesses operating in a competitive environment.

And while unions may still play a vital role in the private sector, it’s fair to wonder why their political agenda—open borders in particular—is a goal that is shared by the tech billionaires and corporations these unions supposedly oppose. Why the contradiction?

The answers to this help explain the alliance between corporations and unions which, on the surface, seems contradictory.

First, the center of gravity of union power in the United States—and this is especially the case in California—now rests with the public sector. And why wouldn’t public sector unions want open borders, and moreover, why wouldn’t they want unrestricted immigration with no regard for the ability of immigrants to speak English, bring useful skills, and assimilate? The more numerous and dependent America’s immigrants are, the more numerous and expansive the roster of government employees necessary to assist them in their new country.

The public schools of Los Angeles, to cite an obvious example, receive revenue based on how many students are enrolled. The more immigrants arrive, the more revenue these school districts collect, and the more unionized, dues-paying members of the teachers’ union have to be hired. If these students have had poor education in the nations they are arriving from, and if these students lack English language skills, then the public schools of Los Angeles will qualify to collect even more revenue, and hire even more specialized staff, in order to better assist the special needs of these students.

In most areas of public service, the more dependent and difficult to assimilate immigrants are, the more public services required: social workers, welfare administrators, police, probation officers, translators, and assorted bureaucrats. More generally, the more the population grows through immigration, the more government will grow, benefitting government unions. Population growth, of course, also fulfills corporate objectives, expanding the labor force and driving down wages.

Less acknowledged but perhaps even more significant, a larger population simply creates a larger critical mass of consumers. In the broadest, most macroeconomic sense of the term, a “consumer” is any living resident of a nation, even someone totally dependent on the government. They still require food, medical care, and shelter. They still buy products, and someone—a private-sector government contractor as often as a government agency—will be remunerated to fill those requirements.

This still doesn’t explain why private-sector unions would favor open borders, but here ideology and opportunism align synergistically to provide the answer. On one hand, the leftist narrative of anti-racism, replacing the oppressors, displacing and overthrowing the colonizers, etc., provides an ideological rationale for even private-sector unions to agitate for open borders.

And the internationalist perspective of these union leaders, where increasingly their concern is not for the American worker, but for the “workers of the world,” also gives them cover to call for open borders even though that increases the supply of labor and drives down wages. Many of them simply don’t understand the realities of supply and demand and are fully committed to an economic dream of socialist redistribution, but for those who do recognize economic reality, there is another more practical motive: the worse off the workers are in their bargaining units and in the economy generally, the more likely they’ll be to join a union in an attempt to better their circumstances.

In any case, by far the most powerful unions in California are public-sector unions, for which policy and program failures constitute success, because to address the failures, they can agitate for more policies and more programs. This agenda is playing out in Democratic cities and states across America.

Unionizing Police and Firefighters

California’s state legislature doesn’t have to do anything to unionize public employees including police and firefighters, that’s already an established fact. But if Californian Democrats have anything to say about it, unionized public safety is coming to America. California’s 45 Democrats in the U.S. Congress, by far the most numerous and influential coalition of Democrats from any state, have introduced federal legislation to that effect.

Legislation to unionize public safety, misleadingly dubbed the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, HR 1154, authored by Los Angeles-area Representative Karen Bass and co-sponsored by 201 other Democratic representatives (including all of California’s Democratic House members), would impose exclusive California-style collective bargaining for police and emergency services to the roughly 20 states that don’t already have it.

The consequences of unionized law enforcement and firefighting are many and dire. Every year these unions will collect hundreds of millions in dues, and they will use a significant percentage of that money on political spending to flip battleground states from purple to blue. This bill would also require union bargaining over police officers’ wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment, increasing costs to taxpayers.

These costs are not trivial. Police and firefighter pay and benefits are breaking the budgets of cities and counties across California. The average sheriff in a California county in 2019 earned pay and benefits of $158,000. That’s average, and that’s on the low side compared to other categories of public safety. For example, on average, a police officer in a California city in 2019 earned pay and benefits of $176,000. And firefighters earned, on average, much more: In California’s counties in 2019, $214,000; in California cities, also $214,000.

These averages, if anything, are understating the reality, insofar as they don’t take into account the increased costs of prefunding their pension benefits if there isn’t another bull market, nor do they take into account the full cost of prefunding their retirement health care. Most reasonable people agree that it is very important to support police and firefighters, and to pay them well. But these averages are so high they are often met with disbelief. They are unaffordable, compromising the ability to maintain adequate forces, and taking funding away from other vital public services. They are a direct result of unionization.

And if unionizing is not to save money, since clearly the opposite has happened, then what is the motivation? In contrast to Democrats’ stated aims, unionizing police departments per this legislation would exacerbate systemic police violence, by protecting bad cops from accountability. So why support it? Because government unions want it. Passing the bill allows Democrats to expand the revenue of the unions that quietly fund their campaigns.

Environmentalist Extremism

In 2006, California passed AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act.” Signed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, AB 32 empowered the unelected bureaucrats on California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to regulate CO2 emissions in California with the goal of reducing them to 1990 levels by 2020. Since the passage of AB 32 there has been an unceasing flow of follow-on legislation, executive orders, and CARB regulations. To name just a few:

In 2008 California’s Public Utilities Commission released their “Long-Term Energy Efficiency Strategic Plan, which, among other things, requires all new residential construction to be “zero net energy” (ZNE) staring in 2020, all new commercial construction to be ZNE by 2030, and 50 percent of all commercial buildings to be ZNE by 2030.

SB 350 in 2015 requires California to generate 50 percent of its electricity from “renewables” by 2050, with emissions-free nuclear power not eligible for inclusion.

More recently, Newsom has ordered CARB to implement the phaseout of new gas powered cars and light trucks by 2045, barely 14 years from now. He also called on the state legislature to ban fracking.

These recent executive orders from Newsom are motivated by the series of cataclysmic wildfires that have again claimed millions of acres of forest in California, wildfires that Newsom alleges were caused by climate change. But the biggest factor by far in causing these wildfires was forest mismanagement, thanks to environmentalist policies pioneered in California.

For decades, California’s foresters and timber harvesters knew the forests were dangerously overgrown. Tree density had progressed in the vast Sierra Nevada from a historical and healthy norm of between 10-50 per acre to upwards of 300 per acre.

While natural fires were suppressed with increasing efficiency, for many years healthy forests were nonetheless maintained by logging and controlled burns. But between 1950 and 2020, California’s timber industry’s annual harvest declined from 6 billion board feet, which maintained an equilibrium between natural growth and annual removals, to less than 1.5 billion board feet.

California’s powerful environmentalist nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, used litigation and lobbying—not only within California, but in federal court and the U.S. Congress—to coerce sympathetic judges and legislators to nearly destroy California’s timber industry, at the same time as CARB regulations and other onerous permitting obstacles prevented forest thinning or controlled burns.

When it comes to progressive ideology in general, and California’s environmentalists in particular, irony abounds. Let this sink in: California’s environmentalists destroyed California’s forests. Any attempt to deflect this catastrophe onto climate change is sophistry. Densely packed, tinder dry forests will burn like hell, and that’s exactly what happened. It doesn’t matter one bit if summers are slightly dryer and slightly hotter. They’ll still burn.

Cripple the Housing Industry, Destroy the Suburbs

In all aspects of what Democrats now market as the Green New Deal, California’s state government has led the way. This is vividly expressed in the critical area of zoning for high-density housing, based on the largely unchallenged assumption that suburban sprawl results in higher per capita greenhouse gasses. By cramming nearly all new home construction into the footprint of existing cities, the price of entitled real estate in California has become artificially inflated. But that’s just the beginning of the ordeal facing developers.

Along with higher-priced land, home builders have to contend with costly building codes (such as requiring “zero net energy” homes), excessive fees, and uncertain, prolonged delays in gaining approval to begin construction. The result of California’s restrictive policies is that it has become impossible for unsubsidized developers to build and sell affordable homes.

A key piece of restrictive legislation is SB 375, enacted in 2008, which ties transportation funding to cities and counties adopting higher density residential zoning. A more recent example of the relentless drive towards higher density is SB 743, passed in 2013 but just now being implemented by CARB. This new law requires every new housing development to assess the likely “vehicle miles traveled” by the residents per year, and if that amount is considered excessive, the builders must pay extra fees or in some way “mitigate” for this. Needless to say, this renders the price of homes even more unaffordable.

All these laws being passed in California are designed to increase the density of housing, as well as to mandate home builders move to multi-family dwellings with a percentage of them designated for low-income renters. Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly introduced bills that will supersede local control over zoning to force, for example, fourplex projects to be approved in neighborhoods that currently are for single-family homes.

The entire regulatory ecosystem that has been created not only denies middle-income Californians the ability to purchase homes, or long-standing homeowners the right to preserve the ambiance of their neighborhoods. It also enriches a corrupt class of developers whose business model relies on tax credits and public subsidies to build housing for low-income families and the homeless at a statewide average cost that has now eclipsed $500,000 per apartment unit. At this extraordinary per unit cost, nothing is solved. But the tax-subsidized developers and investors do very well.

And the more money these developers make, the more political influence they have. This is the model for housing that California is exporting to the rest of the United States. Their goal is to eliminate the single-family dwelling altogether, which they justify by characterizing free-standing homes as ecologically unsustainable and disproportionately allocated to people with unwarranted privilege based on the color of their skin.

Through all of these examples of progressive feudalism that California is perfecting even as they export them to the rest of America, the same themes apply. Reduce consumption. Ration energy and water. Ration the supply of available land for construction. Reduce the privileged middle class, in this case by transforming their suburbs into high-density neighborhoods with abundant subsidized housing. Justify all of it in the name of saving the planet and social justice.

Make Basic Necessities Unaffordable

The consequence of California’s excessive, environmentalist-inspired policies is to make the state unaffordable. It comes from a fundamental worldview that California uses all of its cultural influence to reinforce in America and across the globe: Austerity is necessary to save the planet. This goes all the way back to Jerry Brown’s “era of limits” philosophy which he promoted during his first terms as governor back in the 1970s.

The basic necessities of life—housing, transportation, energy, and water—cost more in California than anywhere else in America. This is because of artificially imposed scarcity, a choice that is entirely avoidable. Along with making it impossible to profitably build affordable market housing, California no longer makes significant public investments in energy, water, or transportation infrastructure—preferring instead to redirect available funds to public employee pay and benefits. They justify this by claiming they are protecting the environment, but the real winners are the special interests.

The fully co-opted, unionized public sector is a primary beneficiary of a hyper-regulated state where everything costs more than it should. Stratospheric home values translate directly into higher property tax receipts. Elevated utility and telecommunications prices to the consumer enable higher returns from the hidden taxes and fees embedded in the monthly billings. Public employee pension funds benefit when their real estate portfolios soar in value.

Also benefiting from artificial scarcity are landowners, established corporations, public utilities, and investment funds, all of which realize higher profits and returns when competitors are shut out and captive consumers bid up prices on limited supplies. Public utilities offer a particularly pernicious example of how artificial scarcity elevates profit. The profits these regulated utilities can earn are limited to a percentage of their revenues. But when expensive renewable energy is delivered on this cost-plus basis to the consumer, they can sell the same or even fewer kilowatt-hours for far more revenue. Since they are allocated a fixed percentage of their revenue for profit, higher revenue always means higher profits.

This philosophy of limits and austerity, pioneered in California and pushed relentlessly into the culture, is as dangerous to the prospects of ordinary Americans in the rest of the country as the actual policies enacted by California’s politicians.

The blessings of capitalism, where competitive development and innovation yield ongoing and broadly distributed prosperity, are assigned no credibility in California. They are discredited as harming the planet and inherently racist, in a stunning inversion of logic promulgated as much by high-tech billionaires as by the zealous millennials emerging from California’s K-12 system of public school indoctrination. Which brings us to public education.

Destroy Public Education

There is one area where California’s influence is felt every election cycle in the rest of the United States, and it comes courtesy of California’s unionized public education system. California’s public employee unions collect and spend over $900 million per year, mostly from member dues. More than half of that, nearly a half-billion per year, comes from public education unions, chief among them the California Teachers Association.

The leadership of these unions are willing to spend hundreds of millions every election cycle to support Democratic candidates and causes. Everywhere. With California’s cities and counties and school boards almost universally dominated by California Teachers Association-approved Democrats, along with both houses of the state legislature and all higher state elected offices, the teachers’ unions have money to burn in the rest of the United States. And that’s exactly what they do, sending out millions to swing close elections to the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and state offices around the country.

Where there’s money for politics, there’s the political clout to completely dominate California’s school system. Thanks to the influence of the teachers’ union, state laws are slowly squeezing charter schools out of existence, with a rising assault on homeschoolers only deferred by the COVID-19 school shutdowns.

Thanks to the teachers’ unions in California, the work rules that prevent teacher accountability and school accountability are already well-established law. Attempting to fire a teacher, or retain the best teachers in layoffs, or even to extend the period of time before a teacher gains tenure and has a job for life, are all rendered nearly impossible in California.

The ways teachers’ unions have used their power to affect the curriculum of California’s public schools are well documented. Most notably, the recent mandate to implement “gender studies” instruction across all age groups that borders on pornographic. Still pending, the mandate to require “ethnic studies” courses as a prerequisite for high-school graduation—something that would have already become law, except the various “stakeholders” haven’t yet agreed on which victimized groups would occupy which positions on the victim hierarchy.

In general, California’s teachers’ unions have committed public schools to a pedagogy that indoctrinates students with their own political ideology. America is a flawed nation founded on racism. White men are oppressors. Capitalism is inherently exploitative. Socialism is the only path to social justice and environmental health.

The impact of the teachers’ unions to reinforce and catalyze California’s socialist vision for America and the world cannot be overstated. Year after year, their money pours over the Sierra Nevada to decisively influence countless political races in the rest of the nation. The national teachers’ unions that lobby for similar curricula around America are dominated by the California leadership and California’s dues revenue.

For over a generation, students thoroughly steeped in socialist ideology have graduated from California’s K-12 schools. As graduates of this indoctrination, they have spread into every state, from the streets of Portland and Seattle to the precincts of Allegheny County. They staff HR departments and activist nonprofits. They are code warriors and social media influencers. The teachers’ unions of California have done their job well. Their proteges are everywhere.

Foment Identity Group Tension

Fundamental to California’s progressive culture is the deconstruction of meritocracy. It’s all an illusion, of course. No start-up that aspires to be Google or Facebook’s next unicorn acquisition expects to achieve such glory by hiring incompetent programmers. But the institutional drive towards erasing colorblind, genderblind criteria has progressed further in California than anywhere else in the United States. For any corporation still doing business in California, these policies have enterprise-wide impact.

Just last month, for example, Newsom signed AB 979, which requires publicly traded corporations to “appoint directors from underrepresented communities to their boards.” A close reading of this law reveals the brazen, punitive arrogance of California’s Democrats, exemplified by the announced fine of $100,000 merely for “failure to timely file board member information with the Secretary of State.”

A tactic of the Left, perfected in California, is to measure aggregate group achievement, by ethnicity or by gender, and then to ascribe all variation between groups either to racism or sexism. And to the argument that perhaps there are factors related to competence, qualifications, and merit, rather than racism or sexism alone explaining these disparities, the response has been to eliminate those factors as official evaluation criteria, or even as subjects we are allowed to discuss.

Why else is it that the regents of the University of California, yielding to pressure from the state legislature, haveeliminated the use of the SAT and ACT tests as a method to evaluate college applicants? Why is it that California is lowering the score required to pass the bar exam and become a licensed attorney?

All of these steps and more are being pioneered in California. In November, California voters will even have the opportunity to bring back affirmative action, which would restore the explicitly racist (and sexist) requirement for public and private institutions to achieve proportional representation by race and gender in admissions, hiring, pay, and promotions. Where does this end?

It doesn’t end there. Governor Newsom has just signed another bill, AB 3070, which will “establish a first-in-the-nation task force to study and make recommendations on reparations for slavery.” Critics have suggested this is just Newsom’s way to position himself to run for president in 2024 or 2028. Maybe. And he could win. But meanwhile, given their record to-date, there is no evidence whatsoever that California’s state legislature would not enact a reparations bill.

As part of their relentless, intrepid quest for social justice, California’s woke Democrats are not just trailblazing quotas, affirmative action, and reparations and exporting them across the United States—another pioneering innovation is to declare racism to be a public health emergency. This notion gained national traction in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it was already being pushed by health providers in California.

Which brings us to California’s excessive attention to public health, to the point of absurdity and beyond.

Health and Safety Mandates 

The COVID-19 lockdowns may have grabbed the headlines, but California has been going off the deep end in pursuit of health and safety for decades. A good example is Proposition 65, the “Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act,” sold to voters in 1986. This is the California law responsible for cancer-warning signs so ubiquitous that most Californians know it’s better just to ignore them.

In bars and restaurants, on playground equipment, shoes, umbrellas, and golf club covers, even around Disneyland, consumers are warned that a product served on the premises—even the place itself—“is known to the state of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.”

While most Californians have gotten used to these warning labels, they are no laughing matter. They expose small businesses to ruinous lawsuits. Prop. 65 is often out of step with scientific consensus because it draws from a reference list of nearly 1,000 chemicals, chosen if, according to state regulators, they could cause “one excess case of cancer in 100,000 individuals exposed to the chemical over a 70-year lifetime.” But with criteria like that, everything causes cancer.

Like so many regulations, the biggest victims of Prop. 65 are small businesses. Prop. 65 deputizes private trial lawyers to search for evidence of noncompliance. Small businesses, which generally don’t have the resources to fight costly legal battles, are often compelled to settle. Because the penalties for “failure to warn” are so steep, businesses paid $35 million in Prop. 65 settlements in 2018, with more than three-quarters of this total going to attorney fees. Some lawyers who specialize in this area take home more than $1 million in fees per year.

The federal government is the only backstop against a law so broad that it applies to products produced anywhere in the world and that are sold in California. In August 2019, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took the unprecedented step of issuing guidance stating it won’t approve of Prop. 65’s “false labeling” on the weedkiller Roundup because the science doesn’t support it. EPA didn’t mince words: “It is irresponsible to require labels on products that are inaccurate when EPA knows the product does not pose a cancer risk,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. “We will not allow California’s flawed program to dictate federal policy.”

This federal action against Prop. 65 came on the heels of a long-sought exemption for coffee in June. This about-face was the result of outrage from coffeemakers, drinkers, and even scientists who demonstrated that coffee was not a cancer risk. Another federal agency—the Food and Drug Administration—threatened to “step in” if the state went ahead with Prop. 65 labels for coffee. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb explained that these “could mislead consumers to believe that drinking coffee could be dangerous to their health when it actually could provide health benefits.” Imagine a White House in the hands of someone more favorably disposed to California’s global ambitions.

The Battle For California Is the Battle for America

But again, it’s not just coffee or weed killer. California’s long reach is far more ambitious. What we drive, where we live, and how much we pay for basic necessities—all of these questions are destined to be answered with far more restrictions making everything far more costly, if California’s policies are successfully exported to the rest of the United States.

Despite covering a lot of ground in this discussion of how California is transforming itself and the rest of the nation in the process, there are more examples of equal significance left unexamined. California’s proposed wealth tax borrows from proposals from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and returns the favor by creating a model for states and possibly even the federal government to emulate. There’s also California’s minimum wage laws, set to drive the statewide minimum wage to the highest in the nation; California’s extraordinary hostility to small businesses; and California’s punitive rates of taxation.

To counter California enacting laws and regulations that corporations will simply adopt for their entire global product line, or HR manual, the political and cultural values that dominate California must be challenged. Sadly, many corporations have decided it is more cost-effective for them simply to adopt these practices than to bother fighting them. In California, most corporations have realized their commercial aspirations are actually better served by adhering to the excessive restrictions imposed by California, because it creates artificial scarcity which drives up prices, it creates captive markets purchasing mandated products, and it throws up barriers to innovative competitors lacking the financial resilience to comply.

For these reasons, out-of-state interests must recognize California for what it is—a plutocracy that has put its own interests before the interests of its residents.

This power of this plutocracy is almost indescribable and extends well beyond their alliance with environmentalist nonprofits and public sector unions. California’s plutocrats not only have personal wealth measured in tens of billions, but they control the most powerful corporations on earth. These corporations have monopoly power over America’s online communications and search platforms, and equally if not more significant, their companies are at the epicenter of a high-tech ecosystem capable of developing and rapidly deploying advanced autonomous weapons systems. In a low-intensity civil war, California, allied with other blue states, might easily hold its own.

The Battle for America is the Battle for the Future of the World

California’s plutocrats don’t just have their eye on America, they want to conquer the world. For them, progressive feudalism is the political economy of the future, enabling them to preside over a reduction in the quality of Western lifestyles and individual freedom and a leveling of wealth around the world, while exponentially increasing their own wealth and power.

Once they’ve taken over the United States, they may face a reckoning with the progressive electorate and militant cadres that were their enablers on the ground, but it wouldn’t last long. By then the technology-driven police state will be perfected, with limitless access to robots, slap drones, nanobots, cyberware, and precision pathogens offering effortless control of even the most restive populations.

For these reasons, overcoming the progressive feudalists now, by changing the sentiment of California’s electorate, is not only preferable to violence, it has a higher probability of success. Most Californians have figured out that something is wrong, but they have been brainwashed into fearing the alternatives. They fear meritocracy. They fear capitalism. They fear racism. They fear climate change. They have slowly become accustomed to what is becoming tyranny, and they believe material poverty is necessary to save the planet and atone for racism. And in all these areas, the people who could offer common-sense solutions have been censored and disparaged.

But the progressive feudalists have one fatal weakness: They are wrong. The fundamental premises they use to justify their actions are flawed.

Meritocracy is the only way a free people can create an efficient, prosperous, opportunity society. Without it, nobody has any incentive to innovate or work hard. The capable and hard-working become cynical and resentful, while the incompetent and the indolent know they don’t have to step up, because they can live for free.

Capitalism is not dangerous, it is the engine of progress. It has been conflated with corporate monopolies and financial speculators. What a free nation does is use thoughtful regulations to amputate the gangrenous appendages of capitalist corruption, the predators and the gamblers, leaving the pure and competitive heart of capitalist competition to thrive.

Racism is an odious fact of history, in all nations and cultures, but the facts today in California tell a very different story. Racism, such as it is, is institutionalized to favor nonwhites in every aspect of society, hiring, admissions, and promotions. To the extent racial disparities exist in academic group achievement, it is the result of schools that have been destroyed by the teachers’ union monopoly, which has been proven to disproportionately damage schools in low-income areas. And as courageous conservatives in the black and Latino communities are asserting with increasing confidence, building wealth and income in these communities requires internal cultural change: stay married, work hard, stay in school, study marketable skills, reject drugs and alcohol and gangs. There are ample examples of communities in the United States that have overcome discrimination, or possible discrimination, and have thrived. It can be done. Take responsibility.

Finally, there is climate change, the trump card of the collectivists, played by progressive feudalists whenever they decide it’s time to end the debate and get on with their agenda. But everything the environmental extremists have done in recent years has caused harm. Suburban expansion doesn’t stop climate change, it just makes housing unaffordable. Forest “preservation” doesn’t preserve forests, it turns them into tinderboxes that are periodically obliterated by fire. Natural gas is affordable and clean, and has already allowed Americans to lower their ratio of CO2 emissions to energy consumption to the lowest of all industrialized nations. Are the Chinese and Indians going to lower their emissions? Because if they don’t, so what if Americans do? And what about nuclear power? Why is the renewables lobby shutting down Diablo Canyon?

These are the messages that must be taken to California’s voters, without apology or equivocation. Expand suburbs along the freeway corridors into the vast rangeland of California. Build new reservoirs and restore the aqueducts. Build desalination plants up and down the California coast and keep Diablo Canyon open. Thin the forests, restore the timber industry, and build biomass power plants to turn the trimmings into clean electricity. Instead of squandering billions on the bullet train, widen the roads with smart lanes for high speed, high tech cars. Drill for natural gas in the Monterey Shale. Mine lithium in the Mojave Desert. Deregulate, so builders and business owners can spend their time, talents, and money on productive work instead of permits and fees. And launch a frontal assault on the teachers’ union by enacting school choice with vouchers parents can redeem wherever they want.

This is a contract with California that would entice everyone. This is the enlightened, empowering capitalism that delivers the broad prosperity and freedom that progressive feudalism promises but cannot possibly deliver. This is the agenda that will enable voters in California to understand that competitive abundance is a morally preferable choice. California can be affordable again without compromising environmentalist values.

California can deliver opportunity to everyone again, no matter who they are or where they came from. Americans who want to prevent the Californication of America must step up, dollar for dollar, to counter the spending of California’s public sector unions and resident billionaires.

California’s seething population, searching for answers, must realize the premises used to justify their misery rely on convenient illusions, conjured by special interests for their own gain. But the battle must be fought. Somebody has to tell them.

What is at stake in California is not just California. It is the future of America. It is the future of the world.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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There is No Moral Justification for the “Lincoln Project”

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Speaking recently to a predictably sympathetic Lesley Stahl on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” members of the “Lincoln Project” Super PAC claimed they were trying to rescue the integrity of the Republican Party and defeat “Trumpism.” These former Republican consultants claim that the party under Trump has betrayed what they believed were core Republican values.

Given everything the Lincoln Project is doing, however, it is clear they are not trying to “rescue” the Republican Party from anything. They are trying to destroy it.

Why else would they not only be targeting the president, but also, as The Hill reported in August, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), John Cornyn (R-Texas) Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Steve Daines (R-Mt.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.)?

There are 23 Republican U.S. senators up for reelection next month. The Lincoln Project is spending heavily against 14 of them. The Washington Post recently identified the close races for U.S. Senate, naming eight Republicans as vulnerable: Gardner, McSally, Collins, Tillis, Ernst, Graham, Daines, and David Perdue of Georgia. Of these eight Republican senators, only Perdue is not on the Lincoln Project’s hit list. Perhaps that’s an oversight.

In close races, a few nudges this way or that can make all the difference, and if the 2020 election is anything like the 2016 election, nudges will matter. The Lincoln Project, which reportedly already has collected more than $60 million, is a big nudge.

As Lincoln Project attack ad guru Rick Wilson said on “60 Minutes,” “it’s a game of small numbers. I mean, Donald Trump won [the 2016] election by 77,000 votes in three states.” And as Lincoln Project treasurer Reed Galen said, when asked if the Lincoln Project has endorsed Joe Biden, “We have. We have endorsed Joe Biden. Yes.”

Attempting to explain a moral justification for their decision to “rescue” the Republican Party, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt explained, “We all had a conviction that there are millions of Republicans who look at this debacle and reject it. And what we thought we could do is talk to those voters in the language and the iconography that they understand, connect with them, and persuade them, many of them, to vote for the Democratic nominee for the first time in their lives.”

But here is the disconnect. They’re not only targeting the president, they’re targeting moderate Republican senators. And President Trump, for all those “millions” who “look at this debacle and reject it,” is enjoying an 87 percent approval rating among Republicans. So what is this “Trumpism” from which the Lincoln Project is bent on rescuing Republicans?

The Choice Between Trump and Biden

Imagine a Biden victory; imagine Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. Here are some things we could expect.

School choice will become much harder. Charter schools and homeschooling will come under withering attack; the teachers’ unions will further consolidate their monopoly on public education.

The move toward leftist indoctrination will gain momentum, with public education and corporate HR departments promoting divisive “critical race theory” and gender ideology with the full support of the White House and U.S. Congress.

The environmentalist “sue-and-settle” scams will resume. Powerful nonprofits will sue the EPA to block development of natural resources, housing, or rational forest management, and the EPA will pay the environmentalist attorneys off immediately, then issue stricter regulations as part of the settlement.

America’s foreign policy will be set adrift, with appeasement resuming vis à vis Iran and China, alienating allies in the Middle East and Asia. Nothing of substance will change with the Russians, with whom Trump’s actions have been tough even as his rhetoric has sought to de-escalate tensions.

Conversely, expect America’s military adventurism to resume. Trump is the first president since Gerald Ford not to start a new war. No wonder the military industrial complex and intelligence community is against him.

Expect ideological “free trade” orthodoxy to reign again, enabling America’s multinational corporations and global investors to resume selling America to foreigners to fund the trade deficit. Expect a return to the Obama era’s “those jobs aren’t coming back” mentality, with the added twist of a post-COVID “great reset” used to justify a semi-comatose economy.

Public works projects such as Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan will not have any effective oversight, because instead of a construction expert heading the federal executive branch, a doddering old man who couldn’t have managed an honest, efficient public works project in his prime will be in charge. By the time the consultants, bureaucrats, litigators, and unions have taken their cuts, very little of value will get built.

America’s forests will continue to be overgrown tinderboxes, even as the nuclear, fracking, coal, gas, oil, and hydroelectric industries are slowly throttled to death in the name of combatting the “climate change” that is falsely claimed to be the primary cause of wildfires.

Homelessness and lawlessness in America’s cities will get worse, as Democratic “compassion” prevents police from effectively curbing drug use, theft, assault, vandalism, and vagrancy. The homeless industrial complex will continue to soak taxpayers for countless billions, building ridiculously expensive “low income” and “supportive” housing that only accommodates a small fraction of the “unhoused.”

America’s suburbs will be relentlessly densified, as the war on single family homes goes national. At the same time as new housing on open land increasingly is outlawed in the name of preventing “climate change,” millions of refugees will be admitted to the United States. The cruelty of this inherently flawed policy—expand the population, but prohibit urban expansion—will ruin the quality of life for millions of hard working Americans.

The recent tide of conservative federal judge appointments will be rolled back. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, with or without Amy Coney Barrett, may even be overturned by an expansion of the nine justices to “depoliticize” the high court. Expect rulings favoring the leftist agenda to join the administrative state and a sympathetic Congress to stop a conservative resurgence in its tracks.

“Reparations” will be declared for America’s blacks, heedless of the documented, counter-productive futility of throwing money and privilege at those deemed disadvantaged. Increasingly comprehensive quotas in hiring, promotions, contract awards, and college admissions will be enforced to ensure proportional representation in all areas of society by all identifiable groups.

The Electoral College may be restructured so future presidential elections will hinge on the outcome of the popular vote.

And, needless to say, the COVID-19 lockdowns and mask-wearing mandates will become the enforced model for every flu season from now on.

As California Goes . . .

What Joe Biden and the Democrats offer America might be most accurately described as progressive feudalism. Progressive ideals, warped into a straitjacket of identity politics and green fanaticism, will justify socialist redistribution that will wipe out most of what is left of the middle class. The progressive feudalism model has already been pioneered in California, where a small elite wields obscene wealth while the majority of people belong to an underclass that is dependent on government handouts.

This is the world the members of the Lincoln Project are attempting to sell to America. They are using all of their skills and all of the money they’ve received—almost all of it from wealthy Democrats—to tilt the election and shove the nation into this future. They cannot possibly be unaware of what they are doing.

The long-term economic challenges now facing the United States after the economy was deliberately turned off in 2020 are only just beginning to be felt. Trump, for all his bombast and bellicosity, understands the difference between “shovel ready” fraud, and actual productive investment in American manufacturing and infrastructure. He is needed now more than ever.

If Trump loses, the face of that Republican Party will not be anything the Lincoln Project envisions, as they attempt to “rescue” it. They are only mercenaries with a mission—to turn against everything they’ve ever fought for, and make a whole lot of money doing it.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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BART Faces Financial Reckoning

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Of all the public agencies facing financial challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public transit has taken the biggest initial hit. The reasons for this are obvious: when there’s a lockdown and businesses are closed, commuters stay home. And of those still fortunate enough to have places to go, few want to board busses and trains where they risk heightened exposure to contagions.

Northern California’s biggest transit system is the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, commonly referred to as BART, with operating expenses of nearly $1.0 billion per year. In good years, operating revenues – primarily fares and parking fees – never covered more than around 75 percent of operating costs. But that was back in 2016, when ridership peaked, at around 435,000 per weekday, whereas pre-COVID ridership in early 2020 was running around 405,000 per day. Weekend ridership had been dropping at a higher pace than weekday commuting because of board policies that tolerate homelessness, open use of hard drugs, panhandling and petty theft on the trains.

In addition, over the past four years, the BART board of directors has been giving away an increasing array of discounts at the same time as operating costs have steadily increased. There has also been increasing tolerance on the part of the board for fare evasion which lowers revenues by, depending on which expert you ask, between $25 and $50 million per year.

In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic shutdown, BART ridership fell to 6 percent of what would have been normal for that month. Today, ridership has only rebounded to around 13 percent of normal. Even the most optimistic expectations for the fiscal year ending 6/30/2021 only estimate ridership to rebound to around 35 percent of normal.

Even without COVID as an obstacle, will BART ridership ever recover from its steady decline? How many of the major San Francisco employers still attract commuters, when, for example, Schwab, Wells Fargo, and PG&E are all moving operations out of the city, and others intend to dramatically scale back in-person office work?

The financial implications of this implosion in ridership are shown on the following chart, which draws from publicly disclosed information. It doesn’t take a financial wizard to see the trend. Plummeting revenues, rising costs, skyrocketing deficits.

What BART faces in its current fiscal year, based on what may be optimistic ridership expectations, is a system that can only pay for 11 percent of its operating costs through operating revenues. This isn’t nearly enough to allow the normal state and local tax subsidies to cover the difference. To cover this shortfall, BART, like most public agencies in California, is looking for federal bailout funds. They have already received $377 million of federal subsidies, and they’re going to need at least another $230 million just to get through the next 18 months. But what if BART experiences a sustained drop in ridership? The assumptions that governed planning and management of the BART system have fundamentally changed, probably forever.

BART’s Financial Challenges Must be Faced

The BART system has always relied on subsidies to fund their operations. That is considered normal for public transit agencies. But these subsidies have enabled BART management to avoid making tough choices to improve the efficiency of their operation. And the actual cost for BART is not only based on their operating budget that currently sits at around $850 million per year, but its annual capital budget that always exceeds $1.0 billion per year. And 95 percent of BART’s annual capital budget typically comes from taxpayers.

As with most public agencies, pay and benefits are the most significant cost variable. BART’s direct employee costs including benefits during 2019, based on data reported to the State Controller, were $623 million, including over $72 million in overtime. Based on information provided by BART to the State Controller, in 2019, the average pay and benefits paid to a full time BART employee was $163,000, not including payments necessary to reduce the unfunded pension liability.

Making up for years of inadequate pension fund contributions is an expensive undertaking. As of 6/30/2019 (the most recent data available for BART’s safety and miscellaneous employees), BART’s unfunded pension liability stood at $833 million dollars. CalPERS’ own data projects an unfunded payment from BART in the 2020-21 fiscal year of $59 million. Add that to the direct employee pay and benefit costs to get a more accurate estimate of personnel costs.

It would take more than a casual look at these averages to fully understand where there might be room for, at the very least, a freeze in pay and benefit increases of any kind. This sort of analysis could be performed with most of the BART positions, by comparing them to what, for example, people with similar job descriptions earn while working for Amtrak, or other railroad operations in California. If there is to be any appropriate time for making this sort of tough analysis, now would certainly qualify.

BART Oversight and Management is Lacking

It is difficult to ascertain who exactly runs BART. The board of directors consists of 9 part-time positions. The individuals occupying these elected positions contend with low voter awareness, and hence are often dependent on funding from the unions representing BART employees to pay for their political campaigns. In this current election season, both the SEIU and AFSCME, representing bargaining units at BART, have contributed to reelect their favored candidates.

When examining the posted biographies of BART’s current board of directors, it is fair to wonder what qualifies them to manage a transit organization with a combined operating and capital budget that exceeds $2.0 billion per year. Without dwelling on the publicly available details, one must wonder why board members whose primary career experiences were as community organizers, homeless activists, racial justice advocates, open space preservationists, cycling aficionados, and similar non-financial pursuits, are qualified to negotiate with the unions that funded their political campaigns. There is only one former CPA on the nine-member board, hardly constituting a majority.

Meanwhile, the actual governing majority of board members are deferring discussions as to how to fill more projected deficits until after the November 3 election. But when will BART’s board members step up and address systemic management failures? The COVID-19 shutdown may have brought the consequences of mismanagement to an early crisis, but even if there’s a bailout and reopening, the crisis will persist. Without major restructuring, BART is not sustainable. For example:

  • The board needs to right size the services and the top management overhead.
  • The system needs to divest of non-transit activity such as developing low-income housing on BART property.
  • They need to prioritize their transit projects and rethink their level of involvement in major proposed expansion projects.
  • They need to renegotiate the work rules that have enabled BART employees to manipulate their schedules to maximize overtime.

Three of the public employee union contracts expire in June 2021. Negotiations to renew these contracts are already underway. If BART’s board of directors is serious about restoring any sort of financial sustainability to their system, all contract provisions should be subject to negotiation.

In the current contract negotiations, if BART had a financially literate board of directors that properly understood that their job required them to prioritize the interests of fare paying riders and taxpayers, union rumblings of a strike would be met by the respectful suggestion to “go ahead.” With BART ridership at a small fraction of normal, and a new world dawning on the other side of the COVID pandemic, now would be a perfect time to shut BART down and redesign the entire system.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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The Medical Slave State

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“I’ll see you on the outside—68 days.” “That’s in jail. You still don’t know where you’re at?” “Yeah, where am I at?” “With us, baby, you’re with us. And you gonna stay with us until we let you go.”
— Randle McMurphy and Attendant Washington, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975)

This scene from the film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest offered up a cautionary tale nearly five decades ago that has tremendous relevance today. Because in that moment, Randle McMurphy, played by the great Jack Nicholson, realized he was in a situation he hadn’t bargained for and couldn’t control.

Decent Americans have no reason to empathize with Randle McMurphy, a character who was at the very least an incorrigible sociopath and a menace. But Americans today are in a situation they hadn’t bargained for, and they are rapidly losing control of their destiny.

Once whatever challenges Americans face are declared medical emergencies, it now appears they have no constitutional rights. All individual actions can now be controlled by executive fiat. If behavior that runs contrary to the objectives of America’s most powerful establishment institutions can be declared a pathology, the inconvenience of due process can be discarded. They’ll just put you in an asylum and throw away the key. They’ll lock you down. They’ll tell you where you can go, who you can see, what products you can consume, and what content you can watch.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider the events of the past nine months. A two-week “lockdown” to “slow the spread” has turned into a catastrophic shutdown with no end in sight. The entire nation has been turned into a medically supervised asylum as corporate elites mop up what’s left of independent businesses. Whatever chances America ever had of crawling out of debt have been drowned by trillions in new federal borrowing. Life in America may never be the same again.

The scariest thing about this medical usurpation of the constitutional rights of Americans is the precedent it has set. One may argue forever over whether or not the COVID-19 virus required this level of lockdown, but at least it was a virus. At least it was a genuine medical challenge. If this virus didn’t actually merit these measures, perhaps the next one will. But what if any agenda of social control can be medicalized?

The Medical Emergencies of “Systemic Racism” and Climate Change?

Don’t laugh. Already there are doctors willing to declare so-called “systemic racism” a public health emergency. With the lengths to which corporate America, the media, academia, the entertainment industry, and liberal politicians are already willing to go in the name of combating systemic racism, imagine how much further they’ll go once they’ve declared it a medical emergency? “Follow the science,” they will say. “Listen to the scientists.” Or the infantile phrase now used to make whatever statement it precedes beyond debate, “Science says….” And when “the scientists” decide systemic racism is a health emergency, politicians will be empowered to do whatever they want.

In the name of combating the health emergency of systemic racism, for example, forced integration of suburbs will become a matter beyond legal challenge. To be clear: Reasonable people don’t care if people of differing races move into their suburb and become their neighbors. What reasonable people object to is working all their lives to pay for a home in a safe, quiet neighborhood, and then having their taxes used to fund people moving in, becoming their neighbors, and living there for free.

Medicalization of political issues is sort of like the liberal rhetoric of compassion but more potent. It provides a powerful tool for self-aggrandizing opportunists, in an irony that utterly escapes rank and file liberals. For example, low-income multi-family housing, imposed scattershot into neighborhoods that were previously 100 percent single-family homes, offers financial windfalls to tax-subsidized investors. But now the hard-working residents who just want the people they live around to pay the same prices they did, and make the same sacrifices they did, aren’t just personally defamed as racists. Now they’re said to be suffering from a collective pathology. The cure, demanded because this is a health emergency, will undermine if not virtually erase their standing in court to object. Investors get rich. Residents get ruined. Racism is supposedly cured.

The “climate emergency” is also moving swiftly towards being defined as a health emergency, with all the streamlining of process and obliteration of constitutional rights inherent in such a declaration. It isn’t hard to see where this is going: micromanagement of virtually everything people do. To justify this, America’s elites, looking down from lofty heights, see a nation with a pathological need to overindulge in resource consumption. Sustainable options abound to address potential resource scarcity—clean natural gas, nuclear power, biomass conversion, hydropower, indoor agriculture, desalination, and eventually, commercial fusion. And of course, mass immigration is not inevitable, it’s a policy choice. More resources, slower population growth. Problem solved. But these options don’t allow opportunistic special interests to make more profit. They don’t allow America’s establishment elites to amass more power.

Turning environmentalism and the “climate emergency” into a health emergency, on the other hand, admirably fulfills the elitist goals of more profit and power. Cram people into the footprints of existing cities via “smart growth” in order to artificially inflate the value of entitled land. The rich get richer while everyone else no longer can afford rent or their mortgage payment. More and more voters demand subsidies. Artificially scarce, rationed energy and water deliver spectacular profits to the utilities, which collect a regulated percentage profit atop grossly inflated revenues, even while actually delivering less to consumers. High tech manufacturers deliver buggy, internet-enabled appliances that monitor and manage electricity and water consumption, and are obsolete within a few years.

The plutocrats prosper. The people suffer. The planet is supposedly saved.

COVID Precedent Points Toward Future Slavery

Everything put in place to combat the COVID pandemic is furthering the creation of a medical slave state. A medical emergency was declared, everyone was told to go on lockdown, and with fitful exceptions, everyone went on lockdown. The population is now desensitized to the term “lockdown.” That a medical emergency can erase constitutional rights is now a fact, not conjecture. And the technology of surveillance and control has taken a giant leap forward with contact tracing, facial recognition, the inevitable tiers of privileges that will be attendant to individual vaccination status, and the fact that the American people, by and large, accept this.

The medical state, usurping constitutional rights, is now a reality poised to mutate and attack whatever realms serve the interests of the rich and powerful.

President Trump, on three critical issues—the pandemic, systemic racism, and climate change—has been a consistent voice of common sense. This fact, that Trump opposes alarmist overreaction to these issues, and without fear or hesitation exposes the hidden agendas behind the overreaction, is the real reason he is bitterly opposed by every establishment institution in America. President Trump is one of America’s last hopes to reverse the permanent medicalization of public policy, bypassing the constitution.

If Trump’s most implacable and powerful opponents had their way, they would lock him up in an asylum like Randle McMurphy. Unlike Kesey’s unforgettable character, however, President Trump is dangerously sane, as are his supporters. Watch out. The doctors, with paid-for diagnoses, are coming for all of you.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Why is the Prison Guards Union Targeting Senator Moorlach?

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In a tight race, incumbent Republican state senator John Moorlach has been targeted by the prison guards union. In a report filed on October 1, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association Independent Expenditure Committee disclosed spending $910,705 on cable television ads and mailers opposing Moorlach.

Running to unseat Senator Moorlach is Democrat David Min, whose campaign website leaves no doubt as to how he’s going to vote once he gets elected. His endorsements constitute a revealing list of who really runs California; public sector unions representing teachers, firefighters, nurses, AFSCME, the SEIU and dozens of others. While other special interests, in particular, powerful environmentalist pressure groups and high tech billionaires, exercise significant influence over California’s Democrats, the government employee unions are the senior partners.

It is nonetheless inexplicable why the CCPOA would oppose Moorlach in favor of an orthodox California Democrat who is much more likely to support Newsom’s intention to close two of California’s prisons. What could possibly override that very real threat to the interests of a union representing prison guards?

Understanding this apparent contradiction is key to understanding the priorities of public sector unions in California. Perhaps CCPOA is banking on public backlash to the anarchy overwhelming California’s cities to ultimately preclude prison closures. On the other hand, perhaps the CCPOA sees Moorlach’s ability to work with Democrats to enact pension reform as a genuine threat.

Senator John Moorlach is the most financially literate, articulate and outspoken champion of fiscal responsibility in the California State Legislature, and has been since he took office. He is capable of explaining to Democrats the urgency of pension reform. As federal bailout money begins to run out, and the deferred impact of the pandemic shutdown puts California’s state and local government agencies into an acute financial crisis, Moorlach’s presence in the state legislature could spell the difference between making necessary changes to pension benefit formulas, and maintaining them unaltered regardless of the cost.

A review of the legislation that Moorlach has sponsored over the past few years shows him to be a very different legislator than the “anti-science” politician with “extreme views” as alleged on a website paid for by his opponents with the grossly misleading URL “johnmoorlachforsenate.com.” In fact, Moorlach’s bills, most of which were killed by the Democrats, are practical, non-ideological attempts to make government more transparent and accountable, efficient, and fiscally sustainable.

During times of surplus cash flows, accumulating debt and unfunded liabilities can be ignored, as can grossly expanded expenditures. But when the next financial crunch arrives, and it will, Moorlach’s presence in the California State Legislature will become a serious threat to the status-quo. Bills he’s previously introduced and had rejected will be resubmitted, and Moorlach will both make the case and provide the political cover for their possible passage.

For example, in 2018, Moorlach introduced SB 1033, which would have forced agencies that take actions which increase a pension liability to take full financial responsibility for the increase. As it is, when an agency takes an action that increases the amount of a pension liability, all the agencies where any of the benefiting employees previously worked have to help cover that increase, even though they had no voice in its approval.

In 2017, Moorlach introduced SB 32, which merely attempted to enact some of the reforms that Governor Brown had hoped to include in his 2013 Public Employee Pension Reform Act (PEPRA). Also in 2017, Moorlach tried to rein in retiree medical costs with SB 454. All of these fiscal reforms proposed by Moorlach, and others, were shot down by the Democratic leadership. But some Democrats supported them. In a tighter economy, Moorlach could introduce reforms like this and they could be passed.

Is this the real reason nearly every public sector union in California, even the CCPOA, are determined to get John Moorlach out of office? Moorlach can explain why, in terms everyone can understand, public employee retirement benefits are unaffordable and unfair to taxpayers. And once you’ve created an extraordinarily privileged class of public employees, largely exempt from the economic hardship which is a direct result of policies it supported, financial truth is a dangerous thing.

A final irony in all this is the apparent fact that even the threat to close prisons does not animate the CCPOA as much as getting rid of a politician that might successfully build a consensus to reformulate their pensions. Republicans in general, and Senator Moorlach in particular, are far more supportive of law enforcement than Democrats.

After all, it wasn’t Republicans, or Senator Moorlach, who pushed for disastrous initiatives such as Prop. 47 that downgraded drug and property crimes, or Prop. 57 that put many dangerous felons back on the streets. It wasn’t Republicans, or Senator Moorlach, that pushed for and passed ridiculous legislation such as AB 953 that requires police to fill out reports on the race and sex and gender identity of every person they pull over or otherwise interact with. It wasn’t Republicans, or Senator Moorlach who pushed the state legislature to eliminate bail in SB 10. The list goes on. And it wasn’t Republicans, or Senator Moorlach, who are trying to shut down California’s prisons.

Public sector union members and their leadership are urged to adapt to the financial tsunami that is coming ashore. Tough financial concessions are inevitable, no matter who is in office. With that as a given, they ought to back politicians who will be easier on small businesses to grow the economy and the tax base, and tougher on criminals to take back our streets – not the other way around.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Saving California Will Save America

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As proven by the torrent of executive orders issued by King Newsom during this COVID-19 pandemic, during a public emergency, constitutional rights and due process go out the window. In the coming years, with California’s one-party state leading the way, expect climate emergencies, systemic racism emergencies, and new health related emergencies to shred what is left of democracy in America.

hese “emergencies” are enabling the onset of political tyranny in California, with Governor Gavin Newsom as the figurehead. His most significant overseers are the teachers’ unions and Big Tech billionaires. These two blocs spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on political campaigns and lobbyists, along with funding powerful nonprofit groups that agitate for politically useful agendas with respect to the environment, homelessness, social justice, and race and gender equity.

All this well-funded advocacy is framed as “for the people” and “for the planet,” but in reality, everything Newsom, his predecessors, and his puppeteers have done has failed ordinary Californians, while delivering more power and more profits to California’s ruling elite.

Instead of rounding up the homeless, sorting them according to their various problems or pathologies, and putting them in supervised tent encampments in low cost areas in the state, California’s homeless advocates and profiteering “nonprofit” developers build taxpayer funded “supportive housing” palaces that cost over a half-million per unit in the middle of expensive residential neighborhoods, solving nothing. Meanwhile, cities descend into filth and anarchy.

Instead of implementing school choice, the teachers union demands more funding for failed models of public education. And instead of going out and finally allowing property owners and timber companies to clear the dead trees out of the overgrown forests – thanks to years of suppressing natural fires and driving away the logging industry – Gavin Newsom issues an executive order to ban gasoline cars within the next 14 years. Meanwhile, the forests keep on burning.

There is only one way to save California, and by extension, save America. The democratic will of the people must reassert itself in a massive realignment of public sentiment. To win these landslides, too seismic to be challenged by executive fiat, political candidates must step forward by the thousands, adhering to a new agenda that openly rejects core premises of the Democratic party, and offers a new political agenda that promises to do the exact opposite.

In three fundamental areas, public education, land use, and energy infrastructure, California’s current policies are destroying lives, livelihoods, and land. And in all three of these areas, California’s Democrats claim the moral high ground. But Democrats do not hold the moral high ground. They are ruining everything, from California’s cities to its forests. How can that be moral?

Union Public School Monopolies Are NOT Moral

The most obvious example, where a realignment tipping point has already almost been reached, is the moral imperative to nurture the next generation. Everyone agrees: Teach the children well, that they might all have a chance at a bright future. But California’s public schools are failing their students, and the problem is the worst in low income neighborhoods where the importance of a good public education is the greatest.

The solution is equally obvious: Public schools need to experience competition. Parents need to be able to choose from an assortment of accredited K-12 schools; public, public charter, virtual, parochial, private, homeschool, and micro-schools.

To implement school choice, education advocates need to stop trying to push whatever baby step their consultants and donors claim is politically possible, and do what is right. They need to demand school vouchers that parents can redeem at whatever school they wish. Voters have had enough. They’re ready to vote for vouchers.

The biggest barrier to vouchers are California’s teachers’ unions, whose state and local chapters combined collect nearly a half-billion in dues each year. These unions use hefty portions of that money to buy politicians and lobbyists, impacting legislation that protects their monopolies.

But they are not doing this “for the children.” The do not hold the moral high ground. They oppose school choice because as a monopoly they can perpetually acquire more members, more dues, and more power. And the parallel moral dimension, at least for the leadership of these teachers’ unions, is they can use their control over the public schools to indoctrinate California’s children.

Packing Population Growth Into Existing Cities is NOT Moral

If there is any area where years of indoctrination have turned ideologically driven opinions into supposed facts beyond dispute, it is in the area of environmentalism. And one of the most fundamental premises of environmentalism, often overlooked, is the delusion that higher density urban areas is necessary to protect the planet. The moral imperative is to save the earth, with “climate change” as the most urgent threat. But no matter what your opinion is about climate change, cramming California’s population into the footprint of existing cities will not have any impact whatsoever on the climate. All it will do is guarantee that housing is unaffordable forever.

If school vouchers is the revolutionary concept that will rescue K-12 education in California, more suburbs on open land is the revolutionary concept that will restore home affordability in California. Almost every premise of the “anti-sprawl” lobby is ridiculous and must be challenged. Single family homes of one or two stories are far less expensive per square foot than multi-story buildings. Building utility infrastructure for new suburbs is less expensive than tearing up streets and easements to retrofit utility conduits to accommodate higher density in cities.

The claim that expanding suburbs contributes to climate change is also ridiculous. Jobs will follow workers to new suburbs. People telecommute. Cars are becoming greener every year.

The idea that land is scarce is equally ridiculous. Using data drawn from 2017 USDA data, only 5.1 percent of California’s whopping 164,000 square mile area is given over to residential, commercial, and industrial use. California’s total urbanized land, 8,280 square miles, is insignificant compared to its 42,498 square miles of grassland, with about half of that used for cattle ranching and dryland farming. To develop a mere 20 percent of this grassland would allow California’s urban footprint to double.

The array of legislation and executive orders designed to prevent new suburban development in California is overwhelming. These laws and executive orders must be overturned, possibly through a constitutional amendment put before voters in the form of a ballot initiative. There is no environmentally compelling reason to block development of new towns and suburbs along California’s major freeways, 101, I-5, and 99, especially if these developments are on rangeland which is of marginal agricultural value and of which only a fraction would be developed anyway.

Expressed as a percentage of California’s vast area, the amount of land necessary to unlock suburban development again on open space is trivial. If ten million Californians moved into homes on spacious quarter-acre lots, four per household, with an equal amount of space developed for new roads and commercial development, it would only consume 1,953 square miles – this would be a 24 percent expansion of California’s urban footprint, i.e., from 5.1 percent to 6.2 percent of all land in the state.

To deny this opportunity to make home ownership affordable to California’s hard working low and middle income residents is based on misanthropic, cruel lies. Allowing suburban development on open land is a moral choice. Until it is again permitted, housing in California will never be affordable.

“Renewable Energy” is NOT Sustainable, Affordable, or Moral

California’s ruling elite has decided that its citizens will bear the brunt of being the bleeding edge of a global transition to “renewable” energy. But by forcing this advance via government decree, they risk impoverishing a generation merely to leave a legacy of obsolete technologies.

A perfect example is Governor Newsom’s recent decree that new gasoline powered cars cannot be sold in the state after 2035, a mere 14 years from today. What if technologies are found to make gasoline powered cars even cleaner? Or what about natural gas powered cars? What about cars like the Chevy Volt, an extraordinary engineering achievement that allows all-electric driving for short commutes, but also delivers 50 MPG in city or freeway driving when in gasoline mode? The Volt died an unwarranted death because California’s green despots did not consider it sufficiently green.

And if California’s energy future is to be exclusively electric, why isn’t nuclear power an option? Why is Diablo Canyon, which could run for several more decades, being decommissioned? Why is California suing the federal government to stop them from increasing the height of Shasta Dam, which would increase hydroelectric capacity?

The selective use of facts to promote “renewables” in California is epic. What sort of analysis has been done as to how much of California’s solar panels, wind turbines and batteries have to be imported? What about the negative environmental impact of solar farms, or wind farms? What about lithium and cobalt, imported from nations where the environmental abuse and labor conditions are hideously worse than anything in the U.S.? Why aren’t mining concerns allowed to exploit the abundant lithium deposits in California’s Mojave Desert?

Then there is the question of what happens to all these “renewable” installations when they degrade and have to be replaced. How long will these solar panels and batteries last, and how will they be reprocessed? Even if California achieves a 100 percent renewable electric energy infrastructure, how can it ever be scaled to be applied worldwide, given the raw materials required and the fact that today solar and wind only supply 3.8 percent of global energy? What about new technologies that may come along and render this massive sacrifice obsolete?

Californians deserve reliable and cheap energy. This means nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and clean natural gas. Doing this makes life affordable for working families, and also makes it easier for manufacturers to come back to California, bringing with them well paying jobs.

Starting a Revolution Against Misery that Masquerades as Morality

Much more can be said about policies in California that harm people and the environment, but these three are foundational. If you fix the schools you reduce crime and enable upward mobility. If you deregulate so you can build new suburbs on open land you make housing affordable, reduce the overall cost-of-living, and reduce homelessness. If you back off these extreme renewable energy mandates you reduce the cost-of-living and stimulate economic growth.

The premises that must be challenged and destroyed, because they are utterly false, are the following:

(1) More money to feed the teachers union monopoly does not help children learn.

(2) Packing people within the footprint of existing cities does not help people or the environment.

(3) “Renewable” energy is not cheap or reliable, and it is not helping the environment.

The policies that must be promoted without reservations or apology, because they are moral choices that will make California livable again, are the following:

(1) School vouchers must be implemented, so parents can choose whatever school they want for their children.

(2) The regulatory barriers to suburban land development must be all but scrapped, so housing that people want will be affordable.

(3) Hydroelectric, natural gas, and nuclear power must be expanded in California, and renewables mandates must be reduced, so energy will be affordable and reliable.

California’s voters are ready to understand that these failed policies are pushed by special interests that benefit from misery. They’re ready to consider new politicians and new policies. But candidates have to be willing to stand up and tell voters the unvarnished truth about current policies, and promise do do the opposite:

The teachers union has a monopoly on education, and the worse things get, the more money they demand.

The major corporations, the investment banks, and the pension funds are all in a position to benefit from artificial scarcity of land, because it pumps up the value of their real estate portfolios.

The tech giants and the public utilities love renewable energy, because it drives a much larger percentage of consumer spending into paying for overpriced electricity, along with creating a mandatory market for the “internet of things” to manage energy consumption.

Politicians that advocate for school vouchers, suburban expansion, and conventional energy will be viciously attacked by self-righteous zealots, backed up by self-serving billionaires. But the politicians with the courage to stick to this revolutionary agenda will win, because it serves the people instead of the bureaucracy and the billionaires.

California’s one-party state can be overcome. The people are ready. Where are the political leaders?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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