Dwayne Johnson Has Sold His Soul to China

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The man Forbes Magazine lists as the world’s highest paid actor, Dwayne Johnson, has just endorsed Joe Biden for president. In a seven minute video pinned to his Facebook profile, Johnson, also known as “The Rock,” explained that “In this critical election, I believe Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the best to lead our country, and as my first ever (public) Presidential endorsement, I proudly endorse them for the presidential office of our United States.”

From reading through what are now over 100,000 comments in response to Johnson’s Facebook post, one can immediately conclude that Johnson’s endorsement backfired. There are almost no comments supporting his decision. Literally 99 percent of the comments are expressions of anger and feelings of being betrayed. Perhaps Johnson has really laid an egg. Perhaps he didn’t know his fans at all.

Or perhaps he didn’t care about his American fans.

There’s a truism in the world of finance, “past performance is no guarantee of future results,” but if you’re Dwayne Johnson, or Lebron James, or countless other luminaries of sports and screen, you’ve put that time tested wisdom aside in a mad dash into the Chinese market.

Never mind the slow but relentless inertia of history, and the inevitable clash it portends between America and China. If all you’re paying attention to is recent results and trends, the future for motion pictures, sort of like the future for professional basketball, is not in America, but China. A look at the most recent decade of the Rock’s blockbusters suggests the real reason he’s endorsing Biden. He wants to please his Chinese partners.

For example, “Furious 7,” 2015, grossed $353 million in the U.S. but raked in $390 million in China. “The Fate of the Furious,” 2017, grossed $225 million in the U.S., but grossed $392 million in China. Even more recent blockbusters delivered ongoing disparities. “Rampage,” 2018, grossed $101 million in the U.S. but grossed $159 million in China. “Skyscraper,” also released in 2018, grossed $68 million in the U.S. but hit $98 million in China.

Moreover, as most of America’s barely 40,000 movie theaters struggle with reopening, and may never rebound, China’s 70,000 movie theaters opened back up in August. And whereas the U.S. has 12 movie screens per 100,000 people, China only has 5 per 100,000. Surely the future of movies is in China!

The Rock’s New Tequila Brand Eyes China Consumer

It’s not just movies where the approval of the Chinese regime is critical to the financial success of Dwayne Johnson, but also to smooth the way for sales of his new brand of tequila. Launched earlier this year, Johnson’s “Teremana” tequila is attacking a sleeping giant, the Chinese market for tequila.

Despite being heavy drinkers, the Chinese are just beginning to discover tequila. It is outsold by most all other imported Western spirits, with whisky selling ten times as much into the Chinese market as tequila. After a sustained marketing effort by tequila distillers, however, China is now considered the next big market for tequila. And who better to introduce tequila to the Chinese consumer than Dwayne Johnson?

Don’t rock that boat, Mr. Rock. Never mind Hong Kong, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, the South China Sea, the Silk Road debt traps, or the COVID bug. And never mind the overwhelming influence Chinese money is having in literally every American institution from academia and media and big tech to Hollywood. There’s money to be made. And don’t worry. Losing half of a shrinking market in exchange for preferential access to the Chinese market is a worthy trade.

The Disillusionment of Millions of Fans is Nothing New

The Trump era has made it clear to ordinary Americans that their own national elite has turned on them, and considers them disposable. If you care about American jobs, American manufacturing, American culture, or staying out of endless wars, the almost universal opposition to President Trump by America’s elite institutions has made the situation crystal clear. You don’t matter.

Dwayne Johnson joins an ignominious list of celebrities that have decided to betray their lifetime fans by declaring their opposition to President Trump. Unlike some of his celebrity counterparts – Robert De Niro and Madonna come to mind – Johnson’s declaration of support for Biden tried to stay classy. He spoke of “courage, humanity, empathy, strength, grit, kindness and respect.” He urged everyone to be “kind and respectful to one another.”

This persona, “courage, humanity, strength, grit, kindness and respect,” is evident in many of Johnson’s better movies: Walking Tall (2004), Gridiron Gang (2006), Fighting With My Family (2019). It even shows up in his action movie characters. But that noble persona was shattered the moment Johnson threw in his lot with Biden and Harris.

These two politicians offer nothing to Americans apart from extending the misery we’re seeing in America’s Democrat ran cities into the rest of the United States. The cold fact that Johnson either ignores or cannot comprehend is that the urban governance model established by Democrats in cities from New York to Los Angeles is unsustainable. It is bankrupt morally and financially.

If Johnson, along with LeBron James and countless other athletes and celebrities truly care about America’s underprivileged, they would follow their conscience. They would display true courage, and call for school choice, stronger law enforcement, and make an uncompromising and unrelenting plea to inner city youth to avoid drugs, value education, and stay married.

Johnson, to his credit, has done this. But now he has lost all credibility. He has endorsed the corrupt racketeers who have destroyed America’s cities, and especially its underprivileged. This is inexplicable unless you follow the money.

China is Not the Future of the World

One of the most hilarious, hideous lies in politics today is that Russia constitutes the biggest threat to the integrity of American elections. First of all, it is laughably hypocritical, since the United States interferes all the time, almost everywhere, in elections abroad. But more to the point, Russian influence in America is a minute fraction of Chinese influence. China has ten times the population of Russia; China’s economy is also 10 times bigger. While Russia had a small trade surplus with the U.S. in 2019 of $16 billion, China’s was $295 billion.

Russia cannot buy the U.S., but China can. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. They bought Joe Biden and his family. And now they’ve bought Dwayne Johnson. But past performance is not indicative of future results. China is not destined to rule the world, and while the Chinese market may be the biggest among nations, it will always be only a fraction of the total global market.

The Chinese people are only 18 percent of global population, and that percentage is destined to shrink. The Chinese have already alienated entire huge nations with growing markets, including India which has a population projected to exceed China’s population within a few years. There are a lot of movie screens in India. And perhaps Dwayne Johnson should ask the family of a soldier recently killed on the Siachen Glacier what they think of his tequila.

What Dwayne Johnson needs to realize is that China may be a great short-term commercial opportunity, but they are headed for shoals. They are a high-tech police state where a small elite control most of the wealth, and even these elites live in constant fear. They have alienated every free nation in the world, and the only reason they still get a relative pass in the United States is because crooks like Joe Biden haven’t finished taking their money.

Dwayne Johnson could have kept his political sentiments to himself. Who told him that would not be sufficient?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Two New U.S. States – Jefferson & Greater Idaho

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“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
–  Hosea chapter 8 verse 7, Old Testament

In June 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in favor of statehood for the District of Columbia. In response, a columnist for CNN at the time, Nicole Hemmer, wrote “should Joe Biden win the presidency and bring with him majorities in the House and Senate, he should make statehood for DC — and for Puerto Rico — a priority for his first 100 days in office.” Also in June, The New Republic published an opinion column stating “D.C. Statehood Is a Test of Biden’s Political Courage.”

The supposed moral rationale for adding two states to the Union has always been based on “providing representation” to these American citizens. But Puerto Rico ought to become an independent nation, and perhaps the outer portions of Washington DC can be trimmed, with the trimmings absorbed into Maryland and Virginia. And “representation” isn’t the real reason Democrats want to turn Puerto Rico and Washington DC into states, anyway. They want more Democratic senators, and they want more Democratic congressmen.

Now that President Trump is going to attempt to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, supposedly defying precedent because it is so late in his first term, Democrats in the U.S. Congress are claiming “all bets are off.” Among other things – like packing the U.S. Supreme Court – if Democrats gain control of the White House and the U.S. Senate, they’re threatening to turn Puerto Rico and Washington DC into the 51st and 52nd states.

Bring it on.

When it comes to being governed without having a voice, there are plenty of acute cases across America. As any votes-by-county map of the United States that tracks the last several presidential elections will attest, a handful of large cities control the fate of several state legislatures and, all too often, the U.S. presidency.

These cities are ran by public sector unions, leftist billionaires, extremist environmentalists, and – if they behave – multinational corporations. They have concocted an agenda relying on racial tension and resentment, along with environmental fear-mongering, to con overwhelming majorities of their brainwashed urban populations into voting Democrat, year after year after year.

The Great State of Jefferson

Two examples of unrepresented populations in America are in rural California, which is controlled by voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and rural Oregon, which is controlled by voters in Portland. In the rural heartland of these states, thanks to the laws passed down by urban voters that outnumber them, productive, beleaguered residents struggle to survive.

They face punitive taxes to support the urban poor, who are themselves victims of utterly corrupt “programs” designed to help but actually only pour money into the hands of bureaucrats and cronies. They face an impossible array of environmental regulations that have made them unable to productively earn a living on their own land. And more recently, they’ve seen thousands of square miles incinerated thanks to years of state harassment that made it impossible for them to thin their forests.

There is a solution to this oppression. Form new states. This is what a growing majority of citizens in rural counties across America are concluding may become necessary, and in California and Oregon, considerable progress has already been made. The state of Jefferson is rural California’s answer to oppression from the state legislature.

The proponents of the State of Jefferson have produced a map slightly different from this one; their latest does not include the counties of Humboldt or Del Norte. Nonetheless, as momentum grows for secession, there’s a good chance the freedom loving free spirits of California’s far northwestern counties will embrace the opportunity. The other 22 counties shown on this map appear on the State of Jefferson movement’s website as being “counties with declarations.”

It isn’t clear to what extent local politicians have formally backed the State of Jefferson movement. In 2013, the Siskiyou County board of supervisors voted to withdraw from California. In 2016, the Nevada County board of supervisors asserted that they had not voted to become part of a new state. One thing is certain: if you drive the highways and back roads in these counties, “State of Jefferson” signs are everywhere.

The State of Greater Idaho

And then there’s the State of Greater Idaho. This movement, based primarily in Eastern Oregon, is motivated by the same grievances that animate California’s secessionists. In this case, the area in and around Portland, where nearly half of Oregon residents live, elects the representatives that control the state legislature, and it makes their lives miserable.

While the “Greater Idaho” movement today wishes to become absorbed by the State of Idaho, should Puerto Rico and Washington DC become states, they will attract more support from across the United States if they decide to form their own new state. And why not? With over 1.0 million people and sprawling over 78,000 square miles, they’ve got a population larger than six states, and they’re virtually tied with two more – Montana and Rhode Island.

Although it only includes portions of Oregon, for the sake of recognition, “Greater Idaho” is the name showing on the hypothetical map above. Even if the breakaway state only incorporates portions of Oregon, “Greater Idaho” is still a good name. The regions would have a lot in common culturally and politically. But other names can apply. “Cascadia” has been proposed as the name of a new state to be carved out of Oregon, although that movement appears have a diverse assortment of proponents, with widely differing objectives. For example, some supporters of Cascadia want to become a new independent nation, with Oregon and Washington seceding from the U.S. and merging with British Columbia which would secede from Canada.

The Political Viability of Breakaway States

Proposals to add two new states with conservative rural populations will attract substantial new support in the event of a Biden victory combined with a Democratic takeover of the U.S. Senate. There would be an explosion of new support even in the absence of statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, because if Democrats acquire total control of the federal government, the oppression rural residents are feeling in blue California and blue Oregon are going to be felt all over America. Movements by rural areas to secede will become popular from Southern Illinois to the back country of Minnesota.

As rural residents in states dominated by urban Democrats begin to visualize what life would be like if they could govern themselves, the populist momentum could become uncontainable.

Imagine living in a forest community, where if you haven’t been ran off your land just yet, you’re all just waiting to burn to death because you can’t afford to hire “permit application facilitators” and other assorted high-priced experts, along with litigators and lobbyists, in hopes that you will get a forest thinning permit from a faceless, indifferent, multi-headed, implacable bureaucracy, that is staffed with malevolent fanatics and insatiable leeches, who work 3.5 days a week, live in virtuous condos in carbon-sipping virtuous cities, and have been taught their entire lives that YOU are the problem.

Imagine instead that you just round up some crews in trucks with chain saws, and, for example, clear the fire roads. You all just go do it. Instead of spending millions and waiting decades, you send a few men into the hills and the job is finished in a couple of weeks. Without any fuss. Then you cut firebreaks. Then you send in revitalized timber companies to thin the forests, and open a new mill.

That’s how things used to get done in America. Apply that example to everything. Farming. Logging. Ranching. Mining. Construction. Water and power infrastructure. Hospitals. Universities. Schools. Police. Crime and punishment. Government. As described, it’s all messed up today. But it doesn’t have to be.

Up until about thirty years ago, common sense and honest work mattered. Results mattered more than process. Actions mattered more than words. Things got done, they were affordable, and they didn’t take forever. But then the Democratic Party began its final, ignominious slide into what it is today, a festering parasite eating away the heart and soul of America.

The Democratic party is now wholly taken over by thugs, crooks, idiots, cranks, haters, racist anti-racists, sexist anti-sexists, “gender” obsessed whackos, government unions with their insatiable need for more tax revenue, “green” fanatics and their crony “green entrepreneurs” slobbering over public subsidies and captive markets, homeless advocates and the depraved “nonprofit” “supportive housing” developers raking in billions from the taxpaying suckers and solving nothing, communists, globalist billionaires, whores for foreign money, and seditious traitors.

Go ahead. Turn Puerto Rico into a state. Turn Washington DC into a state. Sow the wind. Reap the whirlwind.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How to Realign California Politics

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The working class, which still constitutes a supermajority of California’s voters, is being destroyed by the policies enacted by the Democratic party. This is why political realignment in California can happen fast.

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, the solutions that will work challenge core premises that California’s Democrats have relied on to claim the moral high ground. But these premises must be defied, because Democrats do not hold the moral high ground. They are ruining everything, from our cities to our forests. How can that be moral?

Dismantling the Public School Monopoly

The 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 the 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.

Dismantling the Density Delusion

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.

Dismantling the Renewable Energy Delusion

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 accomplishment 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 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.

Destroy the Premises of Misery that Masquerade 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 need to understand that these failed policies are pushed by special interests that benefit from misery. 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.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Why Can’t Sacramento’s Financial Reporting Match Private Sector Standards?

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If you want current financial information on California’s state government, you won’t find it. The most recent consolidated annual financial report for California’s state agencies is for the fiscal year ended 6/30/2018. That’s over two years, or nine quarters ago.

To put this in perspective, America’s publicly traded multinational corporations, with operations spread all over the globe, are required to submit to the IRS detailed 10K reports within 90 days of filing their tax returns, which in-turn are due “the 15th day of the fourth month following the close of the fiscal year.”

This means that Walmart, with $514 billion in revenue, or ExxonMobil, with $290 billion in revenue, along with dozens of other mega corporations, have at most 195 days, or just over six months, to pull together and submit a comprehensive financial report on their operations.

In reality, corporations rarely need 195 days. Walmart released its annual report for their fiscal year ended 1/31/2020 on 4/23/2020, eighty four days later. ExxonMobil’s most recent fiscal year ended 12/31/19, and their 2019 annual report was issued prior to their annual meeting of shareholders on 5/27/2020, 148 days later.

So why is it that the State of California, where “the expenses of the primary government totaled $300.7 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2018,” still cannot convey similar information for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019? Corporations of comparable size do it in 195 days or less. As of 9/24/2020, California’s 2018-19 fiscal year ended 452 days ago.

What anyone concerned about the California’s state government’s entire system of financial management should wonder is not only why there’s still no report for the fiscal year ended 6/30/2019, but when will the report be produced for the fiscal year ended 6/30/2020. If they could pull together their numbers with efficiency merely matching what corporations have been doing for years, we would see financial reports for the 2019-20 fiscal year by January 15th, if not sooner.

A recent article in the California Globe discussed these delays, noting that “California is the only state that has not yet published a Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for the fiscal year that ended more than 12 months ago.” In terms of meeting deadlines to file financial reports, the ongoing superior performance of not only corporations, but every other state in America, should put to rest any claims that the COVID pandemic is responsible for this slowdown.

So why does it take California’s state government so long to let taxpayers know how they’re doing? State Senator Moorlach, the only licensed CPA in the state legislature, looked into the reasons for the delay. Also courtesy of the Globe, here’s what he learned:

“We were informed that the Secretary of State’s office and the State Water Resources Control Board have not yet given their data to the Controller. Can you imagine? The Secretary of State? A department run by an independently elected statewide official is late? The same department that had faulty software in place when motor voter was initiated? The same department that will be overseeing the state’s first all mail-in ballot process in November?”

It’s easy enough for the state controller to assign blame to another department, and it is certainly ominous that yet another example of incompetence is directed at the Secretary of State’s office, which we must trust to oversee our election integrity. But the Office of the State Controller has faltered in ways going well beyond delinquent financials.

Back in 2013, the California Policy Center published our first assessment of California’s total state and local government debt.  At that time, we were able to rely on Consolidated Annual Financial Reports not only for all state agencies, but for cities, counties, and special districts. Up until 2002, even California’s school districts had a consolidated annual report. There was even a consolidated annual financial report for the state’s public employee pension systems. All of those reports, with the exception of the one for state agencies, have been discontinued.

These consolidated annual reports, released as PDF documents, contained readable, useful information that made it relatively easy to compile total a debt profile for California’s state and local government agencies. But they have since been scrapped in favor of a “By the Numbers” website that offers superficial analysis in the form of interactive graphs and charts, along with downloadable Excel files that contain an overwhelming amount of data.

To be fair, both of these forms of data are useful. It’s good to see topline data on revenues and expenditures, and it’s good to have a mountain of raw data to pick through. But what’s missing – kind of like California’s disappearing middle class – is a mid-level written analysis where someone has done the work to analyze what’s beneath the topline numbers. Anyone who thinks this mid-tier of explanatory material is not invaluable is invited to download one of these Excel spreadsheets.

For cities, for example, the spreadsheet format consists of 482 rows of data, corresponding to each of California’s reporting cities, then there are 12 columns containing various categories of data. These columns list the name of the city, the estimated population, and other basic information. But that’s just the first tab. The “Cities Raw Data 2018” spreadsheet has 46 tabs containing data. These tabs have enigmatic names, such as “CIX_INTER_SERV_FUND” or “CI_FUNC_REV_EXP. Some of these tabs have several thousand rows of data, since many cities, for example, have several tranches of outstanding debt. Most of these tabs also have several dozen columns, and while these columns for the most part have reasonably explicable headers, no attempt is made to show the relationship between variables, i.e., which columns contain the subtotals and totals of amounts in other columns, and if so, of which other columns. The user is left to painstakingly infer every relationship.

What the California State Controller did, by eliminating these reports, was absolve their own office staff of the responsibility to analyze this data, something they had done for years. Instead they programmed an automated report generator that loads up pretty bar graphs with no explanation as to what is included or excluded in the totals, and no discussion about what any of it means. Then they offered access to the raw data as well, with the almost glib implication that if you don’t like our pretty graphs, dig through this.

To use the metaphor of an elephant to describe what has been lost, what we have today from the State Controller’s Office is a photograph of the elephant, along with a mountain of data describing each and every molecule in that elephant. What we used to have was a biology textbook, clearly explaining the various functioning parts of that elephant, and commenting on its overall health.

California’s state controller is not merely more delinquent than ever on delivering timely financial data on state and local agencies to taxpayers. For much of what it is tasked to analyze and report – cities, counties, special districts, and school districts – the office has cleverly created opacity in the name of transparency. For reporters looking for a quick number, or data miners with the time and the funding to do the state controller’s job for them, no problem. For anyone who wants to know how California’s state and local governments are doing without having to swim through a ocean of raw data, this is a disservice.

We must wonder how things would change if private sector standards were applied to the state controller’s office. How would they cope, if they were told to get their consolidated annual reports completed in six months instead of within 15 months, or more? It is a reasonable expectation.

There are profound differences between huge corporations and California’s state government agencies. But those differences shouldn’t be overstated. They are equally complex. Both contain huge bureaucracies. Both are subject to laws and incentives designed to create diversity in the workforce. Both have fiefdoms and infighting, waste and inefficiency. But there is one crucial difference.

The financial professionals working for the State Controller’s Office are represented by the various union affiliates of the California State Employees Association. Financial professionals working for ExxonMobil, or Walmart, or other mega corporations, do not belong to a union. It is left to the reader to speculate as to what impact union work rules have on the flexibility and accountability of unionized state agencies and their employees, including the Office of the California State Controller.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Waging Lawfare Against the Left

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In an article with a brazenly deceptive title, “Third Party Contenders Not a Factor in 2020,” U.S. News & World Report proceeded to provide evidence that third party contenders most definitely will be a factor in deciding what is certain to be a very close presidential election this November.

Consider their take on these two battleground states. Wisconsin: “a recent New York Times/Siena College poll has Biden with 48% support, Trump with 45%, and Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen with 2% support.” Pennsylvania: “Biden with 48% support, Trump with 45%, and other candidates getting 2% support.”

In the case of Pennsylvania, note the deceptive reference to “other candidates.” What they really mean is Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. Because in a court ruling just handed down in Pennsylvania, based on a technicality, Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins will not be on the ballot. A similar fate befell Hawkins in Wisconsin, where a slim majority on the court also denied the Green party contender a spot on that ballot.

Thanks to legal decisions, in two crucial battleground states where Trump won by less than one percent in 2020, there is a Libertarian Party candidate on the ballot willing and able to steal Trump votes, but no Green Party candidate to siphon off socialist voters and Bernie Sanders die-hards. This benefits Biden.

As anyone who can remember the court adjudicated outcome in Florida back in 2000, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of legal rulings that can affect a presidential election. And what happened this week in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania courtrooms could be just enough to change the 2020 outcome.

The American Battleground of Lawfare

According to lawfareblog.com, the term “lawfare” originally emerged in the 1950’s in contexts “ranging from divorce law to courtroom advocacy to colonialism to airfare for lawyers,” and, at least in 2010 when this definition surfaced, “its most prominent usage very much concerns national security.” Hoping the still active lawfare blog will indulge this expansion of the definition, “lawfare” seems an apt word to describe the critical and growing role attorneys and courts have in deciding the future of America. And using the term “lawfare, which connotes war, gives the ongoing legal conflicts that will determine our future the weight and intensity it deserves.

A good example of how the Left used lawfare, with no opposing forces to hold them in check, was the relationship between the Obama EPA and litigants representing powerful environmentalist nonprofits. In what an R Street Institute report referred to as the “Sue and Settle era,” “the Obama administration’s EPA chose not to defend itself in more than 100 lawsuits brought by special interest advocacy groups and paid out $13 million in attorneys’ fees in such cases.”

While $13 million is insignificant compared to the billions shoveled into environmentalist nonprofits by liberal foundations, the deeper significance of this uncontested lawfare was that, as R Street reports, “sue and settle became one of the primary avenues to formalize major regulations, including the Clean Power Plan’s proposed constraints on carbon emissions as well as recent mercury and air-toxin standards.”

This process isn’t restricted to the EPA, or purely environmental issues. Leftist activist groups sue a friendly federal bureaucracy, the bureaucracy immediately settles, and then using the court’s consent degree as cover, they co-write transformative new regulations. Whenever there is a Democratic administration – and often enough when there is not, because the bureaucracies remain dominated by Democrats – this process of using lawfare to generate new regulations rips its way through every executive agency.

Green Lawfare Across the Nation

For years, Americans living in the Western United States knew that by suppressing the logging industry and suppressing natural wildfires, their forests were becoming dangerously unhealthy. Trees at many times their historic density were stressed and dying, turning literally hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest into tinderboxes. But rural communities could not thin the nearby forests because of environmentalist litigation.

Examples of this go way back, and happened in every state. In Arizona, back in 2003, the Phoenix area newspaper East Valley Tribune described the difficulties that common sense forestry managers were having in an article entitled “Lawsuits stall forest thinning.” In 2015, well before the devastating round of wildfires in 2018, the Sacramento Bee published an article “Anti-logging lawsuits hurt fight against forest fires.” And even now, after the 2020 wildfires that are already worse than ever, in August the New Mexico Forestry Industry Association, in a press release, claimed that ongoing lawsuits are “killing many of the small businesses that are critical for protecting our water and forest ecosystems from catastrophic wildfire.”

In California, a hotbed of green lawfare, it wasn’t just active litigation that prevented forest thinning, but a web of regulations that in part were the result of previous litigation and consent decrees. For example, after fires obliterated the town of Paradise in 2018, residents of nearby Berry Creek tried to get permission to thin overgrown forests along evacuation routes. Quote: “the environmental reviews were too cumbersome and too time-consuming for a nonprofit to tackle. They required archaeological studies, landowner permission slips, bird surveys and more — making the process arduous to the point of inaction.”

Berry Creek is now a pile of ashes, and 15 people are dead. They couldn’t get out. If over the past few decades, lawfare were waged by the Right as aggressively as it’s been waged by the Left, the outcome may have been different.

How Lawfare Affects Crime and Punishment

By now most everyone involved in politics is aware that George Soros has not only been bankrolling radical organizations with uplifting names, or pouring money into marquee political contests, but also picking off District Attorney elections. For several years, and until recently mostly under the radar, Soros, along with other wealthy liberals, have spent millions to get criminal friendly district attorneys elected. A recent Los Angeles Times article provides comprehensive details and surprising balance regarding how Soros money has transformed criminal justice in major cities across the nation.

When George Soros shovels money into district attorney races, he is engaging in yet another form of lawfare. District attorneys have perhaps unwarranted power and discretion. As it stands today they can choose to ignore serious crimes. Cities where Soros money played a critical role in successful campaigns for district attorney include Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Phoenix. Cities currently facing an election with a Soros backed candidate include Los Angeles, San Diego, and elsewhere.

America’s cities are in embarrassing, tragic decline wherever progressive politicians have taken power. But lawfare, in the form of litigation but also in the form of prosecutors who are leftist radicals, affects policy as much if not more than elected officials. Which brings us to the judges.

Activist Judges Are Lawfare Incarnate

While the term “activist judge” can be jokingly referred to as any judge whose ruling you disagree with, the philosophy of judicial activism poses a serious challenge to defenders of the constitution, and proponents of judicial activism are almost always leftists. When considering some of the astonishing rulings coming from activist judges – such as the 9th Circuit ruling in 2006 that homeless vagrants cannot be detained unless they can be offered free housing – it is easy to see why activist judges are yet another front on the battlefield of lawfare.

While many blue state courts are hopelessly in the grip of activist judges, the battle for control of the federal court system remains in furious conflict. According to Pew Research, as of July 2020, of the active federal judges, Trump, the Bushes, and Reagan appointees account for 392, while Obama, Clinton, and Carter appointees account for 400. What about the critical Circuit Court of Appeals?

The chart below shows the makeup of the Circuit Courts based on whether or not the judges were appointed by a Democrat or a Republican president. As can be seen, the GOP advantage is much higher among Senior Circuit judges, 76 to 31. This makes the outcome of the 2020 presidential election even more consequential, because while senior circuit judges still rule on cases, as soon as a judge elects to transition to senior status, a vacancy is opened up on that circuit court. As can be seen, the vast majority of vacancies in the next four years are likely to be opened up by departing judges who were appointed by Republicans.

The most significant variable affecting the role of judges in America’s political fate, of course, is the U.S. Supreme Court. The death of Justice Ginsberg may not result in Trump successfully naming her replacement, since several Republican Senators in close races may decide it is politically impossible for them to vote to confirm a new Justice so close to the election. But even if Trump does appoint one more Justice before the end of his first term, a Biden victory could still overturn the balance of power on the court. If Biden gets elected, the Democrats in Congress have declared their intention to expand the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Circuit Courts, to create new vacancies that would allow them to acquire an instant majority. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that would prevent them from doing this.

In all areas of lawfare – aggressive litigation in all sectors of society including shaping election outcomes, “sue and settle” collusion with government bureaucracies, and activist prosecutors and judges – the American Left and their billionaire backers are willing to bend the rules and spend whatever it takes to achieve their ends.

Lawfare, defined here as legal warfare to set public policy, often beyond further recourse, is a battlefield where conservatives have to meet force with equal or greater force, lest everything else they fight for, and all their victories, are nullified.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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America’s Western Forests – A Massive Soft Target

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On October 28, 2019, with American commandos closing in, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest and took his life. On January 3, 2020, Qassem Soleimani was blown to bits in a U.S. air strike. Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS; Soleimani was Iran’s most powerful military commander.

Despite losing the territory it had overran in Syria and Iraq, and despite Baghdadi’s death, ISIS remains a growing threat, with operations all over the world. Similarly, despite Soleimani’s death, under his leadership Iran helped Hezbollah grow into a powerful and expanding international network.

Already bitter enemies of America, how have ISIS and Hezbollah escalated their war after seeing their leaders killed by U.S. forces? What sort of activities have they initiated on U.S. soil, and how have those activities increased in recent years, especially in 2020?

The destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 by Al Qaeda terrorists, along with gruesome lone wolf attacks by Islamic jihadists, tend to overshadow the fact that ISIS and Hezbollah have been quietly building their networks within the United States for many years. There is evidence these organizations could be involved in the unrest that has convulsed the nation over the past few months, possibly including arson in the Western Forests.

In 2017, veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, Edward Klein, published an article in the Daily Mail alleging that U.S. left wing Antifa groups traveled to Germany to meet with Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders. In his report, Klein alleges that the terrorist organizations were helping these U.S. left wing groups to acquire bomb making equipment and toxic chemicals and gasses.

Quoting extensively from a secret FBI report, Klein wrote, “Making some sort of common cause with Americans who are determined to commit violence against the U.S. makes them potentially very useful to radical Islam.”

Klein went on to explain how Trump changed the rules of engagement, which caused ISIS to intensify its relationships with the radical Left in America: “As the Trump administration has demonstrated it’s serious about destroying the Islamic State, and depriving ISIS of territory in Iraq and Syria, the alliance between the American radicals and ISIS has grown even closer. The Internet chatter between the Americans and the Islamists is astronomical.” Klein also noted how, by comparison, Obama ignored the domestic threat: “The FBI is really playing catchup ball, because the Obama administration refused to give the bureau the resources it needed to effectively infiltrate and surveil the radical groups on college campuses.”

If ISIS is a relatively recent arrival, Hezbollah has been actively building a base in the United States for years. Also in 2017, writing for Politico, investigative reporter John Meyer published a lengthy report entitled “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” In his analysis, Meyer describes how Hezbollah “transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.”

In his desperation to forge a deal with Iran, according to Meyer, Obama ignored evidence amassed by the DEA that showed how Hezbollah was making hundreds of millions by shipping cocaine and other drugs through Venezuela and Mexico into the United States. One DEA whistleblower quoted in Klein’s article said “The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

International Terrorists, Domestic Insurrectionists

While Antifa militants reportedly networked with ISIS militants in Germany in 2017, in 2013 the Black Lives Matter movement began getting support from the Venezuelan regime. In a report just published in American Greatness, aptly titled “The Complex and International Fight for America’s Future,” retired CIA agent Gary Berntsen describes how in 2013, Black Lives Matter founder Opal Tometi and her entourage traveled to Venezuela for meetings with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Berntsen writes, “During those meetings, Chavez ordered that BLM be given $10 million to help create a foundational base for their organization.”

In his article Berntsen documents how Chavez ceded control of three southern provinces to Colombian narco-terrorist organizations, entering into a joint venture with them to pour hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. Most of this cocaine found its way into America’s inner cities, an irony perhaps lost on BLM militants but useful to America’s enemies: Destroy their lives with drugs, then give money to agitators who will tell the drug addled mobs that racism, not drugs, is the reason for their destitute lot.

If you want to engage in asymmetric terrorism, there are few options more potent than wildfire arson. The forests of the Western United States, overgrown and tinder dry thanks to years of mismanagement, are easy targets. There isn’t a lot of hard evidence that the devastating wildfires consuming America’s forests this year are being set by politically motivated arsonists, but there is plenty of evidence that ISIS has been encouraging it.

In early 2017, ISIS praised the arsonists that had recently torched forests throughout Israel and provided instructions on how to use arson to “impose terror on an entire country.” In July 2017, in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, author Janos Besenyo elaborated on the over 220 forest fires started by arsonists in 2016 in an article entitled “Inferno Terror: Forest Fires as the New Form of Terrorism.”

Then in October 2017, after Californians had just endured another round of devastating wildfires, ISIS celebrated the catastrophe in its newsletter, “days after supporters suggested laying gasoline-filled bottles in the woods to inflict further damage.”

On November 3, 2019, days after Baghdadi’s death, “A media outlet affiliated with ISIS has been instructing the group’s radical adherents to set forest fires in the United States and Europe to cause mass ecological disasters, according to posts on an internet forum dedicated to the terror group.” This was widely reported in journals ranging from Fox News and the New York Post to Law Enforcement Today.

Less than a year later, is it mere coincidence that over 7,000 square miles of America’s western forests have been incinerated so far this year, or were some of these hundreds of fires started not just by arsonists, but politically motivated arsonists? Just this past May, as reported in Homeland Security Today, “ISIS Ramps Up Use of Wildfire Arson as Simple Tactic.”

There isn’t much of anything in current reporting about the role of foreign terrorist groups in starting this years wildfires, in fact, there are only scant reports of arson causing any of them. The prevailing narrative is that lightning strikes and human carelessness have sparked fires in forests that are tinder dry because of climate change. But there is plenty of evidence of connections between foreign terrorist groups and Antifa and Black Lives Matter. And there is little reason to believe that at least some of the domestic militants who are willing to loot and burn down American cities and invade American suburbs would hesitate to ignite American forests.

To be fair, America’s insurrectionists seem to have support from a plethora of institutions and individuals. Democrats and their media allies, to the extent they acknowledge the severity of the violence, attribute it to “Trump’s America,” hoping it will destroy him politically. Money pours in to the BLM movement from globalist billionaires and America’s major corporations. It would strain credulity to suggest that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies aren’t finding ways to discretely lend a hand.

Perhaps America’s own deep state is coordinating elements of America’s leftist insurrection, although we may hope that with these fires they’ve gotten more than they bargained for. But it’s quite obvious that powerful federal bureaucrats including members of the intelligence community want Trump out. And then there are the climate change activists, solidly entrenched within every significant institution in America. No doubt for many of them, these forest fires are a regrettable but necessary step towards depopulating America’s rural landscapes, and ratcheting down the screws of green tyranny all that much tighter, all that much sooner.

With all that to contend with, one might consider a role in America’s ongoing insurrection for ISIS and Hezbollah to be an insignificant sideshow. That would be a dangerous mistake. They are here, and they have embraced wildfire arson as a recommended tactic. They are powerful, bent on vengeance, with eager accomplices among the more hardened elements of the American Left.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Recall Gavin Effort Booms Despite Media Blackout

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When the history of the 2020 election in California is written, the prevailing question will be why didn’t the California Republican Party take advantage of one of the biggest populist movements in modern history, the ongoing campaign to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. The period this recall effort has been allocated for signature gathering overlaps neatly with the peak political season, hence there is a tremendous opportunity for CAGOP to capitalize on its momentum.

It’s easy enough to understand why, despite gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures, and being on track to gather more signed petitions than any volunteer effort, ever, there is virtually zero media coverage. California’s establishment radio, press, and television networks are determined to ignore the Recall Gavin 2020 campaign for the same reasons the CAGOP ought to embrace – it is a rebellion that has attracted millions of disillusioned Californian voters and it has the potential to fundamentally transform the political landscape of the state.

For California’s media, this blackout is merely malpractice. Their partisan bias – expressed in how they frame issues, what issues they choose to cover, what facts they choose to emphasize over others, and their many sins of omission – is well established and comes as no surprise. In the case of CAGOP, their lack of support is, to be charitable, due to an excess of caution.

To appreciate the weight of the populist uprising sweeping California, the media, and CAGOP, might choose to attend the next large event organized by the Recall Gavin 2020 campaign, a rally to be held on the north steps of the State Capitol on Saturday 9/19 from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. They will witness not hundreds, but thousands of supporters, showing up in a “Rolling Thunder” vehicle caravan as well as congregating on the north lawn. Smaller crowds at the Capitol, often comprised mostly of people who were paid to attend, consistently manage to attract television cameras and reporters. But to be newsworthy, you have to further the Democrat narrative.

The ingenuity displayed by the Recall Gavin 2020 campaign could teach a lot to the CAGOP consultants and their donors, a tight-knit network that has displayed remarkable continuity while presiding over an unrelenting decline that has lasted for three decades. It comes down to this: If you support the people, the people will support you.

To support the people, CAGOP three choices: First, they can aggressively promote a visionary platform with a few revolutionary but very concrete objectives. Things have gotten so bad, this ought to be easy. Thin the forests. Round up the homeless and put them in supervised tent cities (saving billions). Permit expansion of suburbs on the perimeter of cities which is the only way home prices will ever come down. Keep Diablo Canyon open, along with clean natural gas power plants (saving billions). Widen the freeways. Fix the aqueducts. Build more reservoirs and underground water storage. Enact school choice, preferably by issuing vouchers (saving billions). Start prosecuting criminals and get drug addicts off the streets. Quit harassing businesses (adding billions).

To the naysayers: Stop relying on polling, which is merely a good way for legacy consulting firms to collect, say, $900,000 to compile increasingly unreliable data on voter sentiment. Voter sentiment changes. Leadership and vision change the minds of voters. Get out there, and listen to people. You will be astonished at how close California’s entire population is to embracing a completely new agenda. But not one powerful CAGOP politician or donor has the guts to not just promote a revolutionary agenda, but demand it.

Choice two for CAGOP is even easier. Fire a shot that will be heard around the world by supporting the Recall Gavin 2020 campaign, unequivocally and without reservations. This will serve notice to voters that the party means business, and it’s gone onto offense. Have every CAGOP candidate express their support for the recall, and make it the centerpiece of a statewide slate declaring the CAGOP position on the many ballot initiatives facing voters in November.

Opposing Gavin Newsom gives much needed coherence and excitement to everything else  CAGOP is fighting for in this state. For example, there is not one significant state ballot initiative Newsom is for, that CAGOP is not against, nor is there one that he is against, that CAGOP is not supporting. The votes on many of these initiatives will be close. Enlisting the support of the recall volunteers could make the difference.

Choice three is the strategy that CAGOP is currently pursuing. Their strategy is thus: “Vote for us because we are not Democrats, and therefore you should support us.” That strategy is adequate – not good, but adequate – with the 24 percent of voters who are still registered Republican in California. For the rest, not so much.

Reluctance on the part of CAGOP to support the Recall Gavin 2020 campaign is understandable only if you view grassroots activism as a zero sum game. There are literally tens of thousands of Californians currently circulating petitions to recall the governor. These are people who could be, to mention perhaps the most important variable, walking precincts to recapture battleground seats in the U.S. Congress. But it is not a zero sum game.

The field directors for those candidates in tight races should be delivering their campaign material to the volunteers who are coordinating the recall efforts in their counties. Supporters of the recall are not exclusively Republicans, in fact, in many counties they may not even be majority Republican. But Newsom personifies Democrats, and they’re already fighting Newsom. If CAGOP endorses the recall, these recall volunteers become ripe prospects for conversion.

This bears reflection. Consider this revealing map, prepared by the Public Policy Institute of California (below), that depicts the political geography of the state as if the number of voters in each county drove the size of the space in which they resided. See that tiny, tiny little red patch up in the great white north? That’s your base. Get real. Take a chance. Swing for the fences.

CAGOP strategists and donors have to ask themselves some tough questions: “Are the recall volunteers people who would have otherwise volunteered to help us?” Some of them would have, but the vast majority of them would not. With that in mind, the question then becomes “will these recall volunteers support our candidates?” And to that, one can only say why wouldn’t they? If they’ve had it with Newsom, they’ve had it with his party.

The final question to pose to CAGOP strategists and donors at this critical time is simply this: Why are you blasting out millions of emails deriding the governor, if we’re unwilling to support the recall effort? Emails with subject lines such as “King Newsom will stop at nothing” (9/17), “King Newsom’s Reign Must End” (9/16), or “King Newsom Has Gone Too Far,” (9/06)? Are you kidding? Or do you mean it?

When you stand up for what you believe in, people are attracted. When you say one thing, and do another, you don’t matter. This recall campaign was inevitable. It was unstoppable. From the beginning the opportunity for CAGOP was either to embrace the recall effort, which would unify the base and attract new followers, or ignore it, confirming their status as the residual irrelevancy exemplified by the PPIC political map.

The Recall Gavin 2020 campaign’s lead proponent, Orrin Heatlie, is a capable and determined campaigner who has, from scratch, mobilized an army. There is a path forward for this campaign to beat the odds and put this recall onto the ballot. As will be seen, they are likely to surpass any similar sort of volunteer signature gathering effort in the history of California. Should they come tantalizingly close to success, yet fail, CAGOP will have a lot of explaining to do. Or they can have the courage of their declared convictions, and join the fight.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Homeless Anarchy in Los Angeles

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Anyone thinking about blaming the police for the anarchy that grips America’s liberal cities is not paying attention. The police know how to do their jobs, but the politicians, elected by progressive liberals, do not let them. And often enough, even when there are laws left on the books that might permit prosecution, activist prosecutors, also elected by progressive liberals, do not press charges.

Life in California, as usual, epitomizes this dysfunction. In 2014 voters approved Proposition 47, which downgraded drug and property crimes. In 2016 voters approved Proposition 57, which released thousands of nonviolent criminals. Back in 2006, the ACLU prevailed in the Jones vs City of Los Angeles case; the judgment prohibits arrests for vagrancy unless there is a space available in a homeless shelter.

The result of these laws is predictable enough. California’s unsheltered homeless population is now more numerous than all the rest of the homeless in the United States combined. And why not? Along with great weather, there are no serious legal consequences for being intoxicated on methamphetamine or heroin, much less marijuana or alcohol, nor are their serious legal consequences for stealing to support your drug habit. And if you want to set up a tent, almost anywhere, nobody can make you move along until they provide you a shelter.

If California is ground zero for urban anarchy, Venice Beach is one of the epicenters. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic and pre-election planned rioting turned the anarchy up two notches, Venice Beach was already occupied, and terrorized, by well over a thousand homeless. Today, the homeless population in Venice Beach is estimated to have at least doubled to 2,000, in an area of only three square miles. Several factors caused this increase.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in thousands of prisoners being released from the Los Angeles County Jail, and many of them headed for the beach. A new homeless shelter was opened earlier in 2020 in Venice Beach, and while it only has 140 beds (at a cost of $8 million), it serves meals to many more, and has no requirements for sobriety or even a curfew. But how the City of Los Angeles responded to the COVID-19 crisis had an even greater impact on Venice Beach.

For years, once per week the streets would be cleaned. This forced people living in cars or RVs to move them to allow trash and debris including feces to get regularly swept up and washed away. But since March 2020 there has been no street sweeping. Also suspended in 2020 by court order was a 2016 LA County ordinance that prevented homeless people from accumulating more than what could fit into a trash bin (about eight cubic feet). If that weren’t enough, since COVID came along, the police have virtually stopped enforcing all laws and ordinances still in effect that might regulate the number of homeless and the behavior of the homeless.

Venice Beach residents are besieged as never before. When speaking with residents to prepare this report, one of them said “I feel like I have a house in the middle of a large homeless encampment.” Residents describe the mountains of trash that have begun to accumulate as a result of a breakdown in code enforcement, along with an explosion in the rat population. For those who have been assaulted or shot, of course, rats and trash are just a nuisance.

The degree to which civilization has receded in places where the homeless have taken over in Los Angeles is difficult to separate from the other epic distractions that have dominated the news in 2020. But these other distractions, COVID-19, economic hardship, mass rioting and vandalism, have compounded the problem of the homeless.

For example, on one residential corner in Venice Beach, for the past few months a man has lived there, working on welding projects. Many of these projects involve converting scrap metal into knives, machetes and axes. According to a neighbor, the man was approached by Antifa and offered marijuana in exchange for weapons, but he refused, stating he only would work for methamphetamine. The entire operation, the generator, the welding torch, the hammering in the middle of the night, is hazardous and disturbing. But despite hundreds of calls to the LAPD, this man continues to ply his trade.

Police Undermined by Progressive Prosecutors

What the City of Los Angeles needs to do is challenge the 2006 Jones ruling in federal court. They need to join with other California cities to put initiatives before California’s voters that will repeal Prop. 47 and Prop. 57. But under pressure from progressive billionaires and BLM activists, they are moving in the opposite direction.

The currently serving Los Angeles District Attorney is Jackie Lacey, an black woman who by most accounts would be considered light on crime. But not light enough. Running against Lacey in November is George Gascon, formerly the D.A. for San Francisco. Gascon is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter, and his campaign has already benefit from over $1 million spent by George Soros to defeat his rival. To say Gascon would not restore the ability of law enforcement to restore order to the streets of Los Angeles is an understatement.

One would think that a liberal black woman serving as the Los Angeles District Attorney would at least earn a respectful opposition from radical activists, but not Jackie Lacey. In March, Black Lives Matters protesters showed up at Lacey’s house, banging drums, pounding on their front door, and demanding a “community meeting.” In response, Lacey’s husband opened the door, pointed a gun at the protesters, and demanded they get off the porch. A Los Angeles judge has just ruled that California’s liberal attorney general, Xavier Becerra, should file charges against him, just in time for the November election.

Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani characterized places like Los Angeles as “criminal friendly cities.” This is an accurate description. On top of everything else, California’s state legislature passed SB 10 in 2018, designed to make California the first state to end the use of cash bail for all detained suspects awaiting trials.” The legislation would replace the state’s cash bail system with “risk assessments.” This legislation was successfully challenged through a referendum petition, so this November California’s voters will decide if they want jails to release suspects without the hook of bail to improve the chances they’ll ever show up in court.

What is happening in Los Angeles is typical for California, and is part of larger and related policy failures. Everything California’s government has done for over 30 years, ever since the progressive grip on the state and local governments became nearly absolute, has made life more difficult for its once thriving middle class. Excessive regulations for the law-abiding small businesses, which big business takes in stride and the underground economy ignores. Urban containment, draconian building codes, and punitive permit fees that have made housing unaffordable.

California has become a feudal economy, and if entire cities are turned into fetid, ungovernable swamps, so what, as long as the right slogans are uttered, and fists are raised in solidarity with the oppressed?

“Black Lives Matter.” “All Cops Are Bastards.” Let’s hear you say it, if you want to have a political career. On your knees. Raise your fist. Say what we tell you to say, because “silence is violence.” Has it come to that? Is this all it takes to remain a successful politician?

But it isn’t just politicians who have brought Los Angeles and other progressive cities to the brink of complete chaos. Activist judges, activist prosecutors, and well funded activist attorneys have all played a role. In some respects the legal obstacles to common sense governance outweigh the political obstacles. The City of Los Angeles should just round up the homeless and put them into supervised tent encampments in inexpensive areas, but the lawsuits would stop that in its tracks. But in feudal California, there’s an innovative workaround.

Instead of solving the problem for pennies on the dollar, homeless advocates build “permanent supportive housing” for $500,000 per unit, using taxpayers money, and for every unit they build, hundreds of homeless remain on the streets. This utterly futile scheme has cost California’s taxpayers billions while the numbers of homeless have only increased.

The next step California’s progressive policymakers envision, well under way, is to erase zoning restrictions and allow investors and developers to collect subsidies and tax incentives to build rent-subsidized multi-family dwellings, randomly dropped onto the sites of demolished single-family homes. Imagine the feeling, when next door to the home you’ve worked for all your life, one of your many new neighbors, living for free in a looming six-plex, is a welder who works all night for methamphetamine.

Police in Los Angeles, like in all cities ran by progressive liberals, are up against a system that is failing. It makes their jobs nearly impossible. The only way their lot will be improved, along with that of residents in Venice Beach and other besieged communities across all of California’s urban landscape, will be through a sustained realignment by voters that categorically rejects progressive politics.

On the other hand, California’s cities offer the example that will be America’s fate if Biden wins in November.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Firefighting Unions Can Help Fix Forestry Mismanagement

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What we quaintly refer to as “super fires” have incinerated nearly 5,000 square miles of California’s forests so far this year. In response, Governor Newsom has declared he has “no more patience for climate deniers.” But it isn’t climate change that caused these superfires. It was negligent forestry.

When it comes to facts that matter on the issue of our burning forests, perhaps Newsom is the one who is in denial. Because when Newsom denounces “climate deniers,” he denies the following far more pertinent facts about wildfires and climate:

  • The timber industry in California has been cut to a small fraction of what it was in 1990 in terms of employment and board feet of timber harvested. In 1990, 6.0 billion board feet were harvested from California’s forests, today the harvest rarely exceeds 1.5 billion board feet.
  • Dense, overgrown forests result in unhealthy trees, because the increased number of trees are competing for the same amount of sunlight, water and soil nutrients. This is the reason so many of them cannot resist disease and infestations, not climate change.
  • Year after year, millions of acre feet of snow and rain fall on these dense tree canopies and either evaporate immediately, or are sucked up by the overgrown, water stressed biomass as soon as they hit the ground. Far less water makes it into the aquifers and rivers as a result.
  • The overgrown forests are not only packing up to ten times more fuel than what is historically normal, but because these trees aren’t adapted to being packed so close together, half of them are dead or dying, which means they are tinder dry.

Any honest mainstream journalist, if there are any left, needs to ask Governor Newsom one simple question:

“Under which conditions would be a lightning strike be more likely to cause a catastrophic fire: on a grove of stressed and dying trees, dried out and packed 200 per acre, on a 75 degree day, or on a grove of healthy trees, moist and dispersed 20 per acre on an 85 degree day?”

A child can answer this question, but perhaps Gavin Newsom isn’t interested in the truth.

The Role of California’s Firefighter Unions

When examining the impact of unionizing firefighters in California, there is little evidence that the quality of services have suffered. Problems arise, however, when considering the capacity of California’s firefighters. The super fires this year that have stretched California’s firefighting resources beyond their capacity are only an example of what could be necessary in the coming years. Not only to fight bigger wildfires, but for civil defense in the event of war or escalating terrorist incidents, California may need to put in place a firefighting infrastructure many times greater than what we have today.

This is why, for example, there may be troubling long-term consequences to union opposition to innovations such as those being explored in the City of Placentia. In response to Placentia’s decision to replace defined benefit pensions with 401A defined contribution plans, California’s professional firefighters are supporting Assembly Bill 2967, which will prohibit California’s cities and counties from exiting their pension systems. But it is simply impossible to significantly expand California’s firefighter headcount when the average full-time firefighter in California costs taxpayers well over $200,000 per year in pay and benefits. California’s professional firefighter unions are urged to recognize that what is needed today, with shrinking tax revenues and potentially multiplying threats to public safety, are not incremental but quantum increases to firefighting capacity.

To some extent the infrastructure to cost-effectively multiply firefighting capacity already exists. During fire season, CalFire enlists the services of temporary workers, prisoners and trained volunteers to help along the fire lines. These programs need to be greatly expanded, and they need to be extended to preventive activity. Also, a mid-tier of firefighting personnel needs to be established in every city and county. Between full-time unionized firefighters and the ranks of prisoners and seasonal workers, California’s cities and counties need to recruit thousands of highly trained, year-round, on-call volunteers and part-time firefighters.

If there are ever conflagrations in urban areas instead of in relatively unpopulated forests, expanded firefighting resources will save even more lives lives and property. The example of Placentia is insignificant on its own, but represents something that in the interests of public safety should be encouraged, not fought.

The other area where California’s firefighting unions have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to redirect their political priorities is with respect to forest thinning. It is difficult to imagine a category of fire prevention that even approaches the scale of this challenge. There are over 50,000 square miles of forest and chaparral in California that require a fundamental, and very labor intensive, shift in how they are managed.

It is impossible to engage in fire suppression, and impose extreme restrictions on timber harvesting, without also having an aggressive program of forest thinning. For decades, this catastrophic mistake constituted California’s forest management policy. California’s politically powerful firefighter unions can play a decisive role in lobbying for quick and meaningful corrective action.

The prevailing challenge when allocating resources to thin California’s forests is the same as that facing local elected officials who want to expand firefighting capacity in their cities and counties – how to innovate in order to accomplish more with finite budgets. California’s firefighting unions need to take the lead in encouraging creative ways to put more people and equipment in the field at less cost.

How can trained volunteers, seasonal and part-time workers, prisoners, and – one can only hope – legions of able bodied homeless people, be put into California’s forests and chaparral and effectively remove excess growth? How can California’s Dept. of Forestry, CalFire, the Dept. of Corrections, and what’s left of California’s timber industry offer resources, equipment, and supervision to make this happen? How can this job be done for a few billion dollars, in a few years, instead of costing trillions, and never get done?

Effectively coping with these issues offer an inspiring challenge to California’s professional firefighter unions. They have a chance to provide needed leadership at a critical time. It’s not the temperature, it’s the tinder.

How California’s Forests Turned Into Tinderboxes

For over 20 million years, forests existed in California at a much lower density than they are today. These forests were healthy and abundant with wildlife, and they stayed healthy through climate cycles that included droughts and so-called mega-droughts that lasted a century or more.

That all changed starting around 1850 when American settlers began logging operations that left vast clear cut areas. The second growth forests that filled these clear cut areas had a higher tree density, and this unnatural response to the original clear cuts is where the problems began.

Natural fires, usually caused by lightning strikes, probably would have burned through 2nd and 3rd growth forests, with the hardier trees surviving to restore the original ecosystems, but over the past several decades fire suppression tactics had become highly effective and were aggressively practiced. Fire ceased to be a significant source of natural thinning. Forestry officials and private landowners tried to do controlled burns, but ran into too much bureaucracy to ever do it at anywhere near the necessary scale.

The problems of overstocked forests magnified in the 1990s when logging operations throughout the Western United States came under attack from environmentalists. While logging practices needed to evolve, cutting logging activity to a fraction of what it had been for over a century caused additional density. For decades now, annual growth has far exceeded harvests.

Unhealthy, unnaturally dense forests. Far fewer smaller, natural forest fires. Almost no logging activity. It doesn’t take a genius to know what comes next.

Forestry experts including some environmentalists have been warning politicians about the fire hazards in the forests, urgently, for well over 20 years. But effective forest thinning has been prevented by environmentalist backed over-regulation.

If Gov. Newsom is in “denial” about any of this, he might explain: Why is it, if we knew this was an urgent problem, that California’s forests are still twice as dense, or more, than they were for the last 20 million years?

“Climate Change” Policies Are Misanthropic and Futile

Whenever there’s a wildfire, Newsom and all the others in denial over their epic policy failures, come shouting “climate change.” They have the audacity to tell us to turn our thermostats up to 78 degrees and refrain from using electric appliances, and they claim these fires are evidence of why this is necessary. They embark on a “renewables mandate” that jacks utility prices up to the highest in the nation in exchange for unreliable power.

More than anything else, what Newsom and all the rest of these politicians who want California to set a “climate example” to the world are in denial of is their own misanthropy. They know perfectly well that California only emits one percent of the world’s CO2. They know as well that China and India are not about to stop using fossil fuel to grow their economies. They know that fossil fuel accounts for 85 percent of global energy production, with hydroelectric and nuclear power accounting for another 11 percent. All renewables account for only four percent of global energy production. Four percent.

Although one often wonders, Newsom is smart enough to figure out, based on readily available and indisputable data, that if everyone in the world, per capita, used half as much energy as Americans do, global energy production would have to double. And it will. And for the next 20-30 years, fossil fuel is going to account for a large portion of that.

Someday, probably within the lifetime of most people alive today, there will be a series of breakthroughs in energy technology. Fusion power. Satellite solar power stations. Direct synthesis of atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel. Who knows? But until that time, the only reason to impoverish the lives of ordinary Californians in the name of the “climate crisis” is so rich and powerful people like Gavin Newsom can get even richer and even more powerful.

Once this horrific fire season comes to an end, there is just one thing Gavin Newsom should be doing as follow up. He needs to figure out how California’s forests are going to be rapidly thinned from, using the Sierra Nevada as an example, 200 or more trees per acre, down to the historical norm of 40 trees or less per acre. No forest management solutions are perfect. But in search of perfection, we engineered a cataclysm. Have we learned? Or will we just watch the rest of our forests burn up, and blame it on climate change?

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

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It’s Not the Temperature, It’s the Tinder

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AUDIO:  Blaming “climate change” is a good way to avoid responsibility for epic mismanagement. Why we need forest thinning, more logging, and controlled burns to save our overgrown and unhealthy forests – 9 minutes on KFI Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the John and Ken Show.