Mismanaged Forests Burn, Newsom Blames “Climate Deniers”

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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.

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 in the California Globe.

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The Riots Ought to be Against Romney, Bush, Biden and Harris

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Not quite a year ago, online journalist Kaitlin Bennett interviewed a Rutgers student who said “neoliberalism has torn through humanity.” Without meaning to, the student neatly expressed the reason Donald Trump appeals to increasing numbers of Bernie Sanders voters, and why NeverTrump Republicans are better suited to be Democrats.

Among the populist leftist movement in the United States, apart from the relatively few people who are hardcore Communists and anti-white racists, you’re left with a vast, embittered population of Americans who have indeed had their lives torn apart by neoliberalism.

For the uninitiated, neoliberalism sees all humanity as an undifferentiated mass of consumers, with borders, language, cultures, and national sovereignty as nothing more than obstacles to global corporate governance.

NeverTrump Republicans, on the other hand, have been treated very well by neoliberalism, as have the Silicon Valley moguls and Wall Street raiders who now constitute the moneyed core of the Democratic party.

Through an impressive sleight of hand, America’s neoliberal corporate elite have succeeded in making Trump, who wants to bring jobs back to America and stay out of foreign wars, the target of nationwide rioting. These efforts by Trump make him an enemy of neoliberals.

By contrast, Mitt Romney and Joe Biden epitomize those neoliberals who have gotten rich by gutting America’s economy, and George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton epitomize those neoliberals who have dragged America into endless wars that drain our wealth and murder our youth.

It’s hard not to have contempt for these politicians. Romney got rich by taking over American companies, loading them up with debt, selling off the assets and the intellectual property, firing the employees, then closing the bankrupt shells while paying himself and his partners the looted millions. Bush is best remembered as the man who destabilized the Middle East on false pretenses, costing countless lives, trillions of dollars, and ongoing chaos.

Now Romney and Bush are now trying to win their grim battle with history, hoping that by joining NeverTrumpers they can vindicate themselves. Good riddance.

Make no mistake about it, Romney and Bush are no longer Republicans, because the overwhelming majority of Republican voters support Donald Trump. Romney and Bush, by declaring they will not vote for Trump, merely signal that the center of gravity of the establishment uniparty has shifted from Republican to Democrat. But the neoliberal core of both of these supposedly distinct political parties is stronger than ever.

Redefining the Premises of Leftist Anger 

Once the left-of-center, left-behind millions in America realize that when it comes to the most fundamental issues affecting their lives, Romney and Bush are actually Democrats (indistinguishable from Republicans), and that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are actually Republicans (indistinguishable from Democrats), they’ll need to think carefully about what sort of leadership and policies they really want from their elected politicians.

And the first thing they’ll need to understand is that neoliberalism is globalism. A core premise of globalism is leveling the national economies of the entire world. In practical terms, that means erasing borders and letting capital chase the lowest wages and the highest profits—both things that are contrary to their interests.

Certain other inevitable realities follow. The first of these reality checks is that a worldwide communist revolution will not happen. The Silicon Valley technocrats, their allies in China, the American deep state, and their Biden-Romney puppet politicians can stop violent dissent, as Trump actually dares to state, “in 30 minutes.”

The next reality check is that when you have open borders, it doesn’t matter what political economy you choose, allowing millions of unskilled and destitute people to swarm into a developed nation will reduce that nation’s ability to maintain a sustainable system of social welfare.

Reality checks like these will come fast and furious once America’s disenfranchised left-of-center millions realize that Biden is Bush, and Romney is Harris. They will realize that the reason they can’t afford homes is not only that, thanks to mass immigration, they can’t make a living wage—if they even have jobs. The other reason they can’t afford homes is that homes, like everything else in America, are artificially scarce. When demand exceeds supply, prices rise.

To create scarcity in everything that matters, from homes to roads to minerals and other vital resources, America’s environmentalists have stopped development in its tracks. Only the wealthiest developers and corporations can afford to jump through the regulatory hoops and pay off the many environmentalist litigants. This suits neoliberals, even though it violates their principles, because when markets have barriers (artificial or otherwise) and prices rise, profits soar.

And of course who could fail to appreciate the need to keep home prices in the stratosphere so consumers can borrow against their home equity to purchase products from the Chinese slave state, where Romney and Biden—and Kamala Harris’s technocratic Silicon Valley buddies—all have fabulously remunerative investments?

Neoliberalism, flawed and corrupt in execution, but true to its core principle of leveling national economies, has indeed torn through humanity.

And there is an alternative.

America’s Unified Future Belongs to Civic Nationalists

As President Trump has often said, “we want immigrants, but it has to be based on merit and it has to be legal.” This is a core premise of civic nationalism in America, because it embraces America’s tradition of welcoming immigration as long as it is in the national interest. Why not allow the best and the brightest come into America? Until we manage to destroy the teachers’ unions and implement school choice, we will need more well-educated people.

The more immigrants have needed skills, the more likely they’ll contribute and assimilate. But to complete America’s economic recovery and create a political economy that restores opportunities to America’s disenfranchised millions, civic nationalists have to fight the environmentalists.

The next wave of militancy to hit America will be coming from the climate change extremists. With or without a Biden presidency, this will be yet another wave in the neoliberal campaign to level the economies of nations. Using the radicalizing issue of climate change, environmentalists are demanding even more curbs on America’s economic potential. Many of these policies, already in place and set to get worse, have nothing to do with climate change.

Central among them is urban containment, the policy of ending all growth beyond the existing urban footprint of cities. More than anything else, these containment policies are the reason homes are unaffordable. These laws create an impossible situation that bears further explanation.

The neoliberal Left demands immigration. They want Americans to open their borders and admit millions—tens of millions, of new migrants. Yet, in the name of fighting “climate change,” they demand that cities stop growing outwards.

But even if you believe in climate change, the argument that cramming everyone into existing cities will alleviate it is dubious at best. More to the point, imagine the chaos and misery that would ensue when millions of migrants, homeless, and displaced inner-city welfare recipients are disbursed into subsidized multi-family dwellings, randomly dropped onto the sites of demolished single-family homes.

The neoliberal Left, supported by brain-dead libertarians who oppose “zoning,” along with green and anti-racist radicals, is dead serious; they intend to destroy America’s suburbs.

The solution to this grotesque assault on America’s standard of living and quality of life—supported by Romney and Bush just as much as by Biden and Harris—is to reject the argument that developing new suburbs on open land will harm the planet. Because it will not.

What it will do is make homes affordable again. The reason neoliberals want to create scarcity of housing is because they want the financial collateral created when demand for developed real estate exceeds supply. And mega development corporations are slavering over the chance to build millions of tax-subsidized, rent-subsidized, grossly overpriced multifamily dwellings where single-family homes currently stand.

The fight between civic nationalists and environmentalists extends to every facet of economic growth. Why aren’t Americans building more nuclear and hydroelectric power plants? Why aren’t Americans mining their own raw materials instead of importing them? Why aren’t Americans reviving their timber industry, an action that would have the side benefit of greatly reducing the severity of forest fires? Why aren’t Americans rebuilding their infrastructure? Environmentalists oppose all of this. They must be stopped.

President Trump has been right on all these issues.

The final reality check that left-of-center Americans must cope with is that neoliberalism is destined to fail even if the neoliberals level national economies. Because other nations are not going to accept a neoliberal global order. The Chinese slave state is bent on replacing America as the dominant power in the world. For them, neoliberals are useful idiots. Buy off Biden. Buy off Romney. Let them kill their economies so they can acquire more personal wealth. Thanks to these greedy traitors, it will be easier to conquer the world.

If you want to know why virtually every establishment apparatus in America is trying to defeat Trump, these are the reasons. Bernie voters: Face reality. Join us.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Why Our Forests Are Burning

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AUDIO:  Why climate change should not be an excuse for failing to manage California’s forests – 10 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests

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Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

What happened among California’s tall stands of Redwood and Ponderosa Pine also happened in its extensive chaparral. Fire suppression along with too many environmentalist-inspired bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.

In 2009, after huge blazes wiped out homes and forced thousands to evacuate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich observed: “The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today.”

In 2014, Republican members of Congress tried again to reduce the bureaucracy associated with “hazardous fuel projects” that thin out overgrown forests. True to form, the bill got nowhere thanks to environmental lobbyists who worried it would undermine the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires thorough impact assessments ahead of government decisions on public lands.

In a blistering report published in the California Globe on how environmentalists have destroyed California’s forests, investigative journalist Katy Grimes interviewed Representative Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents communities in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. McClintock has worked for years to reform NEPA and other barriers to responsible forest management.

“The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency,” McClintock told Grimes. “Up until the mid-1970s, we managed our national forests according to well-established and time-tested forest management practices. But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect. Ponderous, Byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to save the environment. The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”

But these zealots have not protected the forests. They have destroyed them. The consequences are far-reaching.

Decimating the Timber Industry, Disrupting the Ecosystem

Few people, including the experts, bother to point out how overgrown forests reduce the water supply. But when watersheds are choked with dense underbrush competing for moisture, precipitation and runoff cannot replenish groundwater aquifers or fill up reservoirs. Instead, it’s immediately soaked up by the trees and brush. Without clearing and controlled burns, the overgrown foliage dies anyway.

A new activist organization in California, the “California Water for Food and People Movement,” created a Facebook group for people living in the hellscape created by misguided environmentalist zealotry. Comments and posts from long-time residents of the Sierra foothills, where fires have exploded in recent years, yield eyewitness testimony to how environmentalist restrictions on forest management have gone horribly wrong. Examples:

“I’m 70, and I remember controlled burns, logging, and open grazing.”

“With the rainy season just ahead, the aftermath of the Creek Fire will challenge our water systems for years to come. Erosion will send toxic debris and sediment cascading into streams, rivers, and reservoirs, reducing their capacity to carry and hold water. Dirty air, dirty water, and the opposite of environmentalism are on full display right now, brought to us by the environmental posers who will no doubt use this crisis to unleash a barrage of ‘climate change did it’ articles.”

“Many thanks to Sierra Club and other environmental groups. You shut down logging/brush removal and had a ‘don’t touch’ approach to our forests. You shut down access roads and let them get overgrown, so now they can’t be used for fire suppression and emergency equipment. You fought ranchers for grazing, which helped keep the forest floors clean. You made fun of Trump when he said we need to rake the forest. Trust me these forest rakes and logging would have prevented the devastating fires we see now.”

The economics of responsible forest management, given the immensity of America’s western forests, requires profitable timber harvesting to play a role. But California has no commercial timber operations on state-owned land. And since 1990, when the environmentalist assault on California’s timber industry began in earnest, its timber industry has shrunk to half its former size. Reviving California’s timber industry, so the collective rate of harvest equals the collective rate of growth, would go a long way towards solving the problem of catastrophic fires.

Instead, California’s environmentalists only redouble their nonsense arguments. Expect these fires to justify even more “climate change” legislation that does nothing to clear the forests of overgrown tinder, and everything to clear the forests, and the chaparral, of people and towns.

Expect these fires to fuel a new round of legislation containing urban growth while mandating suburban densification, with increased rationing of energy and water.

Expect the “climate emergency” to accelerate in synergistic lockstep with the pandemic emergency and the anti-racism emergency. Expect all three of these emergencies to become issues of public health, thereby eliminating inconvenient constitutional roadblocks to swift action.

Misdirected Union Priorities

Meanwhile, tragically, expect California’s politically powerful firefighters’ union to do little or nothing to support the timber industry or rural inhabitants who don’t want to move into urban condos.

As Steve Greenhut explained in a recent column in the Orange County Register: “Frankly, union power drives state and local firefighting policies. The median compensation package for firefighters has topped $240,000 a year in some locales. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighters earn less, but their packages still total nearly $150,000 a year. The number of California firefighters who receive compensation packages above $500,000 a year is mind-blowing.”

No wonder firefighters are overwhelmed during California’s wildfire season. The state can’t afford to hire enough of them.

And when these firefighter unions could have been pushing for legislation to clear the forests back in 2019, where instead did their leftist leadership direct their activist efforts? They marched in solidarity with the striking United Teachers of Los Angeles. The teachers’ unions have done to California’s public schools what environmentalists have done to California’s forests.

If an honest history of California in the early 21st century is ever written, the verdict will be unequivocal. Forests that thrived in California for over 20 million years were allowed to become overgrown tinderboxes. And then, with stupefying ferocity, within the span of a few decades, they burned to the ground. Many of them never recovered.

This epic tragedy was the direct result of policies put in place by misguided environmentalist zealots, misinformed suckers who sent them money, and the litigators and lobbyists they hired, who laughed all the way to the bank.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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Prop. 15 Empowers Big Business, Destroys Small Business

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California’s state and local governments, and the public sector unions that exercise nearly absolute control over the politicians who supposedly oversee them, have always had an insatiable desire for higher taxes. The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has added even more urgency to their insatiable quest for more money from taxpayers, but through the years their basic game plan and goals have been remarkably consistent.

For example, the so-called “Split Roll” property tax increase which has finally made it onto the November 2020 state ballot in the form of Prop. 15, is something that has been proposed for years by California’s government unions and their supporters. This new tax is designed to undermine the historic 1978 Prop. 13, which limits property reassessments to when there is a change in ownership, and from that baseline keeps increases to maximum of two percent per year. Prop. 13 also freezes the property tax rate at one percent, although countless local “fees” have elevated the actual amount owners have to pay.

The way Prop. 15 is being sold to voters is based on its impact being restricted to commercial properties. Because residential properties are unaffected by Prop. 15, at least initially, proponents expect voters who own homes to not feel threatened by the measure. The airwaves are already saturated with ads in support of Prop. 15. To paraphrase, the themes are “make the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” “relieve the crowded classrooms,” “help local communities respond to the impact of COVID,” “put schools and communities first.”

It should come as no surprise that the top two donors in support of Prop. 15,  are the California Teachers Association PAC, so far contributing $6 million, and the SEIU California State Council, so far contributing $3.5 million. Taking into account the fact that once the pandemic slowdown has come and gone, this tax increase – if approved by voters – will still be in effect, do California’s state and local agencies really need more tax revenue?

Historical Trends Do Not Justify Higher Taxes

Since the CTA is a top supporter of Prop. 15, what are the enrollment and spending trends that have convinced them that California’s system of public education requires even more money?

If all that is taken into account is enrollment, there is no basis whatsoever for more spending. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2000 there were 6.1 million students enrolled in California’s K-12 public schools. According to the California Dept. of Education, in 2020 there are only 6.1 million students. If the student population is stable, why does the system need more money?

Meanwhile, when taking into account all spending on education – teacher and staff salaries, classroom spending, administrative overhead, debt service on school bonds, and the state’s annual CalSTRS contribution – California’s K-12 traditional public schools are currently funded at just over $20,000 per pupil. Public charter schools, by the way, survive on much less, but that’s another story. With that much money to work with, why can’t the system adapt to the present slowdown, instead of trying to raise taxes? Indeed, according to California’s Office of Legislative Analyst, successful adjustments have already been made.

Public education is only on part of California’s state and local spending. An examination of spending trends over the past twenty years, adjusting for population growth and inflation, shows a relentless march upwards. The following graph, the result of an analysis conducted earlier this year by the California Policy Center, shows that per capita state government spending in constant dollars has nearly doubled in the last forty years, and is up 50 percent over the last twenty years. Why?

What have Californians gotten in return for all that money? As noted in the earlier analysis:

“Compared to forty years ago, Californians cannot afford to purchase homes, they cannot afford to pay college tuition, they cannot drive on uncongested freeways, and they cannot expect their children to get a good education in public schools. Forty years ago, they could expect all those things. There have been many improvements to our lives over the past forty years – the tech revolution and precision medicine, to state two obvious examples – but apart from cleaner air, the state can’t take much credit for improvements to the quality of life for Californians. The state can take credit, however, nearly exclusive credit, for making California unaffordable, for ruining California’s public schools, for driving up the cost of college tuition and neglecting our highways.”

Add to that litany two additional catastrophes that California’s state government can take credit for: their misguided restrictions on logging and forest clearing are the reason forest fires are now destroying forests forever instead of just burning off underbrush, and their misguided attempt to convert to supposedly renewable energy is the reason residents are paying the highest utility rates in the nation while enduring electricity brownouts and blackouts.

Perhaps it is an oversimplification, but nonetheless worth stating: The primary reason for this incompetence despite record per capita spending is because California’s state and local agencies are ran by public sector unions, for whom higher pay, higher benefits, and higher headcounts are the primary objective, with efficiency and accountability actual impediments to achieving those goals.

How Prop. 15 Will Destroy Small Businesses

Worked into the language of California’s split roll property tax increase proposal is an exemption for commercial properties worth $3.0 million or less. Unfortunately, in California’s commercial real estate market, $3.0 million doesn’t buy very much.

Consider these $3.0M+ commercial listings in Los Angeles:

11,979 SF Industrial Building, Long Beach, $3.6M

13,290 SF Industrial Building, Los Angeles, $3.2M

12,150 SF Industrial Building, El Monte, $3.6M

6,119 SF Retail Building, Burbank, $3.3M

What about San Diego?

2,491 SF Retail Building, San Diego, $3.2M

11,800 SF Industrial Building, San Diego, $3.5M

San Jose?

8,050 SF Industrial Building, Milpitas, $3.7M

5,000 SF Retail Building, San Jose, $3.6M

Sacramento?

8,715 SF Retail Building, Sacramento, $3.1M

2,400 SF Industrial Building, Sacramento, $3.3M

12,000 SF Industrial Building, Sacramento, $3.0M

The point here is these listings are not for operations ran by “the wealthiest corporations.” Nor are these listings in the most expensive parts of the cities surveyed. Industrial sites in California’s major urban areas start at around $250 per square foot, which will buy 12,000 square feet of what is definitely not premium real estate. So who are harmed by Prop. 15?

People who own their own buildings, often multi-generational families, who have eliminated their debt, weathered the COVID shutdown, and operate low-margin manufacturing, retail and restaurant establishments are the people who are going to get killed by Prop. 15.

And what about those “wealthiest corporations?”

These big corporate owners of commercial real estate will pay more in taxes. But they will pass those taxes on to the consumers, including the small businesses that are tenants of many of these larger investor owned properties. Prop. 15 claims it will exempt – only until 2025 – retail centers worth more than $3 million if the “occupants are 50 percent or more small businesses.” Notwithstanding the bureaucratic hoops gaining these exemptions will impose, the relief is only temporary.

Prop. 15 will immediately punish those businesses that are are just above the lowest rung, the owners of commercial property worth anything over $3 million. Imagine a manufacturer of a niche product that manages to compete, thanks to low property taxes and a clean balance sheet, against much larger manufacturers. Imagine small, well managed companies that might eventually emerge to challenge or even displace larger competitors. Prop. 15 will crush them.

Prop. 15 eliminates one of the last, if not the last, competitive advantage available in California to financially responsible, long-standing small businesses that own their property. It is a cruel attack on the hardest working and least privileged among California’s business community, masquerading as the opposite.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Why Don’t Alternative COVID Therapies Get More Trials in America?

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In case anyone still thinks so, the COVID-19 pandemic is not a hoax. How and why it originated may never be known for certain. How societies ought to respond to it, and who are most vulnerable to the disease, are both topics of intense debate. But deaths in America from all causes are up year-to-date by over 200,000 compared to recent years, and while we may hope the worst is behind us, this is not over.

The single most authoritative source for statistics on deaths in the U.S. is the CDC website, and a way to eliminate any doubt about cause of death is to simply bypass the categories and look at deaths from all causes. If that number is only marginally up this year, then you can argue that COVID-19 is overhyped. If that number is up significantly, then something terrible is going on, and COVID-19 probably accounts for most of that. As it is, for 2020 through the end of June, deaths from all causes are up by 15 percent over the average for the past six years, even adjusting for population growth.

The following chart shows deaths from all causes by week, starting when flu season starts in October, with data displayed through September for the six most recent previous years, and through August 26 for the 2019-20 flu season. The pattern of deaths from all causes tracks pretty evenly across the years, roughly 50,000 people per week die in America, except during flu season, when that number increases to somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000. Before this year, one outlier is the particularly bad 2017-18 flu season, when weekly deaths spiked up to 67,495 during the first week of January 2018. But it is clear that 2019-20 is much worse.

While comorbidity is a factor that can trigger legitimate and urgent debate regarding who is dying, how they are dying, and why they are dying, overall death statistics defy manipulation. Dead is dead. And starting around January 2020, weekly deaths in America hit around 60,000 per week, which is within the normal range but on the high side, then spiked all the way up to an unheard of 78,641 during a horrible week in mid-April, before apparently dropping to a low of 57,154 during the week of June 25, then trending slightly up after that.

Anyone viewing the above graph needs to avoid concluding that the downward slope of the blue line representing the 2019-20 deaths trend is indicative of reality. CDC data, for whatever reason, lags up to eight weeks behind. This means that any 2019-20 weekly totals showing on this graph after the first week in June are inaccurate and going to rise significantly.

The next chart, below, can provide an idea of what this means. It compares CDC data for 2019-20 as reported through June 24 (week 25) to more recent CDC data as reported through September 7 (week 35). The only reasonable conclusion is that the death rate in America in 2020 is set to remain significantly above average for at least several more weeks.

As can be seen on the above chart, shown on the blue line, on June 25, the CDC reported deaths so far for that week at 16,283. But by August 26, with most of the data for that week now submitted, the CDC reported deaths for that same week of June 25, shown on the red line, had risen to 57,154. This is an invariably consistent pattern. Weekly deaths are initially reported at a level one-half to one-third of what will become their eventual total once most of the data comes in. This process takes at least eight weeks.

This chart graphically depicts the implications of this delay in reporting. A new peak is forming on the week of July 29 (the red line), with total deaths reported so far at 60,159. But this is only five weeks ago, which means the eventual total will be higher still. Subsequent weeks, where the reported numbers plummet, have diminishing predictive value. But what is beyond doubt right now is that while the unprecedented levels of death seen back in April may not be repeated, for now they are settling at a plateau around 60,000 per week which is well above levels in previous years.

Why Aren’t All Therapy Options Granted Open Debate?

Another unknown surrounding COVID-19 is whether or not a vaccine can ever be sufficiently effective to wipe it out. The disease clearly has various mutations, some more virulent than others, and flu vaccines are typically only 40%-60% effective. Equally to the point, before a vaccine is available, and certainly afterwards as well, without effective therapies to treat COVID-19, more people die.

Back on July 21 in an article published on American Greatness, I described the shameful, organized suppression of public debate or even access to information about the drug Hydroxychloroquine. Ongoing trials around the world continue to indicate this drug, taken in conjunction with Zinc and Azithromycin, has therapeutic value in treating COVID-19, although more information and study is required. But as detailed in the article, the CDC, WHO, and reputable medical journals have all dismissed this therapy as useless, even dangerous.

Just a few days later on July 25, a group of doctors held a press conference to challenge the anti-HCQ narrative, claiming it was an effective therapy for their COVID-19 patients. That video, after getting nearly 20 million views in only a few hours, was removed by Facebook and YouTube, and their website was also shut down by its ISP. Versions of that video still survive on BitChute.

The next graphic isn’t included because it’s accurate. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t It was found online on a Twitter account with the handle @MisaAlvo. In the discussion accompanying this graphic there are comments that appear to question some of the data. But showing this graphic isn’t to attest to its veracity. It’s to ask a very simple question:

Why isn’t the WHO or the CDC compiling this data, and presenting this chart? Why do we have to go to “Misa Alvo,” an unknown entity existing somewhere in the vast Twittersphere, to see a report that uses such an informative layout?

Now there is another alternative therapy that shows promise, Ivermectin.

Will information about this drug also be discredited and suppressed?

An early expose on One America News, aired August 13, discussed the potential of Ivermectin. Searches currently show information from multiple sources about Ivermectin. In BioSpectrum Asia, “Australian develops effective Triple Therapy to treat COVID-19.” Additional favorable (or at least balanced) reports come from TrialSite News, ScienceDirect, Medpage Today, Medscape, and the Journal of Antibiotics.

Why aren’t we hearing more about this drug? Why isn’t this drug being tested all over America?

We may never know what caused the COVID-19 outbreak. We won’t know if it was engineered or arose spontaneously. We won’t know if it was released deliberately or by accident. If it was deliberately released, we will probably never know who was behind it. We may never even know what precautions we took as a society were most effective, and which ones were unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Amidst this profound uncertainty, however, we can be sure of one thing. The systematic denial of information on cheap and possibly effective therapies undermines trust in America’s institutions. Big tech, big pharma, and the so-called deep state are all implicated. With people dying in numbers that are significantly and indisputably greater than normal in America, it is hard to think there are not sinister motivations behind the denial of information and access to various inexpensive and possibly life-saving treatments.

People should be free to try, they should be free to decide for themselves, they should be free to be wrong. Trial and error. Hypothesis and experimentation. Debate over the efficacy of HCQ should welcome all sides, advocates and detractors. Instead only HCQ’s detractors have the mic, and they sprinkle their arguments with obvious, discrediting lies, such as the lie that HCQ constitutes a serious danger to the health of anyone who takes it as prescribed.

What sort of hidden agenda could be behind all this, one might ask? Is it greed? Kill small businesses and let mega corporations take full control of the economy? Develop new drugs that are fabulously expensive, and restrict COVID-19 therapies to these highly profitable choices? Mandate vaccinations and make trillions by injecting literally everyone?

On the other hand, maybe there’s a shared consensus among elites that now is the time to screw down the freedoms Americans have taken for granted. Or maybe the political chaos and economic misery largely caused by the pandemic can be pinned on the president, which could then result in his defeat this November.

Or maybe all of the above. Meanwhile, people continue to die.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Union Power is Behind Fullerton’s Push for Higher Taxes

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Did you know your taxes are being used to advocate for more taxes? Well, not exactly. It’s against the law for public agencies to engage in “advocacy.” The people running these agencies who want to raise your taxes may only spend public funds in order to “communicate” with you about their proposals. And so they “communicate” good and hard. And then you vote.

To make perfectly clear what’s really happening here, the communications are only one side of the coin. When they decide to put tax increases on the ballot, city councils use public funds to hire expensive consulting firms to help them engage in “communications” with voters. At the same time, the public sector unions who arguably control these city councils –  unions that need all that money to raise their pay and fund their pensions – hire political professionals to wage campaigns to voters that explicitly advocate these tax increases.

An example of this, and there are many, is the City of Fullerton. Like most California cities, it’s in financial trouble these days, if it wasn’t already. And like most California cities, public sector unions exercise inordinate if not absolute power over the city council.

Public Sector Union Power is Behind the Push for Higher Taxes

Fullerton is a city with a long history of public sector union influence on elected officials. In a 2012 article entitled “Fullerton Police Union Intimidates Reform Candidates,” author Steven Greenhut writes about two councilmen at the time, Bruce Whitaker and Travis Kiger, who were victims of this intimidation. They were demanding reform in the wake of the death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man fatally beaten by Fullerton officers in July 2011.

Greenhut documents tactics allegedly employed by Fullerton’s police union, including storming City Council meetings, yelling at council members who stood up to them, leveling unsubstantiated charges designed to scare Fullerton residents into electing pro-union candidates, and sending out dozens of hit pieces designed to smear candidates that don’t (or won’t) adhere to police union demands.

More recently, Fullerton’s firefighters union have demonstrated their political power. This June, the political reform website “Friends For Fullerton’s Future” published a report entitled “Fullerton Fire Would Rather Watch Placentia Burn.” This is part of a longer story, about how earlier this year Placentia took the courageous step of restructuring their fire department, against the wishes of their firefighters union, saving millions in the process.

Placentia’s fire department restructuring was done in careful consultation with experts, and the innovations they’ve come up with are likely to make their fire department more effective at less cost to taxpayers. But as part of a coordinated effort to contain Placentia’s new model -a dangerous threat to union power and union benefits – the Fullerton firefighter union put maximum pressure on their City Council to reject a mutual aid agreement with Placentia, despite it being a neighboring city.

Union negotiated work rules, pay scales, and pension benefits are one of the primary reasons California’s cities and counties are in financial trouble. In Fullerton, 70 percent of the general fund budget is allocated towards public safety – the police and fire departments. In 2019 the average fire captain in Fullerton collected a pay and benefits package that cost the city $224,000; the average fire engineer, $186,000. According to Transparent California, 146 Fullerton employees made over $200,000 in pay and benefits in 2019, nearly every one of them were either police or firefighters. No wonder money is tight.

To cope with a projected $7.9 million deficit, the Fullerton City Council has approved a 1.25 cent sales tax increase, which voters will either approve or reject this November. The city expects to raise $25 million per year through this tax. At first glance that appears to be overkill, but first glances can be deceptive.

For starters, nobody knows how far revenue will drop. The pandemic shutdown is entering its eighth month with no end in sight. And while tax revenue falls across the state, pension costs continue to rise. For Fullerton, this is documented in the CalPERS actuarial reports for the city’s miscellaneous and safety employees. These reports, the most recent available, were released in July 2019, well before COVID-19 burst the global investment bubble.

The reports show that Fullerton was already pouring $25 million into CalPERS in the current fiscal year, an amount projected to rise to over $33 million by 2025. And with 70 percent of that going into public safety pensions that were only 64 percent funded as of June 30, 2018, who knows how much those payments are going to rise.

The initial intention of the city council was to propose all of the funds raised by a sales tax increase would go to pay for new and upgraded infrastructure, but a special infrastructure tax would require a 2/3 approval by voters, and the city’s polling indicated that was an unlikely outcome.

Which brings us back to the topic of cities using taxpayers money to research voter sentiment, which they then use to tailor “public information campaigns” to “educate” voters on their new tax proposals.

When Do “Public Information Campaigns” Become Political Campaigns?

In his syndicated column entitled “Local tax hikes cleverly packaged,” two years ago, Dan Walters wrote “Local governments cannot, by law, directly finance campaigns to win voter approval of new taxes. However, local officials can – and quite often do – hire consulting firms to test voter sentiment in advance, design tax proposals to give them the best chance of winning approval, and design supposedly educational mailers and other materials that portray the taxes in positive terms.”

The difference should be obvious, but in practice it’s not. When you engage in a political campaign, you are explicitly supporting a particular candidate or ballot measure. When you are “communicating,” you are compelled to limit yourself to presenting objective facts and information to the public; you cannot take a stand for or against a candidate or ballot measure.

The problem arises because California’s cities and counties are so desperate to raise taxes and secure additional bond financing, their taxpayer-funded “communications” efforts vs. political campaigning is a distinction with almost no difference. After all, it is merely informative to tell voters that the city needs more money to hire more police and firefighters so octogenarian widows aren’t sexually assaulted in their burning houses. These sorts of messages are not political ads, they’re just “communications.”

And through that massive loophole pours countless millions of taxpayers money every election season, out of city or county coffers and into the hands of communications consultants.

Walking this fine line requires cities to make sure they communicate without advocating. But why on earth would a city council spend city funds to communicate information that would discourage voters from voting in favor of a tax increase that they have themselves approved for the ballot?

Fullerton, unsurprisingly, wants to “communicate” with voters about their proposed sales tax increase. To manage their communications, they have accepted a proposal from TBWBH Strategies, a “non-partisan strategy and communications consulting firm specializing in bond, tax and other public finance ballot measures supporting public programs, services and facilities.”

On the homepage of TBWBH’s website, note how they carefully they have worded the description of their primary services, which they characterize as “Revenue Measure Consulting for Public Agencies.” Notice that nowhere does this description actually say they engage in advocacy:

“TBWBH Props and Measures is a strategy and communications consulting firm specializing in developing revenue measures for the ballot and implementing informational communication strategies to meet your funding needs. Our work has generated billions in revenue for quality public services, programs, facilities and infrastructure in communities throughout California and the nation.”

If you scroll a bit further down TBWBH’s homepage, after a slide deck that depicts the many sorts of public agencies that TBWBH works with, there is a description of additional services they provide, characterized as “Winning Revenue Measure Campaigns.” The description reads:

“TBWBH Props and Measures also advises advocacy campaigns supporting revenue measures to develop and implement strategies that secure the votes needed to win. Even on tough supermajority revenue measures, we maintain a win rate of over 90%.”

All of this is perfectly legal.

Do Public Agencies Ever Cross the Line into Advocacy?

The somewhat ambiguous criteria for what constitutes “advocacy” renders this an extremely difficult question to answer. But sometimes public agencies and their communications consultants cross a line obvious enough to earn them a slap on the wrist. But it doesn’t happen very often, and the consequences are minimal.

For example, on August 21 of this year, Los Angeles County settled a claim that it used tax funds to campaign for tax hikes. As reported by LAist, “In 2017, L.A. County spent nearly $1 million in public funds on a campaign to pass Measure H, a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax to fund new services for homeless people. It blanketed radio and TV airwaves, and ran print ads in newspapers in English and Spanish with the slogan ‘Real Hope, Lasting Change.’ Now, county taxpayers are on the hook for another $1.35 million to settle legal complaints about the campaign, based on state law which says governments may not spend taxpayer funds to advocate for a tax increase.”

The scope of this ruling is laughable. Measure H, which was a voter-approved 1/4 cent sales tax increase, will generate an estimated $355 million a year for ten years to fight homelessness. As an aside, that is more than enough money to cure homelessness in Los Angeles County if they’d restore laws and penalties to curb vagrancy, petty theft, and public intoxication, and build supervised tent shelters in inexpensive parts of the county. But instead, anything goes in woke Los Angeles, and corrupt developers are making billions, building “homeless supportive housing” at an average cost of $500,000 per unit. Measure H, like most homeless initiatives in woke locales across America, is a lucrative scam for developers and a magnet for more homeless. This is a failed model in a failing county.

To the point, however, a one-time $1.35 million settlement for violating campaign finance laws amounts to nothing, when the fruits of the illicit advocacy campaign total $355 million per year.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit leading to the settlement with Los Angeles County was the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Jon Coupal, HJTA president, was quoted in LAist saying that next time “We’re going to put bounties on these individuals who engage in this activity.” When asked to clarify what he meant by that, Coupal, in an email, said “we acknowledged that, despite the record fine imposed against LA County, some public entities might still calculate that such fines are worth the return on investment. For that reason, HJTA will, in the most egregious cases, pursue personal liability against the elected officials and public employees who authorize such illegal expenditures. Such a remedy has been recognized by the California Supreme Court as a legitimate penalty.”

Watch out, public agencies. The watch dogs are going to bite harder next time. And they are watching Fullerton very closely.

When reached for comment on the common practice of public agencies using taxpayer sourced funds to “communicate” to voters about tax measures they have proposed, Jon Fleischman, a political strategist with Fleischman Consulting Group and the publisher of the FlashReport, had this to say:

“This practice of spending taxpayer dollars to hire professional public relations firms to advocate for the passing of tax increases is pure corruption. There is an appropriate expectation that when measures are before the voters, those who support and oppose them will raise money and spend money to influence voters, and that those activities will be publicly reported. Here you have voters who do not support higher taxes having their own tax dollars used to influence the outcome of the vote, all while shielding this electioneering from public disclosure as campaign related expenditures.”

Steps to Prevent “Public Education” That Supports New Taxes

The California Policy Center issued a policy brief in 2017 that included sample language for a local ordinance that would make it much harder for public officials to engage in “education” campaigns relating to new tax and bond proposals. The operative paragraphs from that sample ordinance are as follows:

Article 1. This city/county will not use public money – either internally, through its own staff and treasury, or externally, through the hiring or use of outside vendors – to engage in public education; public opinion polling or studies; or communications intended or may seem to be intended to determine the outcome of political campaigns.

Article 2. This city/county will fully disclose and make available – online and in public meetings and in public places – any documents, including contracts, communications, or proposals with vendors and/or staff which touch on public education; public opinion polling or studies; or communications which might seem to a reasonable person designed to determine the outcome of political campaigns.

Article 3. Every city/county official – elected, appointed or in any way employed with this city – is duty-bound to declare publicly a violation of this resolution.

Article 4. This city/county will never use force – including lawsuits – to derail an attempt to disclose the potential violation of this resolution.

The next few years are likely going to be more financially challenging for California’s cities and counties than the last few years. Higher taxes burden private citizens that are already harmed by the economic slowdown. Rather than raising taxes, local elected officials, and the public sector unions that influence them so much, need to work to make government more efficient. It can be done.

This article originally appeared on the website California Policy Center.

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When Will A Prominent Black Athlete Stand Up to the Mob?

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The recent expressions of support for Black Lives Matter by professional athletes can be understood as a legitimate reaction to tragic episodes of injustice that occur in the United States. But everything beyond that noble sentiment is flawed.”Systemic racism,” to the extent it even exists, explains very little of black underachievement, and the Black Lives Matter organization offers absolutely nothing that will help the black community.

The reality for at least the last forty years in America is that Blacks are beneficiaries of programs – college admissions preferences, incentives for minority-owned businesses, quotas towards achieving proportional representation in corporate hiring and promotions, and subsidized housing, to name a few – designed to uplift them. These programs have been administered at a cost that by now probably amounts to trillions of dollars. If Black activists and the politicians who pander to them for votes truly think “reparations” are justified, reparations have already been tried and are ongoing. They’re not working. They may have actually done more harm than good.

Most every citation of “systemic racism” either references things that were ended several decades ago, or they are based on flawed statistical analysis. To the first point, slavery was eliminated in 1863. Segregation was abolished in 1965. Redlining was outlawed in 1968. And as noted, starting in the 1960s, incalculable sums have been spent on systemic benefits and preferences designed to help America’s Blacks. So much for institutionalized racism persisting in America. If anything, it’s the opposite, institutionalized anti-racism.

Statistics, however, at least at first glance, tell a very different story. Despite outlawing racist institutions and policies, and despite institutionalizing a comprehensive and extremely expensive assortment of preferences and policies and benefits designed to compensate for the historical legacy of racism, according to nearly every statistical metric, Blacks still lag behind Whites in group achievements.

Black Lives Matter activists, along with most liberals, point to disparities in Black achievement in academia and economically, as well as disparities relating to law enforcement, and claim this is proof of systemic racism. But a deeper look at the statistics does not justify this conclusion. Statistics relating to law enforcement, the ones that matter, are completely ignored by BLM and a sympathetic media, with tragic consequences.

The most prevalent, and very incendiary, statistic heard is that Black people are being disproportionately killed by police. If some of the politicians and pundits exploiting this supposed fact are to be believed, a genocidal slaughter is taking place. If the consequences of making these outrageous claims weren’t so tragic, they would be laughable. The statistic fails on every level.

As shown on the chart below, using data from the FBI, the Kaiser Foundation, and Statista Research Inc., in 2018 a total of 209 Blacks were killed by police, the overwhelming majority of them armed. This compares to 399 Whites killed by police in that year.

The first thing to understand is that in a nation of over 300 million, these are ridiculously small numbers, although that’s scant comfort to the people and communities affected. The root of the claim of a police war on Blacks comes down to this: If you’re Black, in 2018 you had a one in 190,000 chance of having a fatal encounter with police, and if you’re White, your chances of the same were only one in 495,000. Hence you will hear that Blacks are 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police as whites.

If that were all there was to it, perhaps there’d be a reason for more concern. But here are facts that cannot be ignored: Blacks commit more crimes. In terms of arrests, Blacks are twelve times as likely as Whites to be arrested for murder, three times as likely for rape, eleven times as likely for robbery, and four times as likely for aggravated assault.

This brings us back to the crux of the issue, which is whether police encounters with Blacks result in a disproportionate number of fatalities. If you look at the death rate per arrest rate, they do not. In 2018 (these statistics are fairly consistent from year to year) the chances of dying while being arrested were exactly the same for Whites and Blacks, a nearly infinitesimal one one-hundredth of one percent. 

Presenting these statistics is not meant to diminish the impact of police misconduct, or the necessity to reduce it as much as possible. But this brings up another sad but inevitable statistical reality. There are nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, along with roughly an additional million armed private security guards.

In groups of individuals this big, no matter how carefully screened and no matter how well trained they may be, some bad actors will exist. Similarly, when there are over 50 million individual encounters between police and citizens every year, a few of them will have an unforeseen, avoidable, tragic outcome. People are not universally good, and everyone is fallible. Just as we shall never perfect any other aspect of our society, because that is impossible, we shall never perfect the art of policing.

These are the truths that the BLM movement and all of its supporters ignore. Most know better. And there are many, many alternatives to the popular agenda being pushed – defunding the police, enforcing even stricter systems of racial preferences, paying reparations, and sliding further towards socialism.

How Professional Black Athletes Can Truly Help Their Communities

The personal qualities that enable athletes to play at the level of the NBA or NFL are not the qualities that define the rhetoric or the mentality of Black Lives Matter activists. Their entire premise, that Black people are victims, even if it is true, is unhealthy. Did LeBron James or Steph Curry become two of the best basketball players in history by thinking of themselves as victims?

A Black conservative who has explored this theme in-depth is nationally syndicated talk radio host Larry Elder. In a recent monologue, he asked why the work ethic that an athlete would apply to their sport cannot be applied equally to academics. “If you’re willing to spend two hours a day working on your jump shot,” he asks, “why aren’t you spending that much time working on algebra problems?”

This mentality: That individual resolve and self-discipline can overcome adversity, is something a professional athlete can explain with the credibility of their own accomplishments. This fact, that character can overcome disadvantages has been proven by other groups in America; Chinese, Indian, Jewish, and Nigerian immigrants all have success stories to tell; all of them have aggregate group achievement in academia and household income that surpass Whites.

As for changing the institutions that are harming the Black community, why aren’t athletes like LeBron James and Steph Curry taking an honest look at public education in the inner city? Why don’t they watch the closing arguments in the Vergara case, where Marcellus MacRae, a Black attorney, proves that work rules forced onto school districts by the teachers union have had a disproportionate negative impact on low income communities? Why don’t these athletes demand school choice? Why don’t they denounce the teachers union, which has monopolized and all but ruined public education, especially in the inner cities?

A final argument, considered the clincher, made by social justice advocates and members of BLM is that it is the low income status of Blacks that itself explains their high rates of crime, substance abuse, broken homes, and academic underachievement. This is a dubious assertion, contradicted by the successful upward mobility of so many other nonwhite communities. An exhaustive data analysis on the website Random Critical Analysis makes a convincing case that racial differences in group achievement are poorly explained by economics. But so what?

Staying sober, staying married, finding a job, studying diligently, obeying the law – these are all choices that people make, and priorities that communities choose to embrace or reject. Why aren’t Black athletes going into their own communities and challenging them all to make choices that will help them instead of hurt them? Why are they instead encouraging their brothers and sisters to consider themselves victims? What benefit do they see in placing blame for Black underachievement on Whites, when the basis of these accusations is not well supported by data, and the cure is worse than the disease?

LeBron James, Steph Curry, and all the rest of these athletic stars have real power and influence. They are paragons of physical strength and skill. But for them to have real courage, and offer genuine help to their communities, they should review the facts, tell the hard truths, and stand up to the mob.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Why is Conservative Latino Media Virtually Nonexistent?

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Television and cable network news is overwhelmingly biased in favor of the Democratic party, but at least viewers in search of balance can find options. Fox News will usually report both sides of the story, and One America News can be relied on for a consistent conservative perspective.

Similarly, online search and social media platforms do everything they possibly can – short of triggering federal intervention – to diminish the reach of conservative commentary and news with a conservative slant. But despite everything these companies are doing, there is nonetheless a robust assortment of YouTube channels and Twitter accounts where conservatives have built up massive followings.

There is one place, however, where there is no balance whatsoever, and that is within America’s Spanish language television. The two major Spanish TV networks are Telemundo and Univision, and they own the primetime Spanish-language audience in the U.S. Their news reporting and news commentary is consistently leftist. Viewers have no alternative.

One of the most prominent television journalists for Univision is Jorge Ramos, who attained wide coverage on all of America’s television networks during 2015, when he was temporarily ejected from a press conference held by then candidate Trump. Needless to say, Ramos didn’t like Trump in 2015, and he’s still mad.

A recent pair of tweets by Ramos, who has 3.6 million Twitter followers, exemplifies how Spanish speaking Americans are even more vulnerable to biased reporting. Because they can’t translate for themselves what they may see or hear in English, how their reporters interpret news is all they see. Here is the first tweet, which Ramos posted in English:

In this English language tweet, Ramos is trying to reinforce his allegation that Trump is a racist. Notice that he doesn’t mention what Trump actually said, “some great people, some really bad people too.” Then in his Spanish language tweet, below, Ramos goes a step further:

In Spanish, Ramos not only omits Trump’s reference to “some great people,” but he adds “incluyendo a los de Mexico,” which infers that Trump was targeting Mexican immigrants in his remarks, which he did not. He never even mentioned Mexico in the speech in Arizona that Ramos is criticizing. Then Ramos attempts in his tweet to recruit the Mexican president, Andres Obrador, to speak out against Trump, stating “he criticized Trump when he said something similar in 2015. But will he do it again now?”

These things add up. Ramos is at the pinnacle of a Spanish-language media establishment that uses the same tactics as the mainstream liberal media. They make selective use of facts, omitting anything that doesn’t support their anti-Trump, anti-Republican message. If the weight of a news story obligates them to report something negative about Democrats, they immediately juxtapose it to something even more negative about Republicans. Their tone is invariably calibrated to trigger anger towards Republicans and Trump, and to elicit trust and faith in Democrats and, in this election season, trust and faith in Joe Biden. And, of course, they emphasize issues designed to target Latino sentiments – racism, bilingual education, immigration, benefits for migrants – and package these issues according to a one-sided, pro-Democrat agenda.

According to Pew Research, 2020 will mark the first time that Latinos will represent the largest nonwhite voting bloc in America. They are projected to constitute 13.3 percent of the electorate in 2020, overtaking Blacks at 12.4 percent. In the 2018 election, 90 percent of Blacks voted for Democrats, compared to 69 percent of Latinos. But Black voting patterns have the potential to significantly realign in the coming years, if not months, because there is a powerful and growing movement of Black conservatives.

From well established intellectual heavyweights such as Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, to inspiring radio stars like Larry Elder, or charismatic newcomers like Candace Owens, there is a mainstream Black conservative movement that threatens the electoral status quo. These mainstream personalities are joined by a powerful online assortment of black conservatives that collectively, reach additional millions if not tens of millions of additional followers; people like Terrence Williams, Stacy Dash, David Harris, The Hodge Twins, Diamond & Silk, CJ Pearson, and hundreds of others.

Black conservatism is alive and well and on the rise. There is nothing even remotely comparable among America’s Latinos. Why? Why isn’t a growing movement of Latino conservatives threatening the electoral status quo?

Is the Latino Conservative Movement a Sleeping Giant?

The standard GOP consultant pitch for at least the past two decades has been “Latinos are natural conservatives. They are pro-life. They are pro-family. They work hard and start up small businesses.” And perhaps that explains why the GOP can attract three times the percentage of Latino votes than Black votes. But three times an insignificant slice is still a very small slice. When Latinos, so-called “natural conservatives,” are consistently voting by nearly a 3-to-1 margin for liberals, sanguine affirmations of their “natural conservative” inclinations are crushed by reality.

If conservative television media is nonexistent among Latinos, the online landscape is scarcely any better. Anthony Cabassa, a Marine veteran living in deep blue California is one of the few Latinos who, as an independent journalist and a Trump supporter, has acquired 15,200 followers on Twitter. When asked why more Latinos don’t support conservatives, he was unequivocal:

“The Spanish language media narrative is leftist. For example, they have made the pandemic look like it is Trump’s fault, when the reality is the entire world is suffering now and no country is exempt. The problem with the Latino voters is that they are misinformed by the Spanish language media. A lot of the reporters have worked with the DNC and they don’t promote anything about conservatives.”

Cabassa, who is the current chairman of the California chapter of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, described how the major Spanish language media affiliates ignore them, stating: “Univision and Telemundo have interviewed the Republican Hispanic Assembly but they have not aired any of those interviews. Earlier this year we had over 500 conservative Hispanics in San Diego. They went down to cover the event but they never reported on it. They will not promote anything that suggests there are conservative organizations that are speaking truth about how this administration has helped Hispanics.”

When conservative perspectives are entirely absent from mainstream media, there is a downstream effect. As Cassara observed, “It is really easy to stick with Spanish, you have an option for Spanish everywhere. All the targeting ads are in Spanish. A lot of people speak English to get by, but when they want to listen they listen to news in Spanish.”

And when the news is invariably anti-Trump, pro-Biden, anti-conservative, and pro-liberal, even “natural conservatives” have no information or support that might enable a movement to blossom.

Even in today’s content saturated media environment, it isn’t impossible to launch conservative television networks. One American News, an upstart cable network that offers in-depth national and international news with a perspective that’s more conservative than Fox, is an example of how a newcomer can emerge and reach critical mass in just a few years. Launched in 2013, by May 2019, OAN claimed they were “ranked as the fourth-highest service in that genre, behind Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and CNN. OAN outperformed CNN Headline News, Fox Business Channel, CNBC, BBC World News, Fusion, Bloomberg and others.”

When reached for comment, OAN President Charles Herring had this to say about launching a Spanish language version: “We’ve have investigated business models for the launch of a Spanish version of OAN. Yet there’s no plans to launch a Spanish version at this time.”

Watching OAN is a welcome respite from what is blatant propaganda on most television networks. Even Fox News often ignores important stories that OAN covers. For this reason, OAN is a threat, as evidenced by its establishment critics that span the mainstream ideological spectrum from the New York Times to the National Review. But watch OAN, and make up your own mind. Then imagine the impact of a Spanish language version of this sort of reporting and commentary.

Maybe America’s Latinos are “natural conservatives.” But until Spanish language media is no longer an ideologically monolithic mass of leftist propaganda, this potential will be unrealized.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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“Public Information” to Promote New Taxes, Paid for by Taxpayers

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Did you know your taxes are being used to advocate for more taxes? Well, not exactly. It’s against the law for public agencies to engage in “advocacy.” The people running these agencies who want to raise your taxes may only spend public funds in order to “communicate” with you about their proposals. And so they “communicate” good and hard. And then you vote.

An example of this, and there are many, is the City of Fullerton.

To cope with a projected $7.9 million deficit, the Fullerton City Council has approved a 1.25 cent sales tax increase, which voters will either approve or reject this November. The city expects to raise $25 million per year through this tax. At first glance that appears to be overkill, but first glances can be deceptive.

For starters, nobody knows how far revenue will drop. The pandemic shutdown is entering its eighth month with no end in sight. And while tax revenue falls across the state, pension costs continue to rise. For Fullerton, this is documented in the CalPERS actuarial reports for the city’s miscellaneous and safety employees. These reports, the most recent available, were released in July 2019, well before COVID-19 burst the global investment bubble.

The reports show that Fullerton was already pouring $25 million into CalPERS in the current fiscal year, an amount projected to rise to over $33 million by 2025. And with 70 percent of that going into public safety pensions that were only 64 percent funded as of June 30, 2018, who knows how much those payments are going to rise.

The initial intention of the city council was to propose all of the funds raised by a sales tax increase would go to pay for new and upgraded infrastructure, but a special infrastructure tax would require a 2/3 approval by voters, and the city’s polling indicated that was an unlikely outcome.

Which brings us back to the topic of cities using taxpayers money to research voter sentiment, which they then use to tailor “public information campaigns” to “educate” voters on their new tax proposals.

When Do “Public Information Campaigns” Become Political Campaigns?

In his syndicated column entitled “Local tax hikes cleverly packaged,” two years ago, Dan Walters wrote “Local governments cannot, by law, directly finance campaigns to win voter approval of new taxes. However, local officials can – and quite often do – hire consulting firms to test voter sentiment in advance, design tax proposals to give them the best chance of winning approval, and design supposedly educational mailers and other materials that portray the taxes in positive terms.”

The difference should be obvious, but in practice it’s not. When you engage in a political campaign, you are explicitly supporting a particular candidate or ballot measure. When you are “communicating,” you are compelled to limit yourself to presenting objective facts and information to the public; you cannot take a stand for or against a candidate or ballot measure.

The problem arises because California’s cities and counties are so desperate to raise taxes and secure additional bond financing, their taxpayer-funded “communications” efforts vs. political campaigning is a distinction with almost no difference. After all, it is merely informative to tell voters that the city needs more money to hire more police and firefighters so octogenarian widows aren’t sexually assaulted in their burning houses. These sorts of messages are not political ads, they’re just “communications.”

And through that massive loophole pours countless millions of taxpayers money every election season, out of city or county coffers and into the hands of communications consultants.

Walking this fine line requires cities to make sure they communicate without advocating. But why on earth would a city council spend city funds to communicate information that would discourage voters from voting in favor of a tax increase that they have themselves approved for the ballot?

Fullerton, unsurprisingly, wants to “communicate” with voters about their proposed sales tax increase. To manage their communications, they have accepted a proposal from TBWBH Strategies, a “non-partisan strategy and communications consulting firm specializing in bond, tax and other public finance ballot measures supporting public programs, services and facilities.”

On the homepage of TBWBH’s website, note how they carefully they have worded the description of their primary services, which they characterize as “Revenue Measure Consulting for Public Agencies.” Notice that nowhere does this description actually say they engage in advocacy:

“TBWBH Props and Measures is a strategy and communications consulting firm specializing in developing revenue measures for the ballot and implementing informational communication strategies to meet your funding needs. Our work has generated billions in revenue for quality public services, programs, facilities and infrastructure in communities throughout California and the nation.”

If you scroll a bit further down TBWBH’s homepage, after a slide deck that depicts the many sorts of public agencies that TBWBH works with, there is a description of additional services they provide, characterized as “Winning Revenue Measure Campaigns.” The description reads:

“TBWBH Props and Measures also advises advocacy campaigns supporting revenue measures to develop and implement strategies that secure the votes needed to win. Even on tough supermajority revenue measures, we maintain a win rate of over 90%.”

All of this is perfectly legal. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, merely to make perfectly clear what’s really happening here, city councils hire firms like TBWBH to do “revenue measure consulting” that result in taxpayer funded “information communications strategies,” then the public sector unions who arguably control these city councils –  unions that need all that money to raise their pay and fund their pensions – also hire firms like TBWBH, where the advocacy side of the house wages “winning revenue measure campaigns.”

To keep up appearances, one would expect two firms to be hired. One by the city. A different one by the unions. But who knows? And why bother, if it’s all legal?

Do Public Agencies Ever Cross the Line into Advocacy?

The somewhat ambiguous criteria for what constitutes “advocacy” renders this an extremely difficult question to answer. But sometimes public agencies and their communications consultants cross a line obvious enough to earn them a slap on the wrist. But it doesn’t happen very often, and the consequences are minimal.

For example, on August 21 of this year, Los Angeles County settled a claim that it used tax funds to campaign for tax hikes. As reported by LAist, “In 2017, L.A. County spent nearly $1 million in public funds on a campaign to pass Measure H, a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax to fund new services for homeless people. It blanketed radio and TV airwaves, and ran print ads in newspapers in English and Spanish with the slogan ‘Real Hope, Lasting Change.’ Now, county taxpayers are on the hook for another $1.35 million to settle legal complaints about the campaign, based on state law which says governments may not spend taxpayer funds to advocate for a tax increase.”

The scope of this ruling is laughable. Measure H, which was a voter-approved 1/4 cent sales tax increase, will generate an estimated $355 million a year for ten years to fight homelessness. As an aside, that is more than enough money to cure homelessness in Los Angeles County if they’d restore laws and penalties to curb vagrancy, petty theft, and public intoxication, and build supervised tent shelters in inexpensive parts of the county. But instead, anything goes in woke Los Angeles, and corrupt developers are making billions, building “homeless supportive housing” at an average cost of $500,000 per unit. Measure H, like most homeless initiatives in woke locales across America, is a lucrative scam for developers and a magnet for more homeless. This is a failed model in a failing county.

To the point, however, a one-time $1.35 million settlement for violating campaign finance laws amounts to nothing, when the fruits of the illicit advocacy campaign total $355 million per year.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit leading to the settlement with Los Angeles County was the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Jon Coupal, HJTA president, was quoted in LAist saying that next time “We’re going to put bounties on these individuals who engage in this activity.” When asked to clarify what he meant by that, Coupal, in an email, said “we acknowledged that, despite the record fine imposed against LA County, some public entities might still calculate that such fines are worth the return on investment. For that reason, HJTA will, in the most egregious cases, pursue personal liability against the elected officials and public employees who authorize such illegal expenditures. Such a remedy has been recognized by the California Supreme Court as a legitimate penalty.”

Watch out, public agencies. The watch dogs are going to bite harder next time. And they are watching Fullerton very closely.

When reached for comment on the common practice of public agencies using taxpayer sourced funds to “communicate” to voters about tax measures they have proposed, Jon Fleischman, a political strategist with Fleischman Consulting Group and the publisher of the FlashReport, had this to say:

“This practice of spending taxpayer dollars to hire professional public relations firms to advocate for the passing of tax increases is pure corruption. There is an appropriate expectation that when measures are before the voters, those who support and oppose them will raise money and spend money to influence voters, and that those activities will be publicly reported. Here you have voters who do not support higher taxes having their own tax dollars used to influence the outcome of the vote, all while shielding this electioneering from public disclosure as campaign related expenditures.”

Steps to Prevent “Public Education” That Supports New Taxes

The California Policy Center issued a policy brief in 2017 that included sample language for a local ordinance that would make it much harder for public officials to engage in “education” campaigns relating to new tax and bond proposals. The operative paragraphs from that sample ordinance are as follows:

Article 1. This city/county will not use public money – either internally, through its own staff and treasury, or externally, through the hiring or use of outside vendors – to engage in public education; public opinion polling or studies; or communications intended or may seem to be intended to determine the outcome of political campaigns.

Article 2. This city/county will fully disclose and make available – online and in public meetings and in public places – any documents, including contracts, communications, or proposals with vendors and/or staff which touch on public education; public opinion polling or studies; or communications which might seem to a reasonable person designed to determine the outcome of political campaigns.

Article 3. Every city/county official – elected, appointed or in any way employed with this city – is duty-bound to declare publicly a violation of this resolution.

Article 4. This city/county will never use force – including lawsuits – to derail an attempt to disclose the potential violation of this resolution.

The next few years are likely going to be more financially challenging for California’s cities and counties than the last few years. Higher taxes burden private citizens that are already harmed by the economic slowdown. Rather than raising taxes, local elected officials, and the public sector unions that influence them so much, need to work to make government more efficient. It can be done.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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