How the Scarcity Agenda Benefits Oligopolies

/by

AUDIO: How financial speculators benefit from politics designed to create scarcity, and how environmentalism is used as the moral justification for scarcity policies. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.

Foreign Firms Siphoning Water From America’s Southwest

The Partisan Rigging of the 2022 Election

/by

In a society that retains trust in its institutions, the most authoritative source for news and information would probably be the publicly funded media property that is supposed to adhere to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Here in America, that would have been PBS. Except it isn’t. The American media, by and large, along with Silicon Valley’s social media communications oligopolies, are doing everything they can to deny American voters the opportunity to politically realign their nation.

It’s always useful for conservatives to watch the legacy networks, starting with PBS, to fully appreciate the level of bias that pervades their “news” organizations. While watching them all the time might quickly become intolerable, return periodically to be reminded: The political content on these networks serve the interests of the Democratic Party.

These days, and for at least the past year, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, along with every PBS reporter, repeats the term “election denier” dozens of times during every daily news broadcast. They repeat it without irony, without hesitation or qualification. It doesn’t matter what level of skepticism someone may have about the 2020 election. Skepticism in and of itself makes one a “denier.” One can have well founded, incrementalist concerns about election integrity, or one can believe every allegation ever made about systemic election fraud, but there’s no room for such a continuum. According to PBS, all these folks are “election deniers.”

Characterizing anyone concerned about election integrity as an “election denier” is manipulative and deceptive, and with rare exceptions, every major news network is doing it. The pervasive deception practiced by the national media throughout the Trump presidency and ever since, in addition to being deliberately manipulative, is designed to cause profound election consequences. We know it was coordinated; we know it was effective. It still is. And all of it designed to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans. Does that constitute “rigging” an election, and if not, why not?

The media’s role in rigging elections to favor Democrats cannot easily be overstated, but it’s far from the only way in which elections in America are rigged. We’re all familiar with the way laws were ignored in swing states by partisan election officials. Depending on which state these violations occurred, they included ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting, mailed ballots, changes in procedures governing ballot custody and ballot verification, same day registration, waiving voter ID requirements, and more. We all remember how one activist multi-billionaire sent over $400 million dollars to public agencies tasked with administering elections, and restricted his donations to Democrat-heavy precincts in these same swing states in order to “get out the vote.”

To reduce this to the obvious: Ignoring laws is against the law. And public entities accepting private donations that are made with explicitly partisan objectives, at the very least, violates the supposed impartiality and political neutrality of the election bureaucracy. Does any of that constitute rigging an election? Why not?

These allegations are beyond serious debate. Nearly all media is partisan, favors Democrats, and manipulates their audiences. Election officials broke state election laws to help Democratic candidates. Partisan private-sector billionaires made donations to public entities with the goal of increasing Democratic turnout.

But there’s so much more. Consider the manipulated search results on Google, and the suppressed content on the major social media platforms. The partisan participation of America’s social media and search giants in manipulating public opinion, all by itself, has decisive election consequences. These communications platforms deliberately shape political sentiments in open defiance of their legal obligation to refrain from censorship in exchange for their Section 230 exemption from publisher liability. If nothing else were stacking the deck in favor of Democrats, the activities of Google, Facebook, and Twitter would be sufficient reason to allege the 2020 election was rigged.

And then there were the statistically improbable results, the dubious integrity of the ballot counting process and the questionable security of the voting machines. We can go down that speculative path a very long way. But we don’t have to. It is enough to say that legacy media, online platforms, partisan election bureaucrats, and billionaire donors made sure the election went their way. Because they rigged what they reported, what content we saw, the rules they violated, and every donation they made to a public entity. In my book, that’s a rigged election.

Small wonder there are new laws being passed in multiple states requiring (gasp) voter ID, signature verification, a secure chain of custody for ballots, cleaned up voter rolls, paper ballots that can be saved for audits, restrictions on partisan donations by private citizens to public election bureaucracies, and other reasonable measures to reduce the probability of another rigged election. And for their trouble, Judy Woodruff & Co. calls the people supporting these measures “election deniers” engaged in “voter suppression.”

The Partisan Corruption of Election Bureaucracies

At the time of publication, the polls will have just closed on the West Coast. But for any close race, we won’t know the results for several weeks. In California, election results don’t have to be certified and publicly disclosed until December 16.

This is preposterous on its face. No major nation except America requires such a protracted period to count votes, and this never happened in America until very recently. The reason for it has little to do with the COVID pandemic, because just one reform would have solved that problem (and still would): Restrict mail-in ballots to absentee voters who complete a rigorous application process.

What the partisan media won’t share with their audience is the degree of corruption that has infected the administration of elections in urban, Democratic Party-controlled counties for decades, or how the new laws enabling same day registration, early voting, ballot drop boxes, mailed ballots, ballot harvesting, and similar measures have enabled even worse corruption. In California, where the supposedly enlightened fight against “voter suppression” is the most evolved, it is uncanny how every race initially reported as too close to call ends up, several weeks later, a victory for Democrats. The voter file in California, according to expert Democrats and Republicans alike, is a mess. And as voter sentiments realign and races tighten even in this blue bastion, voter integrity matters.

Deep blue Los Angeles offers a good illustration of just how broken the system can get. Consider this excerpt from a report in City Journal that describes the voting process: “This year, every registered voter was mailed a ballot, and 84 percent of ballots were cast by mail. The city now permits ballot harvesting and unguarded drop boxes, and it doesn’t check signatures.”

The City Journal story describes how Democratic Socialists are on the verge of complete control over the Los Angeles City Council, where they have, among other things, committed to “no new cops,” the “abolition of police and jails,” “a universal public and unionized education system,” and “new housing that is permanently affordable and not operated for profit.”

These fanatics get a pass from the media, they get funding from feckless, virtue signaling, delusional billionaires, and, more to the point, they operate in an election system that is rife with defects. In 2019, to settle a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, the State of California agreed to purge over 1.5 million names of inactive voters. At the time, in violation of federal law, which requires the removal of inactive registrations that remain after two general elections, Los Angeles County had more registered voters than citizens old enough to register. The voter registration rate was 112 percent of the adult citizen population.

One year later, in the 2020 primary election, Los Angeles County officials rolled out new and unproven voting machines, or “ballot marking devices,” which would “be accessible for everyone, including the disabled and visually impaired.” The result—jamming ballots, confusing procedures, election gridlock, and incomplete screens so voters had to push “next” merely to see all the candidates competing for each office, were so disastrous that even the very left-wing American Prospect called it a debacle.

There isn’t much reason to expect that problems with the voter rolls or the voting machines have been completely fixed. Much more likely, what happens in Los Angeles elections is the opposite of “voter integrity.”

A prime example of this can be found in the recent attempt to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, someone who is either a certifiable idiot or a cunning revolutionary bent on destroying civilization. On the surface, the story of how the Gascón recall failed is merely questionable. The petitioners failed, by an eyelash, to produce enough valid signatures, and that’s all there is to it. One might raise eyebrows at a 27 percent rate of invalid petitions, but it happens.

Since 2008, however, the man in charge of ensuring Angelenos are given secure elections is Dean Logan. This excerpt from UpintheValley.org, one of the best political blogs in America that nobody’s ever heard of, describes Logan’s history, and how he oversaw verification of Gascón recall petitions:

“In secret, courtesy of Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, who managed to disqualify 195,000, or 27%, of the signatures away from the eyes of Recall Committee observers, who were banned from the building on the grounds it was not an election but a signature verification process. Dean Logan has a history. In 2004 he was the Director of Elections in Seattle during the Dino Rossi-Christine Gregoire gubernatorial race, in which Rossi prevailed by 261 votes, then 46 votes in the recount, and then in a second manual recount Logan ‘found’ 573 votes for Gregoire, previously disqualified due to -wait for it- signature matching issues. The blowback was so intense Logan was forced to resign. Because one can only fail upward in the administrative state, Los Angeles hired him soon after.”

Partisan election functionaries such as Logan, concentrated in corrupt urban strongholds where Democratic Party machines exercise absolute political power, are never the ones under the media microscope. Yet they always seem to select the right combination of ballot irregularities and technicalities to decide close races in favor of Democrats, taking full advantage of the extended period allowed for vote certification and the gaping loopholes in election security enacted by partisan legislatures.

Reserved instead for microscopic scrutiny and withering stigmatization are those “election deniers” whose candidacies for the influential secretary of state offices in states across the nation are a mortal “threat to democracy.” But these reform candidates are not the threat. The threat to democracy is to leave things the way they are. Rigged.

Americans, by the millions and irrespective of their background or ideology, are increasingly appalled by the psychotic absurdity of what are now mainstream Democratic talking points. Murdering a full-term fetus is a woman’s inalienable right. Mutilating a child who “chooses” a new gender can be done without parents’ consent. Burning down cities in pursuit of social justice is not a crime. Smothering city streets in feces and discarded syringes is necessary to protect the rights of homeless drug addicts. Criminals are victims. Productive, hard-working citizens who struggle to maintain financial independence are privileged oppressors. White people, men, heterosexuals, and Christians: Bad. BIPOC, LBGTQ+, women (if they’re liberal or trans), and non-Christians: Good. Shutting down the energy industry so an entire nation can freeze to death is necessary to counter “climate change.”

And if you vote against the political party that spews this dishonest, nihilistic, manipulative, misanthropic insanity, you are “endangering Democracy.”

Democratic Party power will diminish as a result of this election. But if not for a rigged system that is rotten to the core, they would be handed a ticket to well-deserved oblivion.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Tracking Political Spending by Government Unions

/by

With a rough top-down analysis, it’s easy enough to estimate how much government unions collect and spend every year in California. They have roughly a million members, paying roughly $1,000 per year in dues. That would be one billion dollars per year. They spend about a third of that on politics. That’s equal to over a half billion dollars, every two year election cycle, that these unions can use to influence if not decide the outcome of every contest from the top to the bottom of the ticket.

If you want to know who is paying for those ubiquitous yard signs promoting some complete unknown to become the next member of the local school board, however, it gets a lot harder. If you think it’s a government union local, buying the office for a compliant candidate, you’re probably right. They’ve got the money, and they’re everywhere. But compiling a detailed assessment of government union spending at the local level in California is nearly impossible.

This matters because public agencies are relatively decentralized in California, with local government expenditures accounting for over 60 percent of total state and local spending. The only organizations that wield sufficient resources to select and support tens of thousands of local candidates every election are government employee unions. For obvious reasons these unions also have a strong incentive to find candidates they know they’ll be able to “negotiate” with for more staff, more pay, and more benefits.

Reform candidates willing to stand up to government unions quickly learn that the rules favor big money and big institutions. To begin with, there are limits to how much anyone can donate to an individual campaign. This means a candidate cannot find a political patron to back their campaign, but instead has to raise money from hundreds of donors. That’s much harder, especially at the local level. The political patron that is ever present, in every race, is the union whose members staff the agencies these elected officials will supposedly oversee.

The practical impact of contribution limits is that most viable candidacies are backed by “independent expenditure campaigns” for which there are no contribution limits. And if the candidate coordinates their individual campaign efforts with an independent expenditure campaign, they go to jail.

Contribution limits, contrary to their intent, have made it easier for big money – i.e., government unions – to dominate every small race. When a government union pours money, without limit, into an independent expenditure campaign, they exercise more influence on a candidate they support, because with independent expenditure campaigns it is the donor, instead of the candidate, who creates and defines the candidate’s identity to voters.

Another pernicious consequence of contribution limits is that by necessitating the proliferation of independent expenditure campaigns that can accept big money, it’s a lot easer to hide union money. To begin to get an idea of how difficult it is to track government union political spending in California from the ground up, monitoring every campaign, go to the California Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance website, select “Committees, Parties, Major Donors & Slate Mailers,” and enter the search term “teachers.” After you’ve eliminated the ones that are inactive and terminated, you will be staring down a list of 461 active recipient committees funded by state and local teachers unions.

Examining the reports from these 461 committees formed by teachers unions quickly reveals how little you really know. Many of the incoming contributions come from other committees; many of the outgoing donations are to other committees. It is almost impossible to track the money coming in or going out to its ultimate source or destination. Making matters much worse is the fact that only “state political campaigns and lobbying individuals and entities are required to file financial information with the Secretary of State.” Committees that restrict their activity to local candidates – and there are thousands of them – do not have to file reports on the state’s campaign finance website.

So who paid for those yard signs?

To answer this, California’s counties have stepped up to provide campaign finance information for local elections. The same challenges, however, are multiplied on these websites. Trying to decipher what donors are behind what candidates is an exercise in futility. The many transparency resources created by California’s state and county election officials are rendered nearly opaque by virtue of their complexity.

For starters, the website interfaces used by these counties are not uniform. Have a look at the campaign finance “public search” websites for San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Sacramento counties. They’re all different. If you’re looking for information all over the state, you’ll need to learn each interface separately. In most cases, finding data on candidate controlled committees is relatively easy. But that’s not where the big money gets spent.

When it comes to independent expenditures, the complexity can become overwhelming. There is no limit on the number of independent expenditure campaigns that can be set up to influence a single race, and the contributions are reported in several different ways. For example, independent expenditures against a candidate are not reported in the same place as independent expenditures in support of that candidate’s opponent. Making matters still worse, if there is a campaign effort – a mailer, an online ad, a text or robocall campaign, a door hanger, whatever – that communicates support or opposition to multiple candidates, those expenses can show up in one place but have to be apportioned to each of the candidates mentioned.

It’s interesting to wonder what possibilities might exist to algorithmically mine California’s 58 county election reporting systems and Secretary of State Campaign Finance database to search by each candidate’s name and develop a report that identifies every donor to every committee that is either for the candidate or against their opponent. That would not be a terrifically challenging project, if California’s 58 counties used standardized campaign finance portals, and if they required candidates and committees to submit their information into a database instead of merely requiring them to upload PDF files of paper reports.

It would probably come as a surprise to many voters on the sidelines, and no surprise at all to those who have participated in state and local politics, that the vast majority of elected positions, especially at the local level, are bought and paid for by government unions. But don’t expect a comprehensive report on exactly how much was spent, in every local contest, despite that transparency residing well within the capacity of existing technology.

Without better information on the sources of campaign contributions, it is still informative to simply visit a candidate’s website and see who is endorsing them. If a candidate is endorsed by government unions, you can be pretty sure who bought those lawn signs.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Solar Farms Should Not Displace Prime Farmland

/by

Successfully coping with severe droughts in California and the Southwest requires tough choices, all of them expensive and none of them perfect. But taking millions of acres out of cultivation and replacing them with solar farms is not the answer.

California produces over one-third of America’s vegetables and three quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts – more than half of which is grown in the San Joaquin Valley. According to the California Farmland Trust, the San Joaquin Basin contains the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, which is the best there is.

Putting solar farms in more than a small fraction of this rich land will not only displace farming, but have a heat island impact in the enclosed valley. That would be unhealthy for the farms and people that remain, and could even change atmospheric conditions over a wide area, worsening the drought.

If new solar farms are destined to carpet hundreds of square miles of land, they should be dispersed throughout the state and near already existing high voltage lines. Or, they should be concentrated in California’s abundant stretches of uninhabited land such as the Mojave Desert.

With food shortages worsening throughout the world, Californians should be focusing on how to preserve agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. Why, for example, are spreading basins being proposed to allow runoff from atmospheric rivers to percolate when flood irrigation used to replenish aquifers while also growing food? Why isn’t that practice being evaluated and supported wherever appropriate?

Much of the depletion of groundwater aquifers that led to passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was caused because farmers had their allocations from rivers reduced, which forced them to pump more groundwater to irrigate their crops. Drought was a factor, but cutbacks in surface water deliveries and the abandonment of flood irrigation is what made groundwater pumping unsustainable.

The motivation to protect ecosystems during a drought is commendable. But there are solutions that don’t have to destroy the agricultural economy on what is the richest farmland in the world. Some of the environmentalist goals, such as maintaining a year-round flow in the San Joaquin River, have no precedent in history.

When there were severe droughts, that river often dried up in the summer.

Recognizing this highlights a larger reality. The civilization we’ve built has permanently altered nature, and returning it to a pre-civilization state is not an option. For example, because we suppress natural wildfires, we have to log timber or the forests become overgrown tinderboxes. Searching for the optimal balance between a thriving civilization and healthy ecosystems requires accepting limits in both directions.

With this in mind, there’s an irony in the environmentalist-inspired regulations that require water, stored in reservoirs behind artificial dams, to be released downstream in order to maintain year-round flows in rivers that used to run dry in dry years.

The solution to meeting the water requirements of farms, cities and ecosystems is to build more water supply infrastructure, not fallow millions of acres of prime farmland during a world food crisis. Capturing storm runoff through a combination of more off-stream storage and aquifer recharge can increase available water to farms and cities.

With wastewater recycling, less water has to be imported to cities, and in the San Francisco Bay region, less water would have to flow through the Delta to flush out the nitrogen currently being discharged. Desalination can also deliver a drought-proof supply of new water.

Investing in water supply infrastructure creates options for Californians that do not require undermining an industry that helps feed the world. Build the solar farms in the hot Mojave, and save the valley farms.

This article originally appeared in Cal Matters.

The Bureaucratic Erasure of Culture, Identity, and Freedom

/by

Exploring the roadways of California yields scenery evoking two distinct worlds. On the big freeways, surrounding every major interchange, the 21st century asserts itself in an agglomeration of concrete and glass boxes surrounded by lakes of asphalt, each festooned with a recognizable corporate logo. Food. Fuel. Lodging. The corporate power they represent is reflected in their generic interchangeability. “We have taken over the world. We are everywhere.” And they are. From California to the Carolinas, it’s the same fast food, the same gasoline, the same motel chains. You can’t tell them apart.

If you get off the main highways, a different world still exists, but it’s fading fast. Along Highway 50, which connects Sacramento to the South Shore of Lake Tahoe, there are several examples that take us back to the middle of the 20th century, before the only sources of roadside food, fuel and lodging were franchised cutouts backed by multinational corporations. On the eastbound ascent, just above the snow line, one of these relics sits, surrounded by chain link fence. Struggling for years against an economic deck stacked against it, COVID restrictions administered the coup de grâce. But there it stands, a spacious log cabin style lodge, with steep Swiss roofs and windowed gables. Moldering in the rain, freezing in the snow, it is worth more dead than alive.

Across the highway, a few miles downhill but still in the High Sierra, a roadhouse stands abandoned. Thick wood framing, a peaked roof, stone chimney and a decrepit neon sign define this relic from the last century. Imagine this place in its heyday, with a fire roaring in the hearth, drinks being poured, glasses clinking, the hubbub of exhilarated travelers filling the bar. Imagine the lodge across the street, the same scene, with someone playing the piano in the lobby, while families lounge or play board games with their children beneath the vaulted timber ceiling. It’s all gone now. The only thing these beautiful ruins offer are the real estate they’re sitting on, and the liquor licenses that will pass to the new owners.

To build a new restaurant in California today, much less build a motel, it isn’t enough to buy some land and know how to design a building, work with construction contractors, and run a business. That hard work and skill used to be all that mattered, and it mattered a lot. People with a good work ethic and sufficient determination could do what was, and still is, honest hard work and within a few months or a few years, depending on the scale of their project, they would be the proprietors of a restaurant or a resort hotel. No more. The skills required today favor the snakes and the cynics, the filthy rich and the implacably bureaucratic. Honesty is for suckers.

How else does one tolerate the nearly infinite ecosystem of federal, state, regional, and local agencies, all with the power to stop your project in its tracks? How else to navigate the endless litigation, the overlapping regulations that often conflict with each other depending on which agency they’re coming from, and change all the time? How else to cope when yet another lawsuit, or rule change, requires an entire new set of designs, and the need to resubmit them to every agency and start all over again?

Instead of a restaurant that’s been in one family for a century, with a fire in the hearth and drinks poured by hand, we have corporate franchises with the menu and the interior atmosphere curated by behavioral scientists, and drinks measured out by a machine. Instead of a lodge that was built when the road first went through, with all the flaws and funk and authenticity that independent, multigenerational ownership accretes, we have a concrete tilt-up monstrosity so big you can get lost in the corridors trying to find the exit, with a phony exterior façade of alpine gingerbread, and an ostentatious grand piano in the lobby that’s safely locked so nobody can play it.

One of the ironies of our time is that the traditional role of government funding practical infrastructure projects is now conflated with government at its most wasteful, funding utterly impractical “renewables” infrastructure, or exercising eminent domain to expropriate private homes in order to subsidize stadiums and “transit villages.” Worse yet, the concept of practical infrastructure enabling more affordable market housing and more financially viable small businesses is utterly lost. But how else, unless you have at least partially socialized the initial construction costs for energy, transportation and water infrastructure, can you expect the smaller, independent, private economic players to compete?

Against that prohibitive backdrop, and even more to the point, how can anyone expect small businesses to succeed, particularly if they’re doing anything that requires construction or serving food, when there are dozens of agencies that must be coddled and thousands of regulations that must be complied with, because every one of them, often just on a whim, can fatally derail your business?

These twin impediments to small business – the lack of practical infrastructure which lowers the cost of doing business, and a punitive regulatory environment – have precisely the opposite effect on big businesses. Multinational corporations thrive in the presence of high input costs and excessive regulations, because they have the market share and the balance sheet to withstand anything the government throws at them. Who needs enabling infrastructure to make energy and water affordable? Big businesses just pass costs on to their customers. Who cares about overregulation? That will kill the small players, and let big players mop up the rest of the market.

California’s ruling class tolerates a parasitic government because parasitic government empowers oligopolies. If the government goes too far, big corporations have the power to sue the government. How many smaller players, mavericks with a paltry million or two to burn, have lost everything when they tried to take on the Army Corps of Engineers, or the California Fish and Wildlife Service, or the Coastal Commission, or any others among a host of agencies fueled by an inexhaustible cascade of taxpayer dollars? Enough to provide cautionary tales aplenty.

A practical government in California that was committed to serving ordinary citizens would not only deregulate and consolidate oversight agencies. They would also fast track permitting for nuclear and natural gas development, fund water supply infrastructure, and upgrade the roads. Doing this lowers the cost of housing and empowers small businesses to compete. This understanding is usually lost even among those who properly criticize government investment in wasteful, impractical, politically contrived and unnecessary infrastructure.

We can’t bring back the last century, nor should that be anyone’s goal. But we can make it easier for small entrepreneurs to resurrect and restore the resorts and road houses that would otherwise face demolition. We can make it easier for small entrepreneurs to construct new refuges for the traveler and the tourist. We can create a policy environment that isn’t punitive to the millions of honest dealers who want to create something that consumers want, and achieve financial independence by providing it. This decentralized wealth, the product of unshackled creativity, is the engine of culture and identity – and diversity – and an expression of freedom. We should not turn that over to multinational corporations.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

The Cesspool Politics of Los Angeles

/by

In less than two weeks, voters in Los Angeles will have the opportunity to select a new mayor and nine of the 15 members of the city council. A positive outcome is unlikely. The cards are stacked.

It’s reasonable to acknowledge that big city politics are never squeaky clean. But if urban politics has historically been a swamp, Los Angeles politics in 2022 is a cesspool. To allege that The Machine controlling Los Angeles politics is fueled by the tons of feces that tens of thousands of “unhoused” addicts and predators drop onto the streets and into the gutters of the city each day is more than a metaphor, it’s reality.

This unregulated sewage is the foundation of political control in Los Angeles today. The Machine that runs Los Angeles derives money and power by creating and expanding a dependent, parasitic class of Angelenos, growing every time another free service is rolled out. A population that, by design, will never be “housed,” because “permanent supportive housing” costs taxpayers $500,000 per unit, and because most of them would never voluntarily vacate the streets even if there were enough units, since that would cramp their hunter gatherer lifestyle.

Nurturing this dysfunction therefore requires repeating a lie, endlessly, a lie that claims all you have to do is provide free housing and services, and on their own, people will decide to live in those homes, and magically shed their mental illness, their addictions, and their criminality.

This preposterous, lucrative lie persists because it has utility. It has created an unlikely but all-powerful coalition of service nonprofits, social worker bureaucrats, construction labor unions, housing developers, “democratic socialists,” and feckless billionaires. For each of these special interests, spreading the lie guarantees their ongoing access to stupefying amounts of money, power, and delusional virtue.

There are millions of Angelenos who are terrified and appalled by the tens of thousands of psychotics, addicts, drunks, thieves, perverts, rapists, and murderers that now occupy the streets and sidewalks of their neighborhoods. Millions of Angelenos scoff at how The Machine and a compliant media have unequivocally defined the homeless as victims despite the sad but unavoidable fact that thousands of them are degenerates who choose that lifestyle. It is as if beatifying them obligates us all to do nothing that might effectively restore order and safety to the streets.

So why is it, then, that when the votes are finally counted, probably sometime in mid-to-late December, democratic socialists will remain in firm control of city hall in Los Angeles, and The Machine will continue to transfer billions of dollars every year out of the pockets of working families, and into the hands of The Homeless Industrial Complex? For one thing, money talks.

An extraordinarily detailed investigation published by Westside Current, a local online news source in West Los Angeles, offers a breakdown of who’s funding the Los Angeles elections. The author, attorney Michael Jensen, in a must-read 2,100 word article (with eight diagrams showing the flow of funds), explains how the “progressive” candidates in Los Angeles are “largely supported by donations and independent expenditures made by labor unions, homeless housing developers, extremist Progressive groups and their respective well-financed PACs (i.e., special interests).”

This is not an alliance of people in ideological alignment. This is a symbiosis of disparate special interests that in even slightly more honest times would more likely be mutually antagonistic. But they are united by a common operational strategy: The ongoing failure of Los Angeles to clean up crime and vagrancy equates to their ongoing access to jobs, contracts, donations, funding, and positions of power. Everyone else loses, including the “unhoused,” who in a less corrupt and more compassionate society would be forced off the streets into inexpensive shelters constructed on inexpensive real estate, where they would get treatment and a chance to recover their dignity.

If articles like Michael Jensen’s appeared in the Los Angeles Times, as it might have back when the major newspapers still practiced journalism, millions of voters in Los Angeles would recognize The Machine for what it is – a corrupt throwback, outdoing its historical counterparts in destroying a city for its own gain. And even in spite of major media properties like the Los Angeles Times having devolved into a journalistically bankrupt annex of The Machine, voters in Los Angeles nonetheless are getting the message. City Hall is a feted cesspool. Vote them out.

Here, however, is where the fix really comes in. Anyone who thinks the overpaid thespians who masquerade as television reporters on the big networks can blithely regurgitate the phrase “election denier” with any credibility hasn’t done any homework. What happens in Los Angeles elections is the opposite of “voter integrity.”

A prime example of this can be found in the recent attempt to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, someone who is either a certifiable idiot or a cunning revolutionary bent on destroying civilization. On the surface, the story of how the Gascon recall failed is merely questionable. The petitioners failed, by an eyelash, to produce enough valid signatures, and that’s all there is to it. One might raise eyebrows at a 27 percent rate of invalid petitions, but it happens.

Now sample this excerpt from the local Los Angeles blog, UpintheValley.org (italics added):

“In secret, courtesy of Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, managed to disqualify 195,000, or 27%, of the signatures away from the eyes of Recall Committee observers, who were banned from the building on the grounds it was not an election but a signature verification process. Dean Logan has a history. In 2004 he was the Director of Elections in Seattle during the Dino Rossi-Christine Gregoire gubernatorial race, in which Rossi prevailed by 261 votes, then 46 votes in the recount, and then in a second manual recount Logan ‘found’ 573 votes for Gregoire, previously disqualified due to -wait for it- signature matching issues. The blowback was so intense Logan was forced to resign. Because one can only fail upward in the administrative state, Los Angeles hired him soon after.”

George Gascon. Dean Logan. These are the people in Los Angeles County who are charged, respectively, with keeping our streets safe and maintaining our election integrity. They are not public servants. They serve The Machine. A machine that prospers when society fails.

Eventually the people of Los Angeles will take back their beautiful city. Probably not this time around.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Unexplained Excess Deaths Are Increasing

/by

By a significant margin, and according to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. If nothing else is certain as Americans continue to cope with the most disruptive event in the last half-century, there is one indisputable fact: as the number of cases of COVID decreases over the most recent few months, they now account for less than half of this persistent elevated death rate.

In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increases in total deaths – deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths – is up significantly. In the nine months from April 2020 when COVID first hit hard, through December 2020, a normal death count would have been 2.04 million. Instead, during that period, 2.57 million people died, 26 percent over normal.

Deaths in the U.S. from all causes in 2021 were also well above normal, 3.46 million versus only 2.8 million if it had been a normal year, 24 percent over normal. So far in 2022, with complete data available through August, total deaths were 1.91 million, against a projected 2.21 million if it were a normal year, which is still up 16 percent. These numbers are shown graphically on the chart below.

To put these overages in perspective, in recent decades before COVID came along, a very bad flu season will increase total deaths, but typically not much more than the usual increases every flu season. This can be seen on the above chart, where the normal multi-year average (blue line) rises to a peak of around 60,000 total deaths per week during the worst month of flu season in January, then descends to around 50,000 per week in mid-summer. Even the H1N1 virus didn’t have a significant overall impact. Between 2009 and 2010 the CDC estimates around 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. That represents not quite a 0.5 percent increase in total deaths.

What this means is while it is encouraging that total excess deaths in the U.S. during 2022 so far are only up 16 percent compared to 24 percent in 2021 and 26 percent in the last nine months of 2020, they are still well above anything we have seen in the United States in the last 100 years. But more troubling is the fact that according to the CDC’s own data, these excess deaths cannot be attributed to COVID. On the next chart, shown below, the blue line plots the number of excess deaths over the past 2.5 years, and the gray line plots how many of those excess deaths are attributable to COVID. The grey line is consistently below the blue line.

Breaking this down to numbers reveals the following percentages of unexplained excess deaths. During the first nine months of the pandemic, through December 2020, 32 percent of excess deaths were not reported as COVID deaths. During 2022, 29 percent of excess deaths were not reported as COVID deaths, and through the first eight months of 2022, 32 percent of excess deaths are unexplained by COVID. The most recent data is not encouraging. For the two most recent months for which we have complete data from the CDC, July and August, 57 percent of excess deaths are not explained by COVID.

These numbers cannot be dismissed. The sample sizes are too big. In July and August, 26,685 people were reported dead from COVID. But during those same two months, 62,576 more people died than should have died in a normal July and August. What can account for this?

Overall, since the COVID pandemic began, from April 2020 through August 2022, the CDC has reported 1,044,323 people dead because of COVID. But so-called excess deaths, even when adjusting for population growth, are 1.5 million. There are a half-million excess deaths in the United States that are unaccounted for. The usual suspects do not add up to that much.

For example, suicides increased from 45,979 in 2020 to 47,646 in 2021. But there were 48,344 suicides reported in 2018, two years before the pandemic. Murders were up 30 percent in 2020 vs 2019, and then went up by another 6 percent in 2021. These are alarming percentage trends. But they only account for about 7,000 excess homicides over the averages for pre-COVID years. Deaths from drug overdoses are way up, over 22,000 more in 2021 compared to 2020, with 2020 drug overdoses up about 8,000 over 2019. Automobile fatalities were up by 4,000 in 2021 compared to 2020. All of this is alarming, but numerically they do not explain what we’re seeing.

Deaths from suicides, murders, drug overdoses and automobile fatalities, all combined, over the past 2.5 years, may account for as many as 100,000 of the 500,000 unexplained excess deaths in the U.S., and that’s being generous. What has killed the other 400,000 Americans during the COVID era, since we know it wasn’t COVID?

One suggestion, easily debunked, is that we have an aging population. That’s true. If you view what is known as a “population pyramid” for the U.S. as of 2021, shown below, at the top you will see that America’s senior citizens, plotted by age, form a fairly smooth downward slope. But there is a blip on the slope, seen for both men and women aged 75, i.e., born in 1946 in the first wave of the baby boom. How significant is this bulge in the slope, since people born in this year are nearing the end of the average life expectancy?

As it is, among Americans still living, about 890,000 more were born in 1946 than were born in 1945. It is possible, because people born immediately after World War Two are just now beginning to pass through the years when they are most likely to die of natural causes, we will see higher overall death rates than we have seen in the years 2013 through 2019, a period during which death rates in the U.S. were stable from year to year. But wouldn’t COVID have finished them off, even if people approaching the ends of their lifespans are more numerous than usual? America’s current age demographics may explain a small and temporary increase in the death rate in America today, but because only a small percentage of Americans actually die in the year corresponding to the average lifespan for their birth-year cohort, it is not a significant factor contributing to excess non-COVID deaths.

Other possible causes of excess deaths in the U.S. have been explored elsewhere and also remain difficult to quantify. Clearly there are increased incidents of disease fatalities that are the result of deferred diagnosis and deferred treatment during the pandemic. But even with access to complete data, any honest assessment would have to acknowledge many subjective assumptions and present a wide range of possible answers.

The elephant in the room, of course, are the new vaccines, and to what extent excess deaths can be attributed to adverse events caused by hundreds of millions of Americans receiving multiple COVID shots. Data from the VAERS website (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) does not indicate nearly enough fatalities from the COVID shot to begin to explain a half-million non-COVID disease deaths in the past two years, but its data is widely disputed.

Without diving into that rabbit hole, it is sufficient to say excess deaths in the United States that aren’t caused by COVID might be primarily the sum of increases in suicides, murders, car accidents, drug overdoses, a disproportionately large number of 1946 babies reaching the limit of their life expectancy, and deferred diagnoses and deferred treatments. Or it might be something else.

Regardless of why, the percentage of excess deaths that remain unexplained by COVID has doubled in the past few months. This bears close watching as life in the time of COVID goes on, and on, and on.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Forgotten Local Elections, Unforgettable Consequences

/by

Thanks to California’s ridiculous policy of mailing ballots to voters a full month prior to election day, and allowing “early voting,” I have already completed and submitted my ballot. That was a mistake.

After voting for a local school board candidate who I had some familiarity with and thought might be a safe choice, I learned that he was endorsed by the local chapter of the California Teachers Association, as well as by the local chapter of the California School Employees Association. I now regret giving this candidate my vote.

As for the seven judicial candidates that appeared on my ballot, along with the candidates for the local parks and recreation district, and the candidates for the local community college district, I had no idea who any of these people were and cast no vote. I was able to get enough information on the local bond and tax proposals, and was able to cast an informed vote against them all.

It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that as a responsible voter I am obligated to learn enough about these candidates to make a judgement about them and vote accordingly. Even if I could do that, what would be the point? Hardly anyone else will do that work so it won’t matter. These candidates win because they are recruited and supported by a cadre of insiders who vote for them, and they get elected. Sometimes they’re the right people for the job, and most of the time, here in California, they’re not.

A few inquiries I made with the organizations that might offer a voter guide for local candidates revealed it is beyond their current capacities. The county Republican party can’t do it. The regional taxpayers association can’t do it. In both cases, they’re focused on up-ticket races and major local tax and bond measures. There’s no time for everything else. This presents a problem.

The people who get elected to small town city councils, local agencies such as a parks and recreation district, are the people running most of the governing budgets in California. Public spending is decentralized in California, with local government expenditures roughly 60 percent of total state and local spending. The only organizations that wield sufficient resources to select and support thousands of local candidates are government employee unions, which for obvious reasons also have a strong incentive to find candidates they know they’ll be able to “negotiate” with for more staff, more pay, and more benefits.

There’s more. These successful candidates for local elected positions constitute the farm team for those politicians that eventually advance to major positions of responsibility, running large cities and populating the state legislature. Whatever special interests succeed in developing a huge pool of experienced local politicians will have that many more choices when selecting talented and obedient candidates to anoint to rise to the next level.

The same can be said of judicial nominees. If they are picked and supported by special interest insiders, then only these curated candidates will be elected to form the pool of talent from which higher court appointments will be granted. When you stack the deck, you’re more likely to draw the cards you want. This is reflected in what kind of judges preside over our superior courts and on the federal circuit courts.

Forgettable candidates in insignificant elections lead to unforgettable and very significant consequences. Providing a voter guide for them could be done if state taxpayer organizations and the state Republican party were to create an instructional document and then support their counterparts in California’s counties to implement it.

It is no small task. The California Secretary of State maintains the “California Roster,” updated every two years, that lists every elected official in the state. There are thousands of names on the list. But most of them only come up for election every four years, and in all but the very largest counties in California, the number of candidates is manageable.

Investigating these candidates could be done by a team of volunteers, supported by the county Republican party or the regional taxpayers association, or by both working together. These volunteers would gather information on each candidate using many of the same techniques that businesses employ when doing a background check. They could search for their names online to learn their professional and educational history. They could access their credit history. They could check all of their social media accounts. They could go to the county clerk’s office and get information on who is donating to their campaigns. In most cases, a useful profile could be developed without a huge expenditure of time and resources.

Once profiles of local candidates were compiled, it would be usually be possible to identify whether they were owned by local public employee unions, or were environmentalist extremists, or woke ideologues, and if so, voters could be warned to not support them for judicial posts, or board positions at local special districts, or for school boards. Voters would undoubtedly find this useful.

It has never been easier to make voter information of this nature accessible to whoever needs it. Most volunteers with internet experience can create a post or a page that provides the local candidate recommendations, then put it onto a preexisting party or association website. By promoting these recommendations via links sent in emails, a certain exclusivity of access is retained at the same time as a concentrated mass of select voters is empowered to make informed votes for or against every local candidate. In forgettable races with forgettable candidates, a surge of votes in one direction or another will swing the result.

This is an opportunity that should not be squandered any longer. Local government agencies spend most of the tax dollars in California. Local judges and local elected officials are the farm team for more significant judicial appointments and more powerful elected offices.

Just because we ignore local candidates does not mean those candidates, once they take office, are ignoring us. It is time for activist organizations to add this service to their repertoire, and help us find the rising stars we want to rise, to help secure our future.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Brilliant Political Orphans

/by

For the millions of Americans who over the years have been impressed with Tulsi Gabbard’s courage and authenticity, even if not in agreement with all of her positions on some important issues, her decision to denounce the Democratic Party was a welcome development.

What’s not to like in this statement: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”

Gabbard characterized the Democratic Party as standing for “a government of, by, and for the powerful elite.” Gabbard is now a political orphan, and she’s not alone.

There is an emerging group of politicians and public intellectuals who agree on key economic and social issues, yet cannot find a home in either major political party. Their ideology, while embracing the libertarian ideal of limited government, stops short of embracing the Libertarian Party as an alternative.

An example of a rising politician and well established intellectual who fits this profile is Michael Shellenberger, a Californian who has twice ran for governor and is the author of two books. Shellenberger’s first book, “Apocalypse Never,” published in 2020, makes a strong case that there is not a climate “crisis,” and that policies to supposedly mitigate it are doing more harm than good. His second book, “San Fransicko,” published a year later, indicts progressive politicians for choosing policies that have only aggravated the homeless crisis.

Shellenberger offers comprehensive research and commentary on both woke politics and climate politics. He reports on the growing catastrophe caused by systematic divestment out of conventional energy – natural gas, oil, and nuclear – at the same time as he has produced valuable investigations into the destructive impact of homeless policies that don’t recognize and treat pervasive mental illness but instead invest literally billions in providing expensive housing with no behavioral conditions for occupancy.

One of Shellenberger’s most recent essays, published on his Substack account, is called “The Quiet Desperation of Woke Fanatics.” It is a convincing and unflattering description of the psychology of climate activists and woke activists. Referencing Eric Hoffer’s classic book “The True Believer,” published in 1951, Shellenberger describes the mentality of the woke and the climate activists:

“They are frustrated, needy, and lonely. They are in the grip of nihilism and wounded, narcissistically. They are spiritual seekers and creative failures. They have both a strong need to feel special, and powerful, but also to lose themselves in the group. They are people who desperately want to get away from having to deal with themselves and the confrontation with inner demons required for personal growth.”

These emotionally unstable fanatics are the people being opportunistically used to drive the agenda of Democrats and Republicans alike. This alienated minority has been mainstreamed and legitimized by every established American institution to further the agenda of what Gabbard so aptly describes as “a government of, by, and for the powerful elite.” Catering to their intricate demands requires new laws and regulations which drive small businesses under, enable corporate consolidation, raise the cost of living, and undermine social cohesion. No wonder so many people have lost trust in American institutions. No wonder we have so many political orphans.

Another political orphan is Joel Kotkin, a prolific writer who has quietly leveraged his initial expertise on urban geography and demographics to become a respected analyst covering global political and economic trends. Kotkin, who like Shellenberger and Gabbard was once a Democrat, claims that “our society is being reduced to a feudal state.” In his 2020 book “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism,” he warns “the middle-class is becoming one of property-less serfs, while the ‘expert’ class of the clerisy and the tech oligarchs take over.”

While Kotkin was one of the first to describe what’s coming as “feudal,” a critical differentiating issue for him regards urban planning. Kotkin, along with economist Randal O’Toole (the “Anti-Planner”), correctly identifies environmentalist inspired “urban containment,” where “greenbelts” or “urban service boundaries” are imposed to limit the expansion of cities, as a primary reason for a housing shortage and unaffordable homes.

America’s Kaleidoscopic, Multi-Ethnic Political Orphanage

Ruy Teixeira is an American political scientist who made a name for himself in 2002 with a book he co-wrote, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” An accurate summary of Teixeira’s argument reduces to this: Republicans are racist against nonwhites, who are demographically destined to become a voting majority, therefore Democrats will inevitably become the dominant political party in America. Twenty years later, Democrats cling to Teixeria’s theory more than ever, which is why, according to Gabbard (herself of Samoan descent), they “racialize every issue and stoke anti-white racism.”

A dazzling repudiation of Teixeria’s condescending prediction is found in Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37 year old Ohio native of Indian descent who has made a fortune as founder of several successful technology and biotech companies. Turning to politics, Ramaswamy’s two most recent books have self-explanatory titles: “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” published in 2021, and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” published this year.

One of Ramaswamy’s biggest targets of late is the ESG criteria (Environmental, Social, Governance) that is impelling corporations to incorporate woke ideology and climate activism into their products, their marketing, and their investments. Critical of everything from internal “racial equity audits” to external divestment in combustible fuels, Ramaswamy maintains that the ESG movement is the opposite of the “free market” it purports to merely harness, and sees it instead as an authoritarian power grab.

A few days ago, Ruy Teixeira published a new essay titled “A Three Point Plan To Fix the Democrats and Their Coalition.” Perhaps finally recognizing that even industrial scale race baiting isn’t turning out to be enough to turn America into a one-party state, Texiera’s three points are (1) Move to the Center on Cultural Issues, (2) Promote an Abundance Agenda, and (3) Embrace Patriotism and Liberal Nationalism. These are good suggestions, but the Democrats will never be able to fulfil them in ways that voters will find meaningful.

To illustrate this, consider the most prohibitively difficult of Teixeira’s three points, to “promote an abundance agenda.” It is impossible to achieve that goal without recognizing that “renewables” are at least fifty years away from replacing coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. To reiterate a cold fact that never loses its relevance, if everyone on earth consumed half as much energy, per capita, as Americans consume, global energy production would have to more than double. Wind and solar power today provides less than three percent of total energy produced worldwide. So-called renewable energy production cannot be expanded quickly enough to meet the legitimate demands of nations around the world whose citizens aspire to prosperity, and for it to ever achieve the necessary scale would cause environmental havoc.

A proponent of fossil fuel, who just published a book aptly named “Fossil Future,” is writer and philosopher Alex Epstein. Only starting from the premise that fossil fuels are a nonnegotiable necessity, Epstein goes on to argue that fossil fuels have provided the abundant and affordable energy that has enabled civilization to thrive, and that more fossil fuel development is necessary to ensure “human flourishing” into the future.

Epstein is right. Along with a growing number of climate and energy realists – Judith Curry, Kenneth Haapala, Bjorn Lomborg, Steve Milloy, Jo Nova,  Anthony Watts, Gregory Wrightstone, to name a few – Epstein argues that “the media’s designated experts have made wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years,” and “the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come.”

These noteworthy individuals, along with thousands of other politicians and intellectuals, and millions of American voters, have become alienated from the Democratic Party. But what about the Republicans? Can the GOP offer these people a home?

The answer is, unfortunately, not yet. First, the Republican Party has to be purged of RINOs like Mitt Romney. Matt Taibbi, an investigative journalist of extraordinary integrity who has evolved, like Shellenberger, from a progressive idealist to a political orphan, aptly described Romney in his 2012 expose for Rolling Stone titled “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” If the story of the Democrats is how they moved from a center-left party of the working man to a party controlled by neolibs and neocons, the story of the Romney Republicans is that they have been neolibs and neocons all along.

Mitt Romney, and every other Republican politician of his ilk, never saw an ESG rule they didn’t like, nor a climate emergency mandate they didn’t support. Until the Romney Republicans are either gone or are reduced to a compliant minority in a party that has decisively overcome these anti-human, corporatist creeds, that are written and enforced to benefit a powerful elite, RINO Republicans will only create more political orphans, not attract them.

Which brings us to Trump, and Trumpism, or MAGA, a phenomenon bigger than Trump himself. Tom Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech in August 2022 titled “Trump’s Virtues.” In his remarks, he states, “you cannot fight a war until you know you are in one,” and gives Trump credit for making that clear to Americans.

Klingenstein’s speech defending Trump (transcript) deserves careful scrutiny by any political orphan that is afraid of America’s drift towards authoritarianism camouflaged with woke and climate emergency rhetoric. The civil war in the Republican Party between the Romney RINOs and the MAGA movement is one in which both contenders may alienate America’s brilliant political orphans, but it is not something for them to watch with indifference. The premises of the MAGA movement share too much with the premises they also support to be dismissed.

The very recent ascendancy of political orphans like Gabbard, Shellenberger, Kotkin, Ramaswamy, and Epstein, is something to be encouraged. They are speaking for what is indeed a silent majority of Americans, silenced by the media, by their professors and teachers, by a saturation bombardment of woke corporate messaging, and by politicians that are either completely in the grip of woke ideology and climate activism, or too cowardly to resist. These rising stars and countless others who will join them will not be silenced, and they will channel the sentiments and answer the prayers of Americans who have had no voice and no champions.

How the America’s movement of political orphans grows, what shape it will take, and who or what it will align itself with, shall be most interesting. If they coalesce into a united movement, it will inevitably grow to rival America’s ruling elites in political power.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

The Fate of the Los Angeles River Epitomizes the Choices Facing Californians

/by

From its pristine headwaters in the San Gabriel Mountains all the way to its sordid finale as a gigantic culvert emptying into Long Beach Harbor, the Los Angeles River – what’s happened to it and what the future brings – is an apt metaphor for California’s story and California’s ultimate fate.

Until a few years ago, the Los Angeles River was an unrelieved victim of human progress. In less than 150 years, its lower watershed has been transformed from an Arcadian floodplain to an urban metropolis with over ten million inhabitants. After a series of floods in the 1930s devastated the growing city, the Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to tame the river. By the time they were done, what had been a verdant ribbon of life had become a concrete wasteland, dry enough and wide enough for car chase scenes in countless movies, occasionally deluged with safely channeled floodwaters whenever California’s infrequent storms hit the mountains and the water raced down to the sea.

Starting around 1980 the citizens of Los Angeles began to view their river as more than an intriguing eyesore. Under pressure from artists, journalists and environmental activists, the city and county of Los Angeles, with help from the Army Corps, issued a series of studies that imagined a restored river. Most recently, in June 2022, the County of Los Angeles published the “LA River Master Plan.” All of these lengthy reports offer blueprints for turning the Los Angeles River back into a river.

The obstacles that must be overcome in order to restore the Los Angeles River exemplify the gridlock that grips California in every imaginable context involving infrastructure: energy, water, land development, environmental protection. Even relatively simple projects must navigate a labyrinth of federal, state, regional and local agencies, all of which can veto a project. Permit costs and fees are excessive. Approvals take years if not decades. Regulations change and often conflict with each other, and every time any of them are revised, new sets of designs have to be prepared. Tribes in rural areas and disadvantaged communities in urban areas have to approve of whatever gets built. Organized labor has to be accommodated. Powerful environmentalist organizations oppose almost everything. For every scratch in the ground, for every quarrelsome constituency, trial lawyers can litigate projects to a standstill. And for all of these same reasons, construction materials are scarce and expensive.

The opportunity is bigger than these challenges, however. Regardless of how seriously one may view the “climate emergency,” or how aware one might be of the corruption and potential for tyranny that comes with the environmental movement now that it’s jacked up on climate emergency steroids, in the case of the Los Angeles River, there remains the simple and unassailable goal of bringing something beautiful back to life. In the process, there also remains the undeniable practical benefit of mitigating toxic runoff and remediating and recharging urban aquifers.

To cope with the complexity of a river that runs through 51 miles of urbanized landscape, traversing 17 cities, passing railyards, paralleling freeways, coursing through downtown, the City of Los Angeles developed a community planning framework, widely shared, to facilitate decentralized development efforts involving government, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic sources of funding and implementation.

Along the entire 51 mile stretch of urban river from Canoga Park upstream all the way down to the estuary in Long Beach, shared goals include restoring water quality and ecosystem health, providing for runoff capture and flood storage, and wherever possible, constructing an unbroken river greenway complete with public access points, bike and walking paths, parks and wetlands.

Nothing about this is going to be easy. Ironically, water quality and flow in the river began to improve when three wastewater treatment plants began discharging over 30,000 acre feet per year of clean, treated water into the Los Angeles River. This flow, which has created a perennial stream in the downtown section of the river, is now jeopardized as the cities operating these treatment plants make plans to upgrade the treatment to direct potable reuse. If those plans come to fruition, all that wastewater will no longer go into the river, but instead will go right back into the water mains to be reused.

This possibility highlights a reality facing any attempt to revitalize an urban ecosystem, which is that whatever vitality is created will not be the same as what was once there, and to the extent a perennial flow can be preserved in the river, it will require more money and face questions of sustainability. Should water be imported hundreds of miles into the Los Angeles Basin merely to maintain year-round flows in the Los Angeles River? To minimize minimize waste, can treated water continue to be discharged into the river, but then be recaptured in downstream aquifers for reuse?

Another difficult paradox that revitalizing the river corridor brings is when there is beautification, gentrification follows. By creating desirable green space along what had previously been a bleak concrete culvert, property values soar. As posh restaurants suddenly line the banks of an urban canyon where kayakers frolic below in whitewater rapids, riparian land values soar, and multigenerational families get priced out of their homes and apartments. How to redevelop a place without driving away the people who could only afford to live there before it became prime real estate is a classic riddle. The river in Los Angeles is no exception.

Working in favor of a slow but ultimately successful restoration of the Los Angeles River is the powerful consensus to get it done. But there is no statewide consensus to create the abundance that is required for this restoration to succeed in a spectacular fashion. The Los Angeles River, like most parts of California, will never be the same as it was before. It has to be completely reinvented. This can be a good thing. There’s no reason why the Los Angeles River has to dry up in the summer, even if that’s what it did historically. With abundant imported, recycled, and desalinated water, the river can flow year round at the same time as the residents of the Los Angeles Basin, all ten million of them, can have ample water for their households and their landscaping.

This is the bigger challenge facing Californians. Shall we live with abundance, or accept scarcity and rationing? Previous generations of Californians built a nuclear power plants, a self-sufficient oil and gas infrastructure, wide and ample freeways and expressways, and the biggest system of interbasin water storage and transfer assets in the world. All of that is now crumbling beneath the gridlock of special interest exploitation and an out-of-balance environmentalism.

The result is we face tough trade-offs that should not be necessary. Water and energy in California can be abundant and inexpensive. Scarcity is a political choice. If Californians were to develop a new generation of clean and safe nuclear power and natural gas power plants, there would be no shortage of energy. Similarly, if Californians were to repair and upgrade their aqueducts and reservoirs, adding new ways to capture storm runoff, recycle wastewater, and desalinate seawater, there would be no shortage of water.

Most of California’s ecosystems will never return to what they were centuries ago. But they can still thrive. California’s overgrown tinderbox forests are burning up because at the same time as we became extremely adept at suppressing natural fires, policies were enacted that reduced the timber industry to less than one-quarter the annual amount harvested as recently as the 1990s, and prohibitive regulations all but eliminated grazing, controlled burns, and mechanical thinning. Restoring all of these practices would guarantee healthy forests with bountiful wildlife.

If California’s forests have to be managed in order to recover from the impact of civilization, and end up healthy and beautiful again, but different, that is even more the case with the Los Angeles River. The multitude of people and institutions working to revitalize the river should not be limited by scarce water and scarce energy. Californians do not have to accept a future of rationing and high prices. A consensus to enact policies that enable abundance will create jobs and prosperity at the same time as it will render more exciting options to not just manage, but enhance ecosystems.

The Los Angeles River can be revitalized, and more to the point, reinvented to be even greater than it was, becoming the verdant heart of an incredible, entirely fabricated oasis, nurturing one of the greatest cities in the world.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.