Why the Middle Class is Being Destroyed

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Nearly 30 years ago, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published “The Bell Curve,” which became notorious for its chapter that highlighted differences in IQ test results by race. But that controversy overshadowed the primary focus of the book, which was that the human race is dividing into a cognitive elite and everyone else.

In the book, the authors argue that for the first time in history, humans are far more likely to marry their intellectual equals. “As the century progressed,” they write, “the historical mix of intellectual abilities at all levels of American society thinned as intelligence rose to the top. The upper end of the cognitive ability distribution has been increasingly channeled into higher education, especially the top colleges and professional schools, thence into high-IQ occupations and senior managerial positions. The scattered brightest of the early twentieth century have congregated, forming a new class.”

Herrnstein and Murray went on to predict an alliance between the cognitive elite and the affluent, writing, “For most of the century, intellectuals and the affluent have been antagonists,” but that now, “the very bright have become much more uniformly affluent than they used to be while, at the same time, the universe of affluent people has become more densely populated by the very bright. Not surprisingly, the interests of affluence and the cognitive elite have begun to blend.”

Although parts of The Bell Curve have been hotly debated, these two predictions—the formation of a cognitive elite, and the alliance of the cognitive elite with the affluent—resonate strongly today. They explain one of the root causes of globalism. Herrnstein and Murray even predict the rise of “the custodial state,” which they define as “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America goes about its business.”

The problem with that prediction, however, is that it suggests America will divide into three classes: the cognitive elite and affluent class, the middle class, and a permanent underclass of the cognitively deficient, completely dependent on the “custodial state.” That would have been bad enough, but that’s not quite what is happening. Instead, the elites in America, joining with their counterparts in most of the rest of the developed world, are engineering a future where there will only be two classes: the elites and a permanent underclass.

Not everyone who is highly intelligent or independently wealthy embraces the extreme climate and equity agenda. Many still see that such a flawed agenda is bound to impoverish and embitter billions of people. While there are powerful incentives to go along, and powerful disincentives to resistance, minds can be changed. The prevailing consensus can be broken.

To avoid turning the vast majority of humanity into livestock, which is where we’re headed, requires presenting alternative scenarios. Appealing to those elites who retain a shred of common sense and common decency is not impossible. Protecting the planet and promoting fairness does not require rationing and racism. Elaborating on those basic facts may yet convince a critical mass of elites to change the course we’re on.

Meanwhile, to try to fully understand the reason America’s elites are distancing themselves from everyone else, and engineering the destruction of the middle class, another curve has explanatory value: the curve of population growth in the world.

After a few millennia of slow growth, the human population began to skyrocket. Rising from 190 million in the year zero to nearly 1 billion by 1800, by 1928 it had doubled to 2 billion, hit 3 billion by 1960, and then added another billion every 15 years. World population now stands poised to break 8 billion within the next year or two.

You don’t have to be a member of the cognitive elite to see the human population cannot continue to double every 40 years indefinitely. And it won’t. Several possible causes have been identified to explain the relatively recent and steady reduction of birthrates around the world, but the decline is indisputable. Humanity most likely will reach its peak population within a few decades, if not sooner, after which the total human population will be aging and shrinking. How fast it will shrink, and what that will look like, though, brings us back to the role of the elites.

Herrnstein and Murray in their predictions and prescriptions for Americans coping with the rise of a financial and cognitive elite didn’t take into account global population demographics. They also didn’t anticipate the rise of the green movement as a moral pretext for the destruction of the middle class.

The elitist argument for destroying the middle class is simple. If everyone on earth used as much energy as Americans use, global energy production would have to more than quadruple. That fact roughly applies to all natural resources. We might argue—and we should argue—that innovation can deliver a middle-class lifestyle to 8 billion people without catastrophically depleting critical natural resources or causing unacceptable harm to the earth’s biosphere, but apparently that’s not a choice the elites want to make. And they don’t have to.

Explaining this refers to another development, the full impact of which Herrnstein and Murray couldn’t have seen coming, which is how artificial intelligence and other technological innovations will make the existence of a middle class unnecessary.

In their book, Herrnstein and Murray ask, “what is the minimum level of cognitive resources necessary to sustain a community at any given level of social and economic complexity?” By implication, they suggest that if the average IQ of a population is low or in decline, that jeopardizes the potential of the population to advance or even maintain their standard of living. But the consensus among today’s elites is that broadly distributed intelligence in a population is no longer necessary.

The logic for this is sound, even though it dismisses the aspirations of billions of people. People in jobs of moderate responsibility, or less, won’t need to know as much or think as much as they once did. Even doctors and airline pilots will rely increasingly on algorithms to make their diagnoses and fly their planes. If the plane crashes, as we saw a few years ago with two grisly 737 incidents, that is an inevitable byproduct of working out the bugs in the software. If a cyber attack systematically crashes the entire civilization, the elites will be in their bunkers, sandboxed away from the ensuing mayhem.

What is coming is a ruthless meritocracy that will admit only those individuals with the skills to do work that can’t be replaced by algorithms and robots. There won’t be many openings. In most professions and trades, to the extent human involvement is still necessary, competence will be secondary to affirmative action because automated procedures and artificial intelligence prompts will tell workers what to do.

By blending and flattening the population of the world’s cognitively normal, the cognitive elite will be able to pacify and manage them, distance themselves, and have exclusive access to whatever property and privileges they consider not sustainable or desirable for everyone to enjoy.

For example, even if it becomes possible to deliver a middle-class lifestyle to the entire global population of aging billions, the elites may ask, “Is it desirable?” And if it becomes possible to deliver life extension therapies inexpensively with nothing more than a gene modifying injection, the elites may also ask, “Is it desirable?” Why should elites care about any of this if an underclass of machines that do not require these things can do all the work for far less bother than an underclass of humans?

Meanwhile, the ongoing expansion of the custodial state is concurrent with the average IQ of Americans shifting into decline. This shouldn’t be surprising. The so-called Flynn Effect, the theory that social and economic progress caused IQ scores to rise in the early 20th century, has now been thrown into reverse. Many factors could explain this reversal, but because it is happening universally, we might start by implicating a degraded system of public education, a dumbed-down media, the diversions of mindless, endless online rubbish, the collapse of meritocracy, and the replacement of the pursuit of excellence with the quest to acquire status and rewards by defining oneself as a victim.

The controversy over one chapter in Herrnstein and Murray’s book should not diminish the fact that, way back in 1994, their work anticipated two of the most decisive trends in the world today: The emergence of a cognitive elite, and, for the first time in history, the almost total convergence of intellectuals with the financial elite. The consequence, an apparent consensus among the two groups to destroy the middle class to protect their own interests while claiming they’re saving the planet and promoting “equity,” should surprise nobody.

It’s the easy path. But it’s the wrong path.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Dam Removal in the American West

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The great cities of the American southwest would not exist if it weren’t for dams. Without the massive federal and state projects to build dams, pumping stations, and aqueducts (most of them completed 50 to 100 years ago), more than 60 million Americans would be living somewhere else. Without dams to capture and store millions of acre-feet of rainfall every year, and aqueducts to transport that water to thirsty metropolitan customers, the land these cities sit upon would be uninhabitable desert.

Such is the conundrum facing environmentalists that want to set these rivers free. Without dams, crops wither and people die of thirst. Without dams, devastating floods would tear through towns and cities every time there’s a big storm. Without hydroelectric power from dams, 18 percent of the in-state generated electricity Californians consume would be gone. You can’t just rip them all out. You would destroy a civilization.

But because of dams, fish habitat is lost, and aquatic species can become endangered or go extinct. Because of dams, precious sediment is prevented from running downstream to nurture estuaries and restore beaches. Because of dams, the natural cycle of rivers is disrupted: the cleansing pulse of spring that calls the migratory salmon to come back from the ocean, the dry trickles of summer when these anadromous species fight their way upstream to the cool and perennial headwaters to spawn, the next season’s rains that return newborn fingerlings to the ocean.

There’s often an aesthetic price to pay as well when dams are built. Perhaps the most notable among them is the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, inundating a deep, granite-walled valley once considered a rival in beauty to neighboring Yosemite, less than 20 miles away. Notwithstanding the dividends the ecosystems of this once pristine valley paid to wildlife, its breathtaking splendor inspired human visitors. In describing the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the great naturalist and writer John Muir said, “I have always called it the Tuolumne Yosemite, for it is a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite, not only in its crystal river and sublime rocks and waterfalls, but in the gardens, groves, and meadows of its flower park-like floor.”

When we attempt to assess the pros and cons of dams and dam removal in the western United States today, Hetch Hetchy is a good focal point. Situated at 3,900 feet above sea level and gathering runoff from the 492-square-mile watershed of the upper Tuolumne River, the 430-foot-tall O’Shaughnessy Dam can hold up to 360,000 acre-feet in what was once the Hetch Hetchy Valley. This water is transported 160 miles through pipes and tunnels, generating 385 constant megawatts of hydroelectricity along the way, finally dumping nearly 300,000 acre-feet per year into the Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is located 238 feet above sea level in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just south of San Francisco.

A sensible environmentalism is one that recognizes that environmentalism must involve trade-offs. If you’re going to get rid of dams because they are an abomination to nature — the environmentalist position — you ought to be starting with Hetch Hetchy. Because of that dam, residents of San Francisco and the upper peninsula cities clustered along the bay are recipients of the most reliable, purest water in California. It only takes five feet of snow in the High Sierra to guarantee San Franciscans their full allotment of water and electricity from Hetch Hetchy, a quantity that is achieved in all but the most severe drought years. Progressive environmentalists in San Francisco might talk a good game about removing dams in other areas, but they are curiously accepting of the massive one that benefits them.

The reality in the American west is that every source of water is imperiled. In an average year, California’s farmers rely on about 30 million acre-feet per year to irrigate not quite 10 million acres of crops (15,600 square miles), and urban water agencies require another 8 million acre-feet per year. Diversions to maintain ecosystem health require at least another 30 million acre-feet.

But groundwater aquifers, which have supplied over 18 million acre-feet per year, are overtapped and will require years of reduced pumping if they are to recover. The Colorado River aqueduct, delivering 5 million acre-feet per year to California, depends on water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, both of which are at historic lows. Eithr Californians are going to develop new sources of fresh water by investing in water-supply infrastructure, or they are going to have to take millions of acres of farmland out of production and subject their residents to unprecedented restrictions on water use. They face a deficit of at least 5 million acre-feet per year.

Which brings us back to California’s dams and reservoirs.

Most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, which means the reservoir is behind a dam blocking a river, controlling 100 percent of its runoff. In-stream reservoirs cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December 2021. If California’s in-stream reservoirs are filled early in the rainy season, should a late-season storm hit the state, no storage capacity would be left to control the runoff and prevent flooding. But during droughts, when an adequate Sierra snowpack fails to develop in order to deliver snowmelt well into the summer months, and no late-season rainstorms inundate the state, summer arrives and the reservoirs are empty.

All of this raises the question: If in-stream dams are to be removed to restore aquatic habitat, why shouldn’t development of new water sources, more than offsetting the lost water supply, be part of the project? Why consider these projects in isolation, instead of connecting them? Off-stream reservoirs, which are situated in arid valleys where water is pumped into them from adjacent rivers during storms, can store millions of acre-feet without disrupting important rivers. Wastewater treatment can reuse effluent that is imported into California’s coastal cities at great cost, only to be discharged into the Pacific Ocean after only one use. Ocean desalination finds an ideal venue on the California coast, yet its potential has barely been tapped. The answer, very often, is the refusal to consider realistic trade-offs.

One of the principal environmentalist groups working to facilitate dam removal is American Rivers, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with affiliates and partners all over the U.S. From a review of the organization’s map of dams removed through 2021, two striking facts emerge: A lot of dams have been removed, and almost all of them have been small dams.

When speaking with Serena McClain, the National Dam Removal Practice Lead for American Rivers, it was clear that her organization didn’t expect to remove any of the 240 very large dams that account for 60 percent of California’s total reservoir storage capacity, or, for that matter, many of the more than 1,200 remaining smaller storage dams. “We don’t have a hit list,” she said, “and we don’t want to remove all dams. We want to find the best solution that helps all parties. The majority of dams are small to midscale. Only 20 percent of the dams that have been removed are in the Army Corps of Engineers’ national inventory of dams, the rest are so small they don’t even qualify.”

“Small” is a relative concept, of course. While the political and financial cost, not to mention the loss of capacity, suggests that it is all but impossible to remove large dams with reservoirs that store hundreds of thousands of acre-feet, some medium-sized dams with reservoirs under 100,000 acre-feet of capacity are definitely targeted. Some of these dams are completely silted up, and their removal faces no opposition.

For example, Matilija Dam in Southern California, 168 feet tall and 620 feet long, built in 1947, originally created a reservoir with a storage capacity of 7,000 acre-feet, but now it is almost completely filled up with silt. Dredging to remove the silt is not cost-effective to recover only 7,000 acre-feet of storage. No longer viable for a reservoir, the dam blocks southern California steelhead-trout migration on the Ventura River, preventing passage to over 50 percent of the primary spawning, rearing, and forging habitat of the river system. The dam also prevents downstream transport of nearly 8 million cubic yards of sediment necessary to maintain the lower-river ecosystem, estuary, and beaches of southern California.

Also in southern California, Rindge Dam is a 100-feet-high concrete dam built in Malibu Creek in 1926. By 1940 the reservoir was filled with sediment, and attempts to remove the sediment were unsuccessful. Removal will allow steelhead trout to access 18 miles of high-quality spawning and rearing habitat in the Malibu Creek watershed.

In northern California, Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam, on the Eel River, are two dams that make up the Potter Valley Project. The Eel River is the third-largest watershed in California, and these dams block salmon and steelhead from reaching the Eel River’s headwaters. But this project is not entirely uncontroversial. Scott Dam, with Lake Pillsbury behind it, has a storage capacity of 74,000 acre-feet. Cape Horn Dam, while small, creates a forebay to divert 70,000 acre-feet per year down into the Potter Valley, to help feed the headwaters of the Russian River. A powerhouse, exploiting the 650-foot drop in elevation, generates 9.5 megawatts whenever water is being diverted into Potter Valley.

Jeffery Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, pointed out that the removal proposal includes retaining the capacity to divert water to consumers on the Russian River, which is of great concern to farmers and water agencies downstream. He told me the only people who may strenuously object to losing Scott Dam are the property owners that enjoy the amenities of Lake Pillsbury, which will no longer exist if the dam is removed.

Mount’s comment, and the Potter Valley Project’s legacy of providing water, power, and recreational amenities, points to a core controversy surrounding dam removal, which is how to define beneficial use. One hundred years earlier, during public debate over whether to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam, proponents pointed to these same public benefits of water, power, and recreation. More recently, the California Water Commission used the concept of public benefit, in which it emphasized benefits to ecosystems (a significantly narrower definition with little room, except indirectly, for the inclusion of human welfare in the equation) as a way to deny adequate funding for some of the dam projects approved by California’s voters in 2014.

The complexity of these issues, the unresolved scientific debate over many of them, and the necessarily subjective choice that has to be made over whether to prioritize human benefit or benefit to wildlife, guarantees that every dam-removal proposal will generate public controversy, but only in proportion to how big the dam facing removal is. A few landowners on the shores of a small and remote lake have almost no political clout.

Put another way, the weight and momentum of the institutional forces that favor removal, which focus on one dam after another, will always overcome local resistance if the dam and its reservoir isn’t very big. These institutional forces include federal and state bureaucrats with an ideological bias against dams, powerful environmental activist groups and the think tanks aligned with them, most sport fishing and hunting organizations, and Native American tribes as well as, in some cases, utilities that want to be rid of silted-up reservoirs with obsolete powerhouses.

Which brings us to four dams on the Klamath River: J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate dams. The reservoirs behind these small-to-medium-sized dams have a combined storage capacity of over 140,000 acre-feet. All are scheduled for removal, and demolition could begin as soon as next year.

One of the biggest rivers in the western United States, but known to relatively few, is the mighty Klamath, encompassing a massive 16,000-square-mile watershed that straddles southern Oregon and California’s far north. With headwaters in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, the Klamath bends its way west into California through deep canyons, finding the ocean in an estuary roughly 30 miles south of the Oregon border.

The Klamath is distinguished not only by its vast extent and unique topography, but by its importance to salmon populations. Until you reach the Columbia River over 400 miles to the north, the Klamath and its tributaries offer the largest spawning habitat for salmon in North America.

Meanwhile, the powerhouses on these four dams have the capacity to generate up to 160 megawatts, which goes a long way in the sparsely populated counties of northern California and southern Oregon. More controversial than the loss of hydroelectric capacity, however, is concern among farmers over what is going to happen upriver once these four dams are removed. Because there’s one more reservoir on the Klamath, upstream from the four targeted for removal.

When the Link River Dam was built at the southern end of Upper Klamath Lake in 1921, the intention was to provide water storage for irrigation to what is some of the richest farmland on earth. By the 1900s, over 200,000 acres were planted with alfalfa, barley, garlic, horseradish, onions, potatoes, sugar beets, and wheat. And then came the water wars.

In March 2020, federal water allocations from Upper Klamath Lake to farmers in Klamath County, Ore., were cut from the historical norm of 350,000 acre-feet down to 140,000 acre-feet, and then in May 2020, after the farmers had already invested in crops for that year, the allocation was cut further, to 50,000 acre-feet. After a 30-mile-long convoy of rural dissidents descended on Klamath Falls to protest the cutback, the 140,000-acre-foot allocation was restored. But then in 2021, for the first time in 120 years, the Bureau of Reclamation — which has the authority to manage water resources in the United States — said the farmers would get a zero allocation; after more protests the farmers ended up with 50,000 acre-feet. In 2022, after another initial zero allocation, the farmers got 80,000 acre-feet.

Rural communities and farm interests throughout the American West view every dam removal as a growing and existential threat. Not necessarily because removal of the dams currently slated for removal are going to deprive them of irrigation for their crops, but because of the mentality of the agencies that control the water and concern for what new dam removals and other restrictions come next.

Is it even “science” that compels the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation to maintain that more water in the Klamath River, year round, improves the survivability of salmon? Don’t the parasites that attack salmon die when rivers naturally run nearly dry in the summer? Doesn’t science rely on testing various hypotheses, rather than adhering to one theory — more water in the river, all summer long — despite no evidence that it’s helping restore fish populations? And how could those summer flows ever be maintained, anyway, without dams?

In Idaho, environmentalists claim that four dams on the lower Snake River — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite — must be removed as part of any recovery plan for endangered salmon and steelhead. Plans are moving forward to remove them but are running into opposition. These are big dams; their four reservoirs have a combined storage capacity of over 1.6 million acre-feet. Replacing the irrigation infrastructure, offsetting the losses in waterway transportation, and replacing the more than 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity would cost an estimated $30 billion or more.

The biggest threat to water supply in the American West isn’t dam removal, which, despite what I have written above, is unlikely to spiral out of control, nor is it terribly objectionable to get rid of small and obsolete dams. The threat is everything that surrounds the dam-removal movement, which is a symptom of a far wider set of problems, such as that posed by powerful bureaucrats who believe that conservation, and nothing else, will resolve the challenge of water scarcity.

Then there are the experts who claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that maintaining strong year-round flows in rivers that historically used to run nearly dry in summer will somehow benefit fish. And let’s not forget the climate-change zealots who think hydropower, along with fossil fuels, can all be replaced with nothing more than wind, solar, and battery farms. Even the possible (partial) solution represented by nuclear power is rejected by many of the eco-activists involved in climate-change campaigning.

Perhaps most of all, the threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure, including new off-stream reservoirs. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water.

There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics. Off-stream reservoirs, wastewater recycling, spreading basins to percolate floodwater into underground aquifers, desalination, and an all-of-the-above approach to energy development — more of these infrastructure investments become necessary when dams are removed from rivers. That environmental activists fail to understand the consequences of their actions will only mean disaster if they continue to get their way.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

California’s Union’s Are Misdirecting Their Power

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If you go to the “what we do” page of the California Labor Federation, the lead paragraph starts with this sentence: “The California Labor Federation is dedicated to promoting and defending the interests of working people and their families for the betterment of California’s communities.”

But they’re not.

What unions in California do has arguably helped their members, but the legislative agenda they support has not helped the vast majority of private sector working families. Laws passed by the California State Legislature, explicitly promoted by unions, usually cause more harm than good for the majority of California workers. Moreover, laws passed by the political coalition which these unions are part of, laws that these unions have often supported and rarely opposed, have devastated the economic opportunities for all but the wealthiest Californians.

The latest example of a bill promoted by California’s unions is AB 257, known as the “Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act.” It was signed by governor Newsom on September 5. This flawed legislation is going to form a “Fast Food Council” to regulate wages and work rules in fast food franchises. It will consist of the following members:

(1) One representative from the Dept. of Industrial Relations, a state agency, (2) two representatives of fast-food restaurant franchisors, (3) two representatives of fast-food restaurant franchisees, (4) two representatives of fast-food restaurant employees, (5) two representatives of advocates for fast-food restaurant employees, and (6) one representative from the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development.

A quick look at the composition of these ten positions reveals an obvious outcome: It will be stacked 6 to 4 in favor of union advocates. The appointees from California’s state agencies, the governor’s office, and the restaurant employee representatives, will almost certainly be choices approved by the unions.

For this council to formally assume power, the California Department of Industrial Relations must first receive a petition of at least 10,000 fast-food workers approving the creation of the Council. That should not be a problem, considering there are over 550,000 fast food workers in the state. It’s also a vanishingly minute threshold, less than two percent of fast food workers have to sign the petition for it to take effect.

If unions truly cared about all the workers in California, this council would not use its considerable power to harm the industry or the state. But that’s not what early indications suggest. The council will have the power to establish a minimum wage of up to $22 per hour by 2023, with up to 3.5 percent annual increases thereafter.

There are plenty of additional powers the Fast Food Council will have to regulate any fast food restaurant located in California that is part of a national franchise chain with 100 or more restaurants nationwide, but the power to regulate wages merits a specific focus. Across every unionized sector, whenever wages have been negotiated by unions, problems follow, and AB 257 is no exception. Here are some of the difficulties that will surface if this council raises the minimum wage for fast food workers:

  • Only affects workers in franchise outlets, making those outlets less competitive with non-franchise restaurants.
  • Imposes a statewide hourly minimum pay even though the cost-of-living varies considerably across California.
  • Stimulates investment in automation by major chains, potentially eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
  • Raises the price for fast food to consumers.
  • Will drive many fast food franchisees out of business, harming small businesses and eliminating jobs.

There is, however, a more fundamental problem with raising minimum wages. While California’s unions have focused on increasing the wage and benefit packages for their members, particularly in the public sector which is almost 100 percent unionized, they have done nothing to address the out-of-control increases to the cost-of-living that have made it impossible for ordinary working families to survive. Even at union negotiated rates of pay, families are suffering.

For at least the last 30 years, and more so every year, unions in California have been part of a ruling coalition that exercises nearly absolute power over the state legislature. Along with unions – most of them government employee unions – this coalition includes powerful nonprofits, environmentalist hardliners, public utilities, most major corporations, and most billionaires especially in the bazillionaire rich high-tech industry.

Strange bedfellows? Yes! But on every major issue affecting the cost-of-living in California, unions have supported the political agenda of this self-serving ruling elite.

How Unions Could Help ALL Working Californians

To make housing affordable again, for example, abolish the ridiculously overwritten building code requirements, relax the zoning laws that prohibit urban expansion, quit charging criminally high fees for building permits, and deregulate the industries that supply building materials.

Investing in water supply infrastructure would guarantee Californians abundant and affordable water, which would lower the cost of housing – because housing developments cannot be built without the builders first knowing where the water is coming from – and of course it would also lower the cost of food. It would lower costs for every business that uses water, and lower the water bills that households have to pay.

Approving development of California’s rich resources of oil and gas, and upgrading and expanding California’s refinery capacity would create thousands of good union jobs, at the same time as it would bring gasoline and home heating costs back down to earth. Approving more nuclear and natural gas generating plants would make electricity affordable again.

Permitting the state’s timber industry triple in size, to again harvest and mill timber at the rate California’s 33 million acres of forests generate new growth – over 4 billion board feet per year – would create additional tens of thousands of jobs and make wood affordable again, further lowering home prices. It might also stimulate more construction using mass timber, which is one of the most exciting new innovations to hit the building industry in decades.

If unions cared about working families in California, they would identify and repeal the laws that have made it so hard for people to afford to live here. To this end, critics of unions may eschew cynicism and appeal to the good hearted intentions of union leaders and union members, and ask them to find the courage to break with the ruling consensus that has driven millions of people to flee this beautiful state, and driven millions more into poverty.

There are many answers to how we may promote and defend the interests of working people and their families for the betterment of California’s communities. Merely focusing on raising pay is one dimensional and exclusionary. Promoting ways to lower the cost of living will better everyone’s lives, and restore a progressive balance to the economic equation we all strive to optimize.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Who Owns the California State Legislature?

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There is only one answer to this question: Public sector unions. Anyone who argues otherwise is either misinformed or has a personal or professional motivation to delude themselves and others.

Before offering evidence of the financial power of public sector unions, consider the power these unions wield that is not explicitly financial. These unions operate the machinery of government, with everything that implies.

Public sector union members staff the countless local, regional and state bureaucracies that businesses depend on to obtain building permits and business permits. Among the functions of these bureaucracies is the power to enforce regulations, review mandatory reports from businesses, and conduct inspections. It only takes a few union zealots within these bureaucracies to decide to target any business that contributes to a politician or a cause that the union opposes.

The teachers union influences – many would say they control – what is taught in public schools. This means their political ideology and political agenda is marketed to children from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade and into public colleges and universities. Throughout their childhood and youth, California’s public school students are indoctrinated to support public sector unions and the political agenda they promote.

Make no mistake about the nature of the public sector union political agenda; it is inherently leftist. The bigger and more intrusive government becomes, the more unionized government workers are hired, and the more membership dues these unions collect.

The union influence is perennial. Politicians may oversee the administrative apparatus of government, but politicians come and go. If a politician opposes public sector union policies, they are targeted for defeat in the next election. By the time a politician has learned how things are run in Sacramento, they are termed out. But the union leadership remains intact.

Unions’ Financial Influence

Which brings us to the financial clout these unions wield. A study conducted a few years ago by the California Policy Center found that public sector unions collect and spend nearly $1.0 billion per year. About one-third of that money is used explicitly for political campaigns at all levels of state and local government, which is over $600 million to spread around every election cycle. That’s a lot, even in a state as big as California. And on top of that $600 million, additional funds are spent on lobbying, get-out-the-vote efforts, and massive public education campaigns that don’t qualify as reportable political advocacy but invariably carry a message and a goal.

Public sector unions in California are also overwhelmingly partisan, and this may be one of the root causes of California becoming a one-party state. The respected nonpartisan political news website Cal Matters recently published two articles, one covering “interesting” races this November for the State Assembly, and one covering races for the State Senate. What they did not cover, however, was the role of union money in supporting Democrats.

For example, they covered 13 Assembly races. For the most part, they chose the races that are considered competitive. Of those 13 “competitive” races, four were between two Democrats, and one was between two Republicans. That leaves eight close Assembly races this November where a candidate from each major party is pitted against the other.

It is a relatively easy, if tedious, exercise to view who the donors are to these candidates. On the California Secretary of State website there is a database, updated every few months, that shows campaign donations by candidate. From a review of the races in the eight competitive Assembly Districts identified by Cal Matters – 7, 22, 27, 40, 47, 70, 74, and 76 – it was clear that public sector unions are heavily biased in favor of supporting Democratic candidates. The data is unambiguous.

Simply by sorting the contributions by amounts, using spreadsheets that can be downloaded from the California Secretary of State’s website, of the top 20 contributors for each candidate, the Democratic candidates got almost all of the union money. For example, when totaling the 20 top contributions to each of these eight Democratic candidates, you have a total of 160 donations. For those Democrats, 108 of the donations, or 68 percent, were from unions, almost all of them public sector unions.

Peter Schiavo, running as a Democrat in the 40th Assembly District, received all 20 of his top 20 donations from unions. The Democrat getting the fewest donations from unions was Ken Cooley with seven union donations in his top 20, but another five of his top 20 were from the California Democratic Party. In most all cases, not only was union money heavily represented in their top 20 donations, but those donations were the biggest donations, appearing at the top of the list. Esmerelda Soria, for example, running for the 27th Assembly District, only got 9 of her top 20 from unions, but they were the top nine.

When it comes to union campaign support, Republican Assembly Candidates don’t do nearly as well. In the same eight races, they got a grand total of 6 donations in their top 20, or slightly less than 4 percent. Of those 6, there were 4 going to one candidate, Juan Alanis, the GOP candidate running in the 22nd Assembly District.

The story in the California Senate elections is the same. Cal Matters identified eight interesting Senate races. Half of them feature a Democrat running against another Democrat. Of the other four, with 80 top 20 donor slots to gauge, the unions filled 40 of them. For the four Republican candidates, only four of the 80 top 20 donations came from unions, just 5 percent, and all 4 went to Roger Niello, a veteran politician who is taking money from prison guard and police unions.

In general, the Democrats got donations from public sector unions, other Democratic campaigns, the Democratic party, and big individual contributors – certain individual names popped up repeatedly. The Republicans, on the other hand, had fewer individuals making big contributions, less party money, and instead took money from business interests.

Unions vs. Business

One might hope that money from business interests would counteract unions. It doesn’t. Business money goes to incumbents regardless of their party. Serious money from business only surfaces when they face an existential threat, such as the Uber and Lyft fight against AB 5, the independent contractor legislation. But in that case, these businesses didn’t try to correct the flaws in AB 5 for everyone victimized by it, but only sought to carve out an exception for themselves.

In reviewing donations in these races featured by Cal Matters, businesses under threat, such as California’s overregulated and water starved agriculture industry, were supporting candidates they thought might help them survive. But businesses in California have not unified to challenge public sector union power, and in most cases have in fact forged a symbiotic détente with them.

When pouring over a lot of data, usually if there’s a pattern, it becomes obvious. The trope frequently heard from unions is that they protect Californians from predatory businesses and wealthy “dark money.” But the reality is different. The perpetual flow of union money, sourced from the paychecks of public employees, is not matched by a perpetual flow from any opposing source.

Candidates that want to challenge the political agenda of unions have to raise their money one donation at a time. It has to be made voluntarily, once, then in the next cycle they start again from scratch. They have to convince big donors over and over that they can win, that the donor will not be alone and get targeted, and that they’ll actually be able to do anything, anyway, in a legislature that is dominated by union controlled politicians.

When it comes to getting elected to the California State Legislature, with rare exceptions, if you have union support, you win, and if you don’t, you lose.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

California’s Unelected Tyrants

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Zeroing in on “unelected tyrants” in a state as dysfunctional and regressive as California is not easy. There are too many targets. Even California’s elected state legislators, as they cook up and pass countless tyrannical intrusions into our lives and livelihoods, are themselves “elected” only so long as they pledge obeisance to a powerful coalition of special interests that have turned California into a one party state.

But once the state legislature has done what it’s been told, whatever glimmer of transparency that still attends to politics in the Capitol Dome is extinguished. Left to implement legislative edicts are unelected bureaucrats, themselves operating under the direction of appointed commissioners. These commissions wield immense power to affect the daily lives of Californians.

One recent example of this would be the 11-0 vote in May of this year by the California Coastal Commission to deny approval for a new desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Capable of producing 55,000 acre feet of fresh water per year and impervious to droughts, this badly needed plant would have been a twin to the successful desalination plant further south in Carlsbad, just north of San Diego. But despite spending over $100 million and over 20 years submitting permit applications, defending against litigation, investing in engineering plans, and continuously resubmitting to conform with endlessly mutating regulations, the applicant was stopped. Cold.

“Staff experts” at the Coastal Commission claimed this desalination plant would “devastate” marine life and produce “expensive water too costly for low-income consumers.” These are patently false assertions, but because “devastate” and “expensive” are relative terms, these biased in-house experts can get away with saying them. There are desalination plants operating all over the planet and the proposed plant in Huntington Beach would have incorporated all the latest mitigation technologies.

As for the cost, the desalinated water would have been purchased by water agencies that would have blended its costs with what they pay their other water suppliers. Consumers would not have been harmed. In fact, having this guaranteed supply of water would have even occasionally helped municipal water agencies in their negotiations with other suppliers, lowering costs. This plant was denied its permit because the California Coastal Commission is dominated by environmentalist zealots who do not care about the welfare of ordinary people. Thanks to their irresponsible ruling, it is unlikely an applicant will ever attempt to build a major desalination plant in California.

For the entire 840 miles of California coast, the California Coastal Commission can prohibit any development within 1,000 yards of the high tide marker. In areas designated “significant coastal estuarine, habitat, and recreational areas” this power can extend much further, up to five miles inland. The Coastal Commission has made it impossible for all but the most powerful corporations and wealthiest individuals to build anything near the ocean, and it frequently harasses small property owners. If the Coastal Commission had been established a century earlier, every single one of the charming towns and neighborhoods lining California’s coast would not exist.

So who runs the Coastal Commission? Who are the individuals who have the power to deny fresh water to a water parched state? The governing board of the Coastal Commission has 12 members. Four are appointed by the governor, four by the State Senate Rules Committee, and four by the Speaker of the State Assembly. No qualifications whatsoever are required. Many appointees are socialites, donors, activists, or all three.

That would perfectly describe one of these board directors, appointed in 2011. She is a major donor to Democratic politicians, and fiercely committed to “protect the coast.” Her late husband, with whom she presumably lived, had a mansion in Pacific Palisades that recently listed for $35 million. Situated on 1.39 acres, a quick zoom in using Google Maps (satellite view and street view) will confirm the presence of expansive lawns and lush hedges. One may only imagine the monthly water consumption on this property.

Exposing this lifestyle is not to criticize it. People who earn a lot of money should be able to buy nice things, live in big homes on big lots, and use as much water as they can pay for. That’s what anyone would believe if they were committed to a rational free-market economy and believed in practical public/private investment in infrastructure to facilitate, at every level, more availability of these amenities for everyone.

But how on earth can someone who has ever lived on a water-guzzling palatial estate in Pacific Palisades be so grotesquely elitist and hypocritical as to deny abundant water to the masses of humans who don’t live in $35 million mansions, but just want to water a patch of lawn so their children have a soft, cool, safe space in their small yards to play?

What’s happening at the California Water Commission is happening elsewhere. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), with a governing board consisting of 14 unelected political appointees, is outlawing gas powered tools and off-road engines, gasoline powered cars, and even diesel powered trucks. This barely scratches the surface of how CARB edicts and enforcement actions are harming the prosperity and freedoms of normal Californians.

At every layer of California’s governments, state, regional and local, commissions ran by unelected appointees are using their power to reduce the standard of living and increase the cost of living. In the case of desalination plants, which Californians desperately need along with more reservoirs, aqueduct repairs, and wastewater recycling, the Coastal Commission gave cover to Governor Newsom, and to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, when they voted unanimously to deny the Huntington Beach desalination plant permit. Both these politicians have vocally supported desalination projects, including the big one proposed for Huntington Beach. But if they were serious, each of them could fire four commission board members, and install new directors who would show genuine concern for working families in California.

The solution is to elect politicians with the courage and vision to fire these all these commission appointees, everywhere, if they cannot recognize that the environmentalist movement is out of control. They can be replaced with new directors who are willing to restore a humanitarian balance between the interests of people and the stewardship of nature.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Green Globalism is the Ultimate Expression of White Supremacy

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There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.

Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.

But are these white leaders on the Left supremacists? Yes, they are, because the American Left, and the globalist green agenda it is cramming down our throats, has only one logical ultimate goal: To conquer the world. It’s pretty hard to be more “supremacist” than that.

Recognizing this reality relies on fairly simple logic:

If life on Earth will come to an end unless all nations achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050, but so far the only nations attempting to achieve this goal are white Western nations, then to save the earth, those nations that are not complying must be forced to comply. In the short run, for example, this means preventing emerging nations from acquiring the investment and technical support to develop an energy economy based on fossil fuel. But within a decade or two, with another generation of Westerners reaching adulthood firmly convinced the world will come to an end if “net zero” is not achieved, the green agenda will be a marketable justification for world war.

It is possible to make this prediction without predicting the outcome. By 2040 or 2050, if not much sooner, the rest of the world will have had quite enough of Western meddling in their energy economy. Powerful nations like China and India will continue to develop whatever resources they wish, at the same time as they will invest in “environmentally incorrect” energy infrastructure in African nations and elsewhere, where the people are desperate to lift themselves into prosperity. This will be a source of increasing international tension, as the white Western globalists invoke the climate emergency and repeatedly attempt to thwart these efforts. At a time that may or may not be by choice, the West will have goaded the rest of the world into open conflict. How it may end is anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile, disparaging actual white supremacists, who represent a vanishingly small fraction of American and European far-right agitators, is a useful rallying cry for the Left. But to think this accusation has any strategic relevance is small thinking.

To paraphrase a memorable line from the movie “Forrest Gump,” supremacy is as supremacy does. And what the white-ruled regimes of the world (including the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the rest of the nations of Western Europe) are doing is using the “climate emergency” and its attendant green globalist agenda to control and eventually conquer the world.

Another example of small thinking is when right-of-center Americans decry how globalists are undermining American sovereignty. Because they’re right, but if that’s the entire scope of their criticism, they’re missing the bigger picture. White, Western globalists are undermining every nation’s sovereignty.

I remember a few years ago speaking with a liberal friend who, like me, had been critical of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But when I asked my friend, hypothetically, if he would support America invading Brazil to save the Amazon rainforest, he lit up with enthusiasm. Without hesitation he proclaimed wholehearted support for such an adventure.

This is the populist face of green white supremacy. Few ever consider what may be the real reasons for America’s bipartisan neocon imperialism, such as protecting the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and safeguarding the expansionist interests of Western multinational corporations. Say it’s for the earth, and onto the imperialist war wagon they will jump. By the millions. Just be sure to paint the wagon green.

The environmental movement has always been dominated by whites. With rare exceptions, every trailblazing leader was white, and the movement today is overwhelmingly white. In the early days, they did amazing work. Greenpeace used to have just one mission: Save whales. The Rainforest Action Network was formed to protect rainforests. Even the EPA in its early years was committed to getting genuine pollutants out of the environment. No reasonable person questions the importance of environmentalist values, so long as they are balanced against human priorities. But just as the environmentalist movement has now been co-opted by the Left, and incorporated the entire leftist agenda into what was once an undiluted and important focus, the Left itself has been co-opted by globalists.

These people are overwhelmingly white, from the environmentalist power brokers that lead that corrupted movement today, to the plutocrats that define and implement the globalist agenda. What a terrific new bludgeon the climate emergency provides them. White globalists now have a moral justification to control the world: All resource consumption must be monitored and managed, or life on earth will come to an end. A threat so existential and so certain—because “the science” is beyond debate—must be met and overcome using any means necessary up to and including a genocidal war. It is better to kill a few billion people than to let the planet burn up. That’s a regrettable yet easy choice.

It is in this context that the American Left, which is now synonymous with the globalist establishment, accuses their political opponents of being white supremacists, or “adjacent” to white supremacists. It is the greatest projection of them all.

Whites who oppose the green global agenda, along with everyone else who opposes it, must realize they are fighting together against what is possibly the most potent supremacist movement in world history. A movement driven by an ideological green polestar that brooks no compromise and will countenance anything to fulfill the mission. The answer is to expose this movement for what it is; overtly supremacist, proclaiming a planetary crisis to camouflage an agenda of conquest, and dominated by white Westerners.

There is nothing redeeming in the green globalist war on conventional energy. We’re not talking about coordinating fishing quotas so Asian trawlers don’t strip mine every shred of living protein out of the oceans. We’re not talking about restoring mangrove forests on tropical coasts around the world to again buffer tsunamis. There are plenty of legitimate avenues for international cooperation by sovereign nations. But using an alleged “climate emergency” to take over and ration the energy consumption of the entire world is illegitimate and immoral. To promote it while fully aware of its inevitable consequences is evil.

If affordable fuel were permitted worldwide, all nations would prosper, and in the process all nations would experience what we have already seen in the West and throughout much of Asia; voluntary urbanization and voluntary population stabilization. Our shared challenge would then become how to use our surplus wealth to nurture and adapt to the changing environment, and make sure we still have enough babies to assure the vitality of our civilization. Isn’t that a better choice than jumping on the green war wagon?

In the ideological civil war within Western nations, the current ruling class, for all its proclamations against “white supremacy,” is itself the faction that is attempting to impose an explicitly supremacist agenda on the world. Green imperialism is still imperialism. Their opponents, decried as MAGA, or worse, are today’s inheritors of the ideals that inspired America’s founders—competitive free enterprise, private property rights, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the sovereign right of the people to choose their government.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How the Teachers Union Can Save LA Unified

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Earlier this year the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) released a report entitled “Burned Out, Priced Out – Solutions to the Educator Shortage Crisis.” Given the universally acknowledged challenges facing public K-12 education in California, this report merits serious attention.

The UTLA represents teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which with over 500,000 enrolled K-12 students is the 2nd largest school district in the United States. How severe is their teacher shortage?

According to statements made by Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho in August, there are 900 teacher vacancies. To put this in perspective, according to LAUSD’s “Fast Facts” for the 2022-23 school year, there are 502,850 K-12 students enrolled in LAUSD, and 23,553 K-12 teachers. This means the student/teacher ratio without hiring 900 more teachers is 21.3 students per teacher, and once those hires are made, that ratio will shrink to 20.5 students.

Without knowing where these vacancies are concentrated – not enough STEM or AP teachers? – this does not appear to be a crisis. In fact, according to Cal School News, LAUSD enrollment is projected to drop by nearly 30 percent over the next decade. LAUSD needs to be planning to reduce teacher headcount, not increase it.

So is there really a teacher shortage in LAUSD? The UTLA may have inadvertently admitted their credibility is not unassailable when in the first introductory sentence of their report, they claim “a bipartisan political campaign has been waged against professionalism and greater spending on public education.” Key word: “bipartisan.” The teachers unions are one of the most powerful political players in Sacramento. If they now believe they’re encountering bipartisan opposition, maybe it’s because even some of their most relied upon politicians can no longer always support them.

The UTLA report goes on to list three factors driving the alleged teacher shortage crisis: (1) increased expectations of educators without essential support for the communities they serve, (2) state imposed testing that limits teacher autonomy, and (3) inadequate salaries compared to other professions. Let’s start with salaries.

The most recent salary data available for LAUSD teachers, posted by the State Controller, is for 2020. In that year, the average base pay for an LAUSD teacher was $80,156. Add to that “other pay,” and their W-2 average salary was $87,057. The value of their health insurance and employer contribution to their pension added another $28,889, to make their total compensation $115,946. How does this compare to other professionals?

A good place to start would be the Los Angeles County workforce, the vast majority of whom are professionals with a college degree required. Excluding firefighters and sheriffs, the average full time employee working for LA County made total pay of $95,702 in 2020, although that includes $2,804 in overtime. Their total compensation including benefits was $122,764, putting them 6 percent ahead of teachers. Neither LAUSD nor LA County included payments on their substantial unfunded pension liabilities in their employee benefit costs, so in both cases, these employees earned more in 2020 than what was reported by the State Controller.

It is important to stress that when evaluating professional compensation in the public sector, the most valid comparisons are between public agencies. This is because public sector workers do not put in nearly the same amount of time at work as private sector workers. For example, according to the LAUSD calendar for the 2022-23 school year, teachers will actually teach for 185 days – they get a week off at Thanksgiving, three weeks off at Christmas, a week off for Spring Break, and eight weeks off for summer, plus numerous individual holidays. Must be nice.

Compare this to non-safety professionals in LA County, where a veteran employee will get 10 holidays, four weeks vacation (after 13 years), some departments allow employees to convert excess sick leave into additional vacation days, and many even have the so-called “9/80” program, where if they work nine hour days, every two weeks they get a paid day off. But even if you consider those 26 days off pursuant to the 9/80 program as paid days off, you still have veteran LA County employees putting in about 200 workdays per year, which is 8 percent more than LAUSD teachers.

None of this comes close to describing private sector reality, of course. Even in very large corporations, where one may assume after 10+ years the employees will get 20 days vacation, you’re looking at at least 230 workdays per year. In small businesses, more than two weeks vacation is rare, as is recognition of as many as 10 paid holidays, but even if so, that’s 240 workdays per year. And then there are owners of very small businesses and independent contractors, who don’t get paid if they don’t work, and pay for their benefits out of whatever they can earn. Expect them to work 250+ days per year, and if, as is not unusual the private sector, they work six day weeks, expect them to work up to 300+ days per year.

Teachers in Los Angeles ought to consider their salary and benefits in comparison not only to their fortunate counterparts who work for Los Angeles County, but to those private sector working households who pay the taxes that support them and who rely on them to teach their children. In 2020 the median household income (often more than one wage earner per household) in Los Angeles County was $72,750. That’s what working families have between them and the world.

Which brings us to the other two primary concerns noted by UTLA in their report: Too many standardized tests, and inadequate support for the communities where the students live. With respect to standardized tests, the UTLA may have a point, but their solution – eliminate all standardized assessments that are not state or federally required – only goes half way.

If the UTLA is serious about ensuring that academically qualified students advance into the appropriate institutions of higher education, they will give those remaining state and federally required standardized tests the importance they deserve. They will lobby the state to return to college admission standards that rely heavily on SAT scores. They may also support a return to standardized testing for admission to graduate schools and before granting professional credentials, whether it’s the LSAT, the MCAT, the Bar Exam, or the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam.

As for “equity for schools and communities,” UTLA recommends every school have a nurse, a fully staffed library, manageable class sizes, special education caseload caps, and “more counselors, PSWs, PSAs, and psychologists.” What that all means, and to what degree it is already in place or to what further degree it may be implemented is a matter for legitimate debate. Bear in mind that LAUSD, like most K-12 public school districts in California, has become top-heavy with non-faculty. But UTLA doesn’t stop there, adding:

“LAUSD must support housing, environment, immigration, and COVID-19 recovery needs for school families and the broader community, and “reject all market-based schemes for our public schools and creation of an Equity System to identify equity gaps in the district and create plans for increasing equity.”

Here is where the ideology of the UTLA, and by extension, the teachers union leadership throughout California, is in conflict with common sense solutions that might be far more effective. What’s so terrible about a “market based scheme for public schools?” Is this an attack on charter schools? Is this taking a shot at school choice, education savings accounts, and school vouchers? If so, UTLA and the unions may soon be standing on the wrong side of history, because those approaches have proven to be good for students.

As for “increasing equity,” an innocent reading might find this as merely the wish to see more funding go to underfunded schools in low income communities. Notwithstanding that “market based schemes” might rescue schools in low income communities more effectively than just throwing more money at public schools, this is a reasonable aspiration. But unfortunately, “equity” has come to mean demanding privileges and preferences for any group that can be identified as having some achievement gap between it and any other group. These equity mandates are flawed because they ignore countless possible causes of disparate group outcomes, many of which have nothing to do with a legacy of discrimination or disenfranchisement.

In that context, consider UTLA’s most ambitious proposed solution, to “support housing, environment, immigration, and COVID-19 recovery needs for school families and the broader community.” This goes well beyond the purpose of public education, which is to educate, but it doesn’t go beyond the scope of the broader political agenda of the teachers union, or the political coalition they’re part of.

If the teachers union wants to help low income communities, they can promote an intact nuclear family as the variable contributing the most to chances that a child will succeed in life. They can identify and condemn thug culture, and demand respect from the street for academic achievement. They can recognize that viable classroom size can be greatly expanded when disruptive students are removed to classes or schools where their special needs or disciplinary challenges can be more efficiently addressed. They can emphasize marketable skills in their curricula and dispense with all the political indoctrination that not only embitters otherwise promising students, but teaches them absolutely nothing useful.

And as for the crippling cost-of-living that leads UTLA leadership to demand higher pay, recognize that everyone is a victim of an exploding cost-of-living, and the reason everything costs too much is a direct consequence of the policies enacted by the political coalition they support. To lower the cost of housing, for example, abolish the ridiculously overwritten building code requirements, relax the zoning laws that prohibit urban expansion, quit charging criminally high fees for building permits, and deregulate the industries that supply building materials. That would be a good place to start, but the same principles apply to prices for energy, water, and food.

The UTLA is a powerful organization. They might consider using their influence to fight for programs and policies that will actually work, instead of hewing to a failed ideology and tired rhetoric.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Solving Water Scarcity in California

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AUDIO: A discussion about water scarcity in California, what policy solutions could create water abundance, and the forces for and against achieving that goal. Edward Ring with Darcy Villere on The We Grow California podcast.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1998676/10965848-doing-more-with-nothing-featuring-edward-ring

The Two Most Destructive Frauds in History

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It’s getting harder and harder to not abandon faith in the supposedly respectable institutions we once relied on, and to unequivocally reject what has become their core governing premises. So here goes: the entire “climate crisis” is an opportunistic hoax; the entire “equity” (along with diversity and inclusion) movement is a corrupt fraud. This fraud and this hoax have permeated and overwhelmed every “respectable” sector of American life, with disastrous consequences that are only beginning to be felt.

If you are someone who still has faith in the ultimate resilience of the institutions that once made America great, try to research positive new ideas. Try to identify and promote solutions to genuine challenges. Invariably as you peruse the promotional literature of today’s innovators, no matter what it is you’ve found, you’ll have to sift through endless drivel about carbon this and carbon that, along with diversity this and diversity that, before you might find any facts that matter.

This is a huge problem, because obsessive attention to climate and equity priorities, regardless of how important they may be, obscure the essence of pretty much anything, and deflect attention from whether or not it might have genuine value. We get it. Less carbon. More diversity. But does it work? Thanks to the obfuscating filters of climate and equity, separating useful ideas from monstrous scams is far more laborious than it ought to be, and all the while, the scams are getting bigger.

Climate and Equity Politics Will Destroy America

It’s becoming reasonable to conclude that the standard of living of all but the wealthiest Americans is being deliberately reduced by people who are utterly indifferent to their fate. This deliberate destruction of an entire nation doesn’t have to be a conspiracy, because so much of it is the merely the logical response to an open, incessantly trumpeted “consensus” that’s noble in its aspirations, but diabolical in its impact. It goes something like this: The climate emergency, along with the inequity of white privilege, are existential threats to humanity, and therefore both require a “reset.”

To make it almost impossible for Americans to unite and stop the destruction of their way of life, in case the sacred and urgent consensus regarding climate and equity isn’t enough, Americans are being trained to hate each other. And that trope, repeated endlessly and everywhere in myriad iterations, goes like this: If you are a member of the heteropatriarchy, you are an oppressor. If you’re not, you’re a victim. But this entire narrative must be questioned, because it’s a pack of lies.

The problem with scientists who can personally vet every equation and offer expert opinion on climate change theory is they are, every one of them, aware that their career and reputation depends on saying what they’re supposed to say. They are not permitted to express doubt. Those scientists who do stand up to the “consensus” are typically retired and less vulnerable to having their livelihoods terminated. But these “deniers” are banned from social media as soon as they develop a following of any consequence, and the mainstream media ignores them unless the purpose is to smear their reputations.

As for “equity,” even black conservatives cannot share basic truths. Intact families with a father and mother are the most reliable guarantor of individual success in life. But if you say this, as the eloquent Larry Elder often has, you are chastised as “the black face of white supremacy.” According to the Smithsonian Institution, no less, if you have a work ethic, a useful education, if you are punctual, polite, self reliant, and think rationally, you are giving in to “white dominant culture.” If, on the other hand, you embrace thug culture, and commit crimes at a disproportionate rate, your offenses are excused because you were victims of white racism.

This infantile nonsense, and those examples barely begin to describe it, has been spewed into American culture for two generations. It has turned the average voter into a Pavlovian stooge, completely unaware that it’s not white privilege, or climate change, or racism, that is responsible for the price of rent to double in the last 12 months, or the price of gas to triple, or the price of food to quadruple. Rather this reset trauma is a logical next step in the consolidation of wealth and power in America into the hands of a few hundred billionaires.

Thwarting Obvious Solutions to Revive America’s Middle Class

Here are some of the major problems Americans face, along with obvious solutions. Here as well are the reasons our elite claim these solutions are unacceptable, the real reason for their objections, the solution they’re pushing instead, and why their solution is dreadfully wrong.

We have expensive energy: the rational solution is to develop more oil and gas, along with nuclear power. We’re having a drought: the rational solution is to increase the supply of water by collecting storm runoff in new reservoirs and aquifers, desalinate water from the ocean, and recycle wastewater. We have a food crisis: irrigate more crops with the enhanced water supply, let cattle graze in the forests and build more meat processing plants. We have forest fires and lumber is too expensive: bring back the timber industry. We have a housing crisis: abolish the ridiculously overwritten building code requirements, relax the zoning laws that prohibit urban expansion, quit charging criminally high fees for building permits, and deregulate the industries that supply building materials.

None of this can be done because it is supposedly environmentally destructive. But notice the common thread: the obvious, common sense solutions involve creating abundance, something Americans used to be good at. But the preferred solution is to conserve, and pay higher prices. When you impose regulatory barriers in the name of sustainability, you don’t merely raise the price of water, energy, food, and housing. You drive out of business the small competitors that might emerge to serve the demand for these products and services. They don’t have the economies of scale to navigate the regulations, pay the permits, fight off the litigation. Meanwhile, monopolistic multinational corporations with sunk costs and strong balance sheets collect windfall profits because the demand driven prices they can charge increase far more than their production expenses.

It is impossible to overstate how centralized financial power in America has already become. BlackRock, an investment fund dedicated to divestment of American fossil fuels, now has over $10 trillion under management. BlackRock is only the biggest of many powerful investment funds promoting “ESG,” (an acronym for the words “Environmental, social, and governance,” these are climate change and equity inspired criteria used to screen investments), with the declared goal of eliminating fossil fuel. Any energy-literate person knows this is impossible. They will not succeed. But they can, and have, made the price of oil and gas prohibitively expensive.

But it isn’t just BlackRock, and the big hedge funds, that have tacitly agreed to turn America into a nation of Lords and serfs. With a few heroic exceptions, it’s every individual and company with a billion or more dollars to throw around. Ordinary people can’t afford homes anymore; the one sure way Americans used to build generational wealth. But institutional investors can buy homes by the millions, and pay for them in cash. To help keep housing prices rising, they’re letting foreign buyers get a piece of the action. That keeps real estate portfolios appreciating, and it also helps collateralize the dollar. Who wants Chinese gold, when you can buy American real estate with your surplus dollars? And to make sure that every time a family farm patriarch dies, it gets purchased by a multinational corporation or a billionaire hedge fund or a foreign sovereign wealth fund, cram down the production of nitrogen fertilizer, then jack up its price along with every other ag input from seeds to tractor fuel to irrigation water, and drive them out of business.

Do all this for the earth. Do it for sustainability.

Never mind that renewables are as destructive to ecosystems as conventional energy. Never mind that without nitrogen fertilizer, ordinary citizens in developed nations are driven into poverty, and those in poorer nations starve to death. Protect the climate! Fight racism! This is vacuous, unwarranted, evil nonsense, and yet we have to hear Judy Woodruff, Lester Holt, Nora O’Donnell, David Muir, and all the rest of the thespian marionettes that masquerade as national journalists intone this litany day after day, year after year, until we’re so numb we no longer realize we’re being fed garbage.

What’s happening to Americans, right now, is a monstrous crime. Through deliberate and easily reversed policies, the cost-of-living in America is being elevated to empower the wealthy and impoverish everyone else. The justification for all of this is the climate emergency that must be countered by any means necessary, and systemic racism that must be eradicated.

Climate alarmists and equity fanatics must be confronted. If they are sincere, they must be told they’ve been lied to. If they are opportunists, they must be held accountable. Candid and unequivocal rejection of the climate and equity agenda does not diminish concern for the environment and respect for the dignity of all individuals, in fact, it restores authenticity to those sentiments and opens pathways to practical solutions for genuine challenges. But if the people pushing this extreme agenda are not stopped, cold, and soon, they will destroy our civilization.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Latest Attack on Proposed Sites Reservoir – Not Enough Water

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When it comes to attacking anything that will make so much as a scratch in the earth, California’s environmentalists never run out of arguments, and their litigators never run out of money.

So it goes with the proposed Sites Reservoir, which is enduring a withering new bombardment from environmentalists in the wake of Governor Newsom’s recently announced Water Supply Strategy in which the governor endorsed the Sites Project and even had the temerity to suggest environmentalist obstruction is stopping as many good projects as bad ones.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week, and dutifully highlighted in Maven’s Notebook, “California’s largest reservoir in nearly 50 years may be derailed by water shortages.” Apparently there isn’t enough water flowing down the Sacramento River to fill the 1.5 million acre foot reservoir. But that entirely depends on who you ask.

Shown below, courtesy of the US Dept. of Geological Survey, is flow data for the Sacramento River, upstream at Colusa, which is near to where the planned diversions into the Sites Reservoir will be made. The data is expressed in “CFS,” which stands for cubic feet per second.

What is immediately evident from this chart is how it vividly depicts the volume of surplus water that hit Northern California even during what has been described as the driest winter in decades. If during the on-and-off wet months from October 1 to April 30 just 20 percent of the Sacramento River’s flow had been diverted into the Sites Reservoir, nearly 550,000 acre feet could have been stored, more than a third of its capacity. And since the pumps in one of the original designs for the Sites Reservoir had a capacity of 5,900 CFS, which is equivalent to 11,700 acre feet per day, during the peak runoff events from October through December, at least another 100,000 acre feet might have been stored.

Put another way, if one-fifth of the Sacramento River’s flow upstream at Colusa had been diverted, and only during the seven mostly dry months from October 2021 through April 2022, the massive 1.5 million acre foot Sites Reservoir could have been filled nearly half way to capacity. In just one season, during a drought.

And why not? Drawing 1.0 million acre feet or more from the Sacramento River to fill the Sites Reservoir during wet years, and over a half-million acre feet even in dry years, would not significantly reduce the flow of fresh water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Sacramento River at Colusa is upstream from the Feather River, which adds its powerful flow 40 miles further south, as well as the American River, which joins the Sacramento River another 20 miles south. In addition, flowing into the Delta from the South is the San Joaquin River with its many tributaries.

An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water.” The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

When the average “uncaptured” water flowing through the Delta, “above and beyond those required by regulations for system and ecosystem water,” is 11.3 million acre-feet per year, suggesting there won’t be enough water to fill the Sites Reservoir is an argument resting on thin foundations.

Environmentalists can’t have it both ways. Either we’re going to have massive atmospheric storms that will require massive systems to capture storm runoff, or we’re going to enter a period of chronic droughts where there isn’t enough water no matter what we do. Even the New York Times, just last month, in an article entitled “Why the ‘Big One’ Could Be Something Other Than an Earthquake,” admonished Californians to prepare for a “monthlong superstorm” of rainfall. What better way to prepare than to build off-stream reservoirs? If anything, Sites is too small.

In the February 2021 document “Sites Reservoir Project – Preliminary Project Description,” the introductory section describes how back in 1995 the CALFED Bay-Delta Program “identified 52 potential surface storage locations and retained 12 reservoir locations statewide for further study.” All twelve were off-stream reservoirs. They then narrowed the candidates to four: “Red Bank (Dippingvat and Schoenfield Reservoirs), Newville Reservoir, Colusa Reservoir, and Sites Reservoir.” Sites was chosen as the most feasible project. But why isn’t this study being dusted off and revisited? What about these other potential locations for more surface storage?

Governor Newsom, when he introduced his California Water Supply Strategy on August 11, also said this: “We did some analysis of those big flows that came in November and December of last year, and if we had the conveyance and the tools to capture that storm water, it’s the equivalent of those seven projects that I just noted that take decades to build in terms of stored capacity… Mother Nature is still bountiful, but she’s not operating like she did 50 years ago, heck, she’s not operating the way she did 10 years ago, and we have to reconcile that. We had a vision in the 50s and 60s to do just that, and we want to reinvigorate that capacity in California.”

“Reinvigorating that capacity,” governor, means you are going to have to start firing some of the people staffing the commissions and agencies that have been complicit in the environmentalist assault that has stopped every major water project in its tracks for the last 50 years.

If you want to be taken seriously in California, so the conventional wisdom goes, you have to play nice with environmentalists. To be welcome in polite company, to retain professional credibility, one must ignore the sad fact that much of environmentalism today has morphed into a nihilistic, anti-human, extremist movement. But to ensure that California’s dazzling civilization, 40 million strong, survives and thrives into the next century, maybe it’s time to stop being quite so nice with environmentalists. At the very least, begin to challenge the notion that every scientific argument must invariably tilt in favor of their agenda. Scientific assessments of infinitely complex aquatic ecosystems are rarely beyond scientific debate.

To restore a more humanitarian and progressive balance to California politics, it’s time to tell our state’s all-powerful environmentalist lobby that they cannot always get their way.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.