I usually catalog book acquisitions on my other blog, but both of these touch on subjects covered here.
Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Random House, 1999. First edition hardback (with “First Edition” states and “24689753” numberline (yes, Random House first printing numberlines of the period started with “2”; don’t ask me why)), a Fine- copy with a touch of a crease at head in a Fine- dust jacket with a slight bit of pull at head and top front edge, inscribed by Morris: “To Wade/With regards.” Massive 874 page authorized biography of Reagan that was quite controversial when released because it added fictional characters for dramatic effect. Bought from Recycled Reads, the Austin Public Library resale shop, for $1.85.
Neville, Leigh. Technicals: Non-Standard Tactical Vehicles from the Great Toyota War to modern Special Forces. Osprey, 2018. Fourth printing of the first trade paperback original edition, a Fine copy. Just what is says, a history of technicals, civilian vehicles (frequently Toyota pickup trucks) modified to mount military weapons like machine guns, anti-tank guns and rocket launchers. Usually an insurgent weapon, American Special Forces used them in some theaters in the 1980s and 90s. Given to me as a late Christmas present by Dwight.
I’m pretty much over my cold, except the occasional cough and continued draining of the Strategic Mucus Reserve.
The USAID revelation continues, with every left-wing, anti-American cause getting their snout into the trough of taxpayer money. Plus blows against the illegal alien and tranny pander brigades. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Second Amendment advocates have long know that “Everytown for Gun Safety” was, like all the other branches of the Brady Bunch hydra, pure Astrotruf, but thanks to database revelations, we now know that taxpayers were footing the bill.
Have you ever heard of NEO Philanthropy? They’re a left-wing group that has been around for more than 40 years. NEO wants folks to believe it is a partnership between “changemakers and funders.” They claim to provide “resources to groups accelerating change.” Race, gender and DEI are huge for them, but guns are a problem.
An incredible website database has outed NEO Philanthropy’s actual duties, and those of thousands of other similar groups. NEO, it turns out, is nothing more than a middleman. It receives money and funnels some of it to Everytown for Gun Safety as well as other leftwing, anti-gun groups.
The website database is called DataRepublican.com, and it will forever change the way nonprofits handle their funding, especially those on the left.
Snip.
On Wednesday, pro-gun official Hannah Hill “exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.”
The next day, she used the website to link USAID funds that went to Everytown, Giffords and more gun-control organizations.
Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
Today, @DataRepublican's tool helped 2A advocates link USAID funds to Everytown, Giffords & more.
George Soros got his nose in the trough as well. Who was bankrolling the campaign to appoint pro-crime Soros DAs? You were.
Beginning about a decade ago, George Soros began funding campaigns for people who became known as the “Soros prosecutors.” Local prosecutorial races, which once had a few thousand spent on them, suddenly started seeing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars pouring in, totaling about $50 million to elect 75 prosecutors nationwide.
Every one of those prosecutors is a radical leftist who immediately set about remaking the local justice system in accordance with leftist values: Criminals are victims of the system and should not be prosecuted; Republicans are enemies of the people and should be prosecuted. Some of these prosecutors are wreaking havoc on a scale that doesn’t make the news; others have done such horrible things that their names hit the headlines:
Kim Gardner, the woman who used false charges to destroy Eric Greitens, Missouri’s Republican governor, and whose tenure was distinguished by slandering the police, violating open records laws, persecuting the McCloskeys for defending their property against BLM rioters, discriminating against employees on racial grounds, and letting the most egregious criminals walk free.
Lawrence Krasner, the Philadelphia DA who just promised to prosecute the pardoned January 6ers. He couldn’t name a crime, though. He seemed to be operating on the Lavrentiy Beria principle of “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Andrew Warren, the Florida prosecutor who announced that he would no longer prosecute entire categories of criminal activities because he didn’t like the Florida laws. Governor Ron DeSantis fired him.
George Gascón, a District Attorney who managed to break both the San Francisco and Los Angeles criminal justice systems. He was finally voted out of office in L.A. this past November.
Kimberly Foxx, the Cook County Chicago prosecutor who turned the criminal justice system into a revolving door, creating a staggering wave of violence in already beleaguered Chicago.
And then there’s Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, who brought an utterly spurious and quite obviously political case against Donald Trump for allegedly criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
Without exception, the Soros prosecutors, most of whom received money from the Tides organizations, have been disastrous for their communities and, in Bragg’s case, for America as a whole. (Although one could argue that Bragg’s manifest political persecution of Donald Trump helped return Trump to the White House, which, to date, has been an incredibly good thing.)
Thus, there’s a straight line from Soros to Tides to corrupt prosecutors.
But what does this have to do with USAID? Well, back in October 2020, when no one was paying too much attention (COVID, BLM, the election), and USAID-funded mainstream media outlets were busy quashing stories that harmed Democrat interests, USAID was Funding the Tides Center:
Nearly $170 million in government grants has passed through a liberal dark money behemoth that houses numerous left-wing groups, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, tax forms show.
The taxpayer-funded grants were disbursed to groups through the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that wealthy liberal donors use to bankroll progressive causes. A number of radical left-wing groups have fallen under the auspices of the Tides Center, which acts as a “fiscal sponsor” to nonprofits by providing its 501(c)(3) tax and legal status. This arrangement lets the groups under its umbrella avoid registering with the IRS.
[snip]
[Scott] Walter [president of the Capitol Research Center] noted that the Tides Center’s recipient profile on USASpending.gov, which posts government grants, shows $34 million in federal funding since 2008. The grants were primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.
And Stephen Green discovered that USAID was also funding #BlackLivesMatter so they could help burn down your city.
More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Biden administration ended up helping groups that sponsored or committed terrorism.
Federal watchdog reports and other documents show former President Joe Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward a network of terrorism in the Muslim world — largely by reversing Trump-era policies.
Snip.
The Biden administration gave $1,053,400,000 in taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which claims to help war-afflicted Palestinian civilians but is tied to terrorists fighting Israel, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding in 2021 but brought back the ban last year after Israel accused UNWRA workers of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Intelligence officials later revealed that more than 1,000 UNRWA employees, or around 10%, were linked to the groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists and other evidence. A dozen took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, including a Hamas commander who was teaching in elementary school for UNRWA and led a siege against an Israeli kibbutz that killed almost 100 people.
UNWRA’s schools have long used curriculum for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, a March 2023 report from UN Watch found.
The curriculum comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing body in the West Bank that the Biden administration considered more friendly to American interests than Hamas. The PA also made a profit from Biden’s presidency despite its program that pays Palestinians and their families as a reward for acts of terror against Jews.
Trump and Congress passed a law in 2018 blocking economic support funds for the PA due to its program. Trump later paused all remaining funding for the PA before Biden took office and resumed it.
The Biden administration in part revived the economic support fund that Trump’s law restricts. The State Department claimed in documents from 2021 that “most” of the money did not “directly benefit the PA” in violation of the law. However, officials sent $265 million straight to the PA for its “security forces and justice sector institutions” throughout Biden’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Under Biden, the PA agreed to pay more than $97 million to reward the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
So Treasury official David A. Lebryk resigned rather than testifying. Sounds like he should be subpoenaed and/or indicted…
Another media beneficiary of USAID taxpayer subsidies: Christianity Today. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and also render unto Caesar what is God’s…as long as Caesar is paying you enough.
You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.
Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges.
The Department of Justice will ensure that, consistent with law, ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ do not receive access to Federal funds from the Department,’ Bondi’s first-day memo says.
‘Consistent with applicable statutes, regulations, court orders, and terms, the Department of Justice shall pause the distribution of all funds until a review has been completed, terminate any agreements that are in violation of law or are the source of waste, fraud, or abuse, and initiate clawback or recoupment procedures, where appropriate.’
It’s no secret that Chicago has forsaken its own low-income residents to virtue signal as a so-called ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal immigrants – to the point where local residents have been excoriating city officials during official meetings, and major businesses such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel moved to Miami due to the city devolving into “Afghanistan.”
Now, the Trump DOJ is suing Chicago, the state of Illinois, local officials over laws creating said ‘sanctuary,’ and have accused the defendants of impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. In their complaint, the DOJ has asked a judge to declare the state and local measures unconstitutional due to the federal government’s supremacy.
One of the laws challenged by the Wednesday lawsuit prohibits officials from complying with federal immigration detainers and providing certain information about noncitizens.
“The challenged provisions of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County law reflect their intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,” reads the lawsuit.
Named in the case are Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), as well as the city’s police superintendent and other city officials.
The case, filed in federal court in Chicago, marks one of the first major cases brought by the Trump administration in such a case, and comes after the Wednesday confirmation of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who issued a same-day memo restricting sanctuary cities from accessing DOJ funds.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it, and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangers, unexploded bombs, and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
Trump’s affinity for beachfront property aside, I don’t see how rebuilding Gaza is a proper use of American tax dollars.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strike again. “Russian singer who donated to Ukraine and called Putin an ‘idiot’ mysteriously falls to his death from a window.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Kamala Harris team lied about Joe Rogan’s attempt to get her on his show. Of course they did. The whole campaign was built on lies and an attempt to install Harris in the White House without enduring any scrutiny from voters.
Speaking of which, remember when CBS swore up and down they didn’t deceptively edit the Kamala Harris video They lied.
Winning. “President Trump Signs Executive Order Barring Men from Women’s Sports.”
On Wednesday, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from women’s sports through Title IX, withholding funding from universities that insist on allowing male athletes to encroach on women’s competition.
The order will also empower women who are forced to compete against men to sue their schools and directs the Department of Homeland Security to deny visa applications from foreign athletes who identify themselves as the opposite sex in order to compete in the U.S.
At the signing ceremony, Trump specifically cited the importance of protecting female athletes at the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the World Cup.
“My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes. We’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said.
J.K. Rowling had something to say about it as well:
Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this. pic.twitter.com/mzR7l5k1OW
Our vile media: “Newsweek runs puff piece on gender transition of man who held family hostage, raped them, and killed their kids.
More dictates from the Texas House Cabal: “Speaker Burrows Confirms House Rules Were Written by Democrat Lawyer. The new rules mandate that all House committee vice-chairs be Democrats and expand their authority.”
Follow-up: Charges against Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader, two of the Lina Hidalgo’s aides indicted for vote rigging, have been been dismissed by the Texas Office of the Attorney General, and a third against Alex Triantaphyllis is expected to be dismissed as well, though it’s unclear why.
Ever since the Toyota War, when Chad’s cheap, fast-moving force of Toyota-based technicals left $1.5 billion worth of Libyan Soviet equipment burning in the desert, it’s been obvious that such forces could be very cost-effective units in future conflicts. The furious rate of smart-munition depletion in the Russo-Ukrainian War also demonstrated the need for cheaper alternatives to Stinger and Javelin.
L3Harris’ Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) is a portable kit that can be installed on most vehicles with a cargo bed for launching of the advanced precision kill weapons system (APKWS) or other laser-guided munitions.
This L3Harris suitcase-type APKWS launcher and designator kit provides a rapid solution for arming non-tactical vehicles (NTV) and a variety of tactical vehicles, while integrating components to customer-specific specifications. Our capability provides ground forces the ability to engage targets beyond the range of weapons normally carried by SOF and light forces.
Modular and palletized, the VAMPIRE system offers a low-cost and effective weapon deployment solution.
VAMPIRE FEATURES
Designed to complement the low-cost, low-signature and availability of common NTVs and fit in any pickup or vehicle with a cargo bed
Installation can be completed in approximately two hours by two people using common tools
Can be configured to meet customer-specific requirements
Everything is on the pallet. Power supply eliminates the need for a 24-volt alternator on the vehicle
The WESCAM MX-10™- RSTA independent stabilized sighting system provides ISR overmatch
Can be equipped with APKWS or other laser-guided munitions
The Fat Electrician (who you may remember from his Sky Warden video) has an amusing rundown:
Takeaways:
“What is it it is literally a DIY kit that shows up on a pallet, and according
to the brochure, two men in two hours can install it on any pickup truck, giving them what amounts to a miniature version of HIMARS.” More like a miniature MLRS.
“As of August 22nd 2022 America is going to start exporting these to countries that are allies or entities that have America’s interest in mind.”
“America’s been sending out a lot of Javelin and Stinger missiles lately, and
those are really expensive, so we made this as a cheaper alternative, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s way fucking cooler.”
“It looks like they gave Xzibit a DOD contract for the deadliest episode of Pimp My Ride. He found out the DOD liked guns and he put the entire Second Amendment in the bed of the pickup.”
“I keep saying any pickup truck. We all know I’m talking about Toyota…that is the official truck of guerrilla warfare.”
“This thing can shoot four Hydra 70 rockets. Now the reason they chose Hydra 70 rockets is because they’re probably the cheapest munition that America uses” at $2,799 a pop. Hydra 70 tops out at around 17 pounds, though most commonly around 10 pounds, so they’re not going to have the kinetic penetrating power of a 120mm APFSDS round to take out a tank, but are probably sufficient to take out a lot of other targets.
“The downside of that being they’re considered a dumb munition because you can’t actually guide them…However, the Hydra rockets being used with the VAMPIRE system are going to be equipped with a retrofit guidance module which is going to allow the Rockets to be laser guided.”
Unit cost with the guidance system is about $22,000, which makes it an order of magnitude less expensive than Javelin or Stinger.
So a soldier can “pull up to the side of the battlefield, throw up his Periscope launch four missiles, and take back off all without even getting out of the air conditioning of the cab because he can do it from the computer in the dash.”
Can also take out drones.
“In conclusion, I’m sure we’re gonna start seeing these in the news a lot more and, it’s probably only a matter of time until some crazy fucker from Texas or Florida acquires one of these mounted on the back of their El Camino, and then uses it to go hunt hogs or iguanas. And that’s the news article I’m looking forward to.”
When Russia bogged down trying to take Kiev, I thought that a raiding force of 100 or so technicals would be perfect to destroy those long lines of trucks (assuming they could be equipped with wheels wide enough to make it across the infamous rasputitsa mud). A system like VAMPIRE, with an ability to take out both light armored vehicles and helicopters, moves us significantly closer to making such a force a lot more practical.
In the end, we are witnessing the continuation of an evolving class war, pitting the oligarchs and their political allies against the state’s diminished middle and working classes. It might work politically, as the California electorate itself becomes more dependent on government largesse, but it’s hard to see how the state makes ends meet in the longer run without confiscating the billions now held by the ruling tech oligarchs.
Lots of comparisons between California and the rest of the nation. Like: “California has a nasty anti-small business $800 minimum corporate income tax, even if no profit is earned, and even for many nonprofits.” And “CA public school teachers the 3rd highest paid in the nation. CA students rank 48th in math achievement, 49th in reading.”
Across California, many local governments have raised taxes while cutting services. Local officials desperate for union support have made irresponsible deals with public employee unions, creating staggering employee costs. Taxpayer money meant to provide essential services to the least well-off instead goes directly to higher salaries and benefits.
In Santa Barbara County, the 2017-2018 budget calls for laying off nearly 70 employees while dipping into reserve funds. The biggest cuts are to the Department of Social Services, which works to aid low-income families and senior citizens. Meanwhile, $546 million of needed infrastructure improvements go unfunded as Santa Barbara County struggles to pay off $700 million in unfunded pension liabilities. County officials estimate that increasing pension costs may cause hundreds of future layoffs.
Unfortunately, Santa Barbara County is far from alone. Tuolumne County is issuing layoffs in the face of rising labor and pension costs from previous agreements. In Kern County, a budget shortfall spurred by increased pension costs has led to public safety layoffs, teacher shortages, budget cuts, and the elimination of the Parks and Recreation department, even as Kern County’s unfunded pension liability surpasses $2 billion. In the Santa Ana Unified School District, nearly 300 teachers have been laid off after years of receiving pay raises that made them unaffordable, including a 10% raise in 2015.
In Riverside County, non-union county employees took the blow for the county’s irresponsible pension deals, as all but one of the 32 employees the county laid off this June were non-union members. This came after contract negotiations granted union employees hundreds of millions of dollars in raises. The Riverside County DA said these raises caused public safety cuts. In addition, Riverside County imposed an extra 1% sales tax to pay for these benefits. Across California, citizens suffer as local governments give away their money while cutting their services.
Don’t think I’m going soft on the Saudis. I’ve just not seen a recent image from California where there were this many American flags and none of them were on fire.
But let’s not forget that we are dealing with a corrupt, degenerate, autocratic state where there is no free speech, where universities are run by fanatics who indoctrinate students with radical ideology; where street thugs aligned with the ruling party freely commit acts of violence against opposing views, and whose ruling elite routinely violates the basic rights of Christians and other minorities. Also, Saudi Arabia is pretty bad too.
Whether you agree or disagree with [religious liberty] laws, they don’t seem like any of our state’s business. California passes its share of laws that might offend any number of Nebraskans or North Carolinians, but we don’t see travel bans on official visits to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Federalism is a wonderful thing. Each state gets to pass laws that reflect the values of its voters.
There was a big, biased piece in New Yorker about Texas politics. Instead of linking to it, I’m going to link to Cahnman’s takedown of it.
California pension funds are going broke because math is hard:
Unlike water deficits, pension deficits compound. As a result, years of healthy investment earnings cannot close pension deficits. Ironically, Walker herself supplies the proof with these two sentences from her op-ed:
“[CalPERS’s] investment returns over the last 20 years have averaged 6.7 percent.”
“[CalPERS’s] funded ratio [today] is at about 63 percent.”
Yet CalPERS’s funded ratio 20 years ago was 111 percent! Ie, despite averaging a wonderful 6.7 percent annual return for 20 years, CalPERS’s funded ratio fell 48 percentage points. That’s because pension liabilities compound at high rates.
“Illinois at the brink: Parallel should give Californians pause….As in Illinois, the Democrats who control California politics use their power first and foremost to protect the interests of public employee unions — not the poor and powerless. This has created an entrenched pension-protection complex.”
Helping Californians move to Texas isn’t just an idea, it’s a business model:
Paul Chabot was a hard working candidate for Congress in the Redlands area. He lost twice and decided that California was no longer a decent place to raise his family—so he moved to Texas. Now he is organizing conservatives and family people to move to Texas. There is an effort to re-populate that State of New Hampshire—indeed former San Diego Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian moved to the Granite State, along with thousands of other Americas.
“So Chabot has found a new pursuit. Last week, he launched the website Conservative Move. It’s a business aimed at helping people leave blue states like California and move places where they might be a little more comfortable — like North Texas, where Chabot and his family moved in January.
“The purpose of this organization is to help other families create an opportunity where we didn’t have much guidance,” Chabot says.
After the election, Chabot searched for a community that appeared to uphold the values that he and his family held dear, like safe streets and good schools. Eventually, they decided on McKinney, Texas, a city about 40 miles north of Dallas with a population around 150,000.”
Missed this for the last Texas vs. California update:
On Tuesday, May 6th, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, who are more concerned with the needs of parents, kids and taxpayers than stoking the bureaucracy and complying with teacher union diktats, were elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Reformers are now the majority of the seven member governing body in America’s second largest city.
Melvoin, especially, was vocal in his campaign that the school district needs a major shake-up, including a call for more charter schools. He also stressed the need for fiscal reform, which includes a reworking of the district’s out-of-control pension and healthcare obligations. In December, LAUSD Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly told the school board that the district may not be able to meet its financial obligations in the future because it faces a cumulative deficit of $1.46 billion through the 2018-2019 school year. While that dollar amount has been disputed in some quarters, there’s no doubt that the district is facing a budgetary crisis. It’s also no secret that an abysmal graduation rate (pumped up with the help of fake “credit recovery” classes) and shrinking enrollment have taken a serious toll on LAUSD. Also, in 2015, only one in five 4th-grade students in Los Angeles performed at or above “proficient” in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Needless to say, anything that bodes well for parents and taxpayers will rankle the teachers unions, and the LA school board race was certainly no exception. Not only did the young Turks (Melvoin is 31 and Gonez 28.), defeat the unions’ candidates, they raised more money – in Melvoin’s case far more – than their opponents. This was a rare occurrence, because historically teachers unions have greatly outspent their opponents to get their candidates elected, especially in high-profile elections. But this time the unions could not compete with the likes of philanthropist Eli Broad who donated $450,000 to the campaign and former LA Mayor Richard Riordan who contributed over $2 million. Additionally, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings donated nearly $7 million since last September to CCSA Advocates (the political wing of the California Charter School Association), which spent almost $3 million on the board election.
On the union side the United Teachers Los Angeles was the big spender, pitching in about $4.13 million, according to city filings. But much of this money came from the UTLA’s national partners. The American Federation of Teachers gave UTLA $1.2 million and National Education Association, $700,000.
More on the same subject. “Melvoin, especially, was vocal in his campaign that the school district needed a major shakeup, calling for more charter schools. He also stressed the need for fiscal reform, including a reworking of the district’s out-of-control pension and health-care obligations.”
California teacher who was laid off shortly after winning her school’s Teacher of the Year award takes her union to court:
Bhavini Bhakta never intended to become an activist, but after being laid off six times in the first eight years of her career as an elementary school teacher in the Pasadena suburbs, she decided to get involved in the education reform movement. She focused first on challenging seniority-based layoffs, which in turn led her into conflict with the California Teachers Association. Now she is a plaintiff in Bain v. CTA, a case which challenges the dues structure of unions as a violation of the First Amendment. The suit seeks to restore voting rights on union matters to agency fee payers, who pay full dues for representational activities but opt out of paying for lobbying and political activities.
“The state union forcibly takes our money and uses it to misrepresent us. They’re not serving the teachers on the ground,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re using my money for their own purposes.”
California Democrats receive death threats for daring to point out that single-payer socialized medicine bill is pie-in-the-sky malarkey without a funding mechanism.
Mark Peterson, the Contra Costa district attorney forced to resign as part of a felony perjury conviction, cut a sweet plea deal with state prosecutors allowing him to keep most of his pension.
The deal will probably let him walk away with starting annual retirement payments of about $128,000 in addition to Social Security benefits. That’s because he pleaded no contest to only the most recent of 13 felony counts stemming from his illegal tapping of campaign funds for personal use.
Today we celebrate another milestone marking the incredible momentum of Texas’ continuing economic expansion. Toyota Motor North America joins Hulu, Jacobs Engineering, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kubota, Jamba Juice, Sabre and many other innovative industry leaders who have decided to go big in Texas.
Our greatest natural resource in the Lone Star State is the hardworking people of Texas. And that work ethic draws global leaders like Toyota to Texas every day. With the second-largest workforce in the nation at more than 13 million strong, Texas continues to be a national leader in job creation. In fact, more Texans have jobs today than ever before, even as more people are moving here every year from states that overtax and overregulate.
During his latter years in office as Texas governor, Rick Perry made it a priority to lure businesses to the state, particularly from California. Two-and-a-half years into the term of Gov. Greg Abbott, the successor to Perry, the pace of corporate relocations to the Lone Star State shows no signs of slowing down.
Much has been written about the state’s business-friendly environment. Most businesses in Texas that aren’t sole proprietorships or partnerships pay a 1 percent or lower “franchise tax,” in lieu of a traditional corporate income tax. In addition, the state’s governing bodies tend to favor minimal regulations and sponsor research and development initiatives.
The state’s economy is healthy, evident by strong employment growth. The Texas Workforce Commission reports a net gain of 210,000 jobs across the state in 2016, and employers are projected to add another 225,000 jobs in 2017.
Equally important to strong job growth is the quality of life that employees are promised upon relocating.
According to Robert Allen, president of the Texas Economic Development Corp., the lifestyle element is perhaps the most common incentive for moving to Texas among executives and employees alike.
“When we ask executives why they’re moving to Texas, what we hear is that providing a high quality of life for their workforces is number one on their lists,” says Allen.
“Employees back that claim up. They’re able to buy larger houses, keep more of their incomes, send their kids to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods. This makes it easier for employees to take a leap of faith,” he adds.
Texas has no personal income tax. Its education system currently ranks 21st based on a state-by-state study by wallethub.com, a credit scoring and reporting site. The study considers factors such as average SAT/ACT score, dropout rates, student-teacher ratios, graduation rate for low-income students and remote-learning opportunities within online public schools. The Huffington Post also notes that Texas has the fourth-highest graduation rate in the country, despite its ever-growing population and high percentage of non-native-English-speaking students.
And according to a recent study from the NYU School of Law, while violent crime rates are rising in urban areas throughout the country, they’re holding steady in Texas. The state’s murder rate falls in the middle of the pack despite it being a national leader in population growth.
“Federal judge blocks California ban on high-capacity magazines.” Note that’s not just a sale ban: “The law would have barred people from possessing magazines containing more than 10 bullets.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The basket of California state taxes — sales, income, and gasoline — rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom.
California depends on a tiny elite class for about half of its income-tax revenue. Yet many of these wealthy taxpayers are fleeing the 40-million-person state, angry over paying 12 percent of their income for lousy public services.
Excessive state regulations and expanding government, massive illegal immigration from impoverished nations, and the rise of unimaginable wealth in the tech industry and coastal retirement communities created two antithetical Californias.
One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.
The other is a huge underclass in central, rural, and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools, and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.
The result is Connecticut and Alabama combined in one state. A house in Menlo Park may sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. In Madera, three hours away, the cost is about one-tenth of that.
CalPERS suffers $30.8 billion annual loss. “CalPERS has notoriously minimized the annual pension contribution for its 3,007 government entities by fantasizing that its superior investments expertise will allow its investments to compound every year without loss for the next three decades at an annual rate of 7.5 percent.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
California taxpayers are getting taken to the cleaners, but most of them are completely in the dark about how and why.
I will pose a quick question: Does it seem strange that California has recorded record revenue increases, yet we also see a record number of tax increases and bond issuances on the ballot?
In other words, the state’s tax system is collecting massive amounts of revenues, record amounts, yet politicians are still asking for a record number of new tax increases. For taxpayer advocates, it just doesn’t seem fair and seems very strange at first glance as to how this can even occur.
The truth of the matter is that California’s system of public finance is a complete train wreck and is set up such that no amount of tax revenues collected will ever be enough to satisfy “spending needs.” The so-called baseline expenditure increases are on autopilot and deficit projections are generated despite record revenue increases, a trend projected in the Governor’s May Revise.
“As we roll toward the November ballot, I’m reminded of H.L. Mencken’s quip that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” We always get it “good and hard” in California given the ever-expanding one-party rule. The worse it gets, the more voters from the GOP high-tail it to Nevada and Texas — and the worse it gets as political competition evaporates. It’s the political equivalent of a death spiral.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Lots of tax hikes are on the California ballot this November, for a variety of different ostensible reasons, but actually for a single reason: Pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Beaumont, California: “Seven former officials were arrested and charged with stealing nearly $43 million during the city’s development boom. Now, residents are learning that the town’s problems go much deeper than the criminal case.” (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)
“California’s high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it.” $68 billion and rising. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
One tiny bit of dubious good news for the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California: Now they’re only the second in bankruptcy filings in the nation at 45,000, having been overtaken by the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois at 47,535 filings.
California has earned quite a reputation for being openly hostile to business, as confirmed by numerous studies and surveys. Its plethora of taxes and regulations are driving away legions of entrepreneurs and workers, but they are doing wonders for one segment of the economy: the moving industry. It is almost as though that industry is secretly lobbying the state Legislature for its anti-business policies.
Joe Vranich, as president of Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine business relocation consulting firm, knows all about what drives businesses’ decisions to give up and leave for greener pastures. According to his research, in just the past seven years, approximately 9,000 businesses have decided to leave California or expand their operations out of state. Companies leaving California typically save between 20 percent and 35 percent of operating costs, he concluded.
Texas has been the biggest beneficiary of California’s business exodus.
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California’s litigious climate has become a common complaint of business owners. No wonder the American Tort Reform Foundation once again named California the No. 1 “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation last year, based on the state’s excessive laws and regulations and a flood of disability access, asbestos and food advertising and labeling lawsuits, frequently more opportunistic attempts at extortion than legitimate attempts to seek justice for victims who have been truly harmed.
California has proven to be a particularly harsh climate for manufacturing businesses. “Even if California were to eliminate the state income taxes tomorrow, that still would not be enough,” CellPoint Corp. CEO Ehsan Gharatappeh told the Dallas Business Journal of the Costa Mesa company’s move to Forth Worth.
General Magnaplate Corp., which has made reinforced parts for the aerospace, transportation, medical, oil and other industries for 36 years, decided to shut down its California facility in Ventura altogether. “This is a very sad day for our employees and for my family, who have a long history of job creation in this area, but the simple fact is that the state of California does not provide a business-friendly environment,” CEO Candida Aversenti said in a press release. “Increases in workers’ compensation costs and government regulations, combined with predatory citizens groups and law firms that make their living entirely by preying on small businesses, have left us with no other choice but to shut down our California facility. This is in stark contrast to our New Jersey and Texas facilities, which are flourishing in small business-friendly environments created by the respective local governments and environmental agencies.”
Yahoo’s 279 workers let go this year contributed to the 3,135 tech jobs lost in the four-county region of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties from January through April, as did the 50 workers axed at Toshiba America in Livermore and the 71 at Autodesk in San Francisco. In the first four months of last year, just 1,515 Bay Area tech workers were laid off, according to mandatory filings under California’s WARN Act. For that period in 2014, the region’s tech layoffs numbered 1,330.
The nation’s largest public pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, has one-fifth of its assets in bonds and is down 1.3% since July 1, according to public documents. The system, known by its abbreviation Calpers, also has 53.1% of its assets in stocks, 9% in real estate and 9.4% in private equity. In 2015, Calpers posted a return of 2.4%, below its target rate of 7.5%.
Nor is CalSTARS doing much better:
The nation’s second-largest public pension plan, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, has shifted a significant amount of money away from some stocks and bonds to protect against a downturn. It moved assets into U.S. Treasurys and so-called liquid-alternative funds, which mimic hedge-fund strategies. Calstrs, as the pension is called, reported gains of 1.5% during a choppy 2015, with returns on its fixed-income investments up just 0.6%.
(Note: WSJ link, so you may need to do the Google thing.)
The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.” This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work. This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.
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In essence, the notion animating the “road diet” is to make congestion so terrible that people will be forced out of their cars and onto transit. It’s not planning for how to make the ways people live today more sustainable. It has, in fact, more in common with Soviet-style social engineering, which was based similarly on a particular notion of “science” and progressive values.
In the same vein, it’s no wonder that Whole Foods opened it’s first semi-automated Whole Foods 365 store in Los Angeles. “Promoted as a ‘chain for millennials,’ the new ‘365’ stores use about one-third less square footage than the company’s traditional 41,000-square-foot Whole Foods stores, but they also slash almost two-thirds of workers with robots and computerized kiosks.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Schedule for California high speed rail boondoggle pushed back four more years. Latest obstacle: wealthy equestrians. “Hey, this study says horses won’t mind a super-fast, super loud train zipping along right next to them.” “You mean the study from the institute that two bullet train authority members sit on? Get stuffed!”
“The State Assembly Subcommittee on Education voted Tuesday to delay funding to the UC system because of concerns with the UC Retirement Plan, proposed by UC President Janet Napolitano in March, which would cause the university to incur significant costs. The delay was announced after an actuarial report was released earlier that day by Pension Trustees Advisors, or PTA, which showed that the retirement plan would cost the university $500 million in savings, or $34 million a year, over the next 15 years.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Maywood, California (which had previously outsourced services to the corrupt city of Bell) is on the brink of bankruptcy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Another aviation company has decided to move its corporate headquarters to Fort Worth to take advantage of the Lone Star state’s business friendly environment and the city’s longtime history in the aerospace industry. The move is historic for Burbank, California-based C&S Propeller — an FAA and EASA certified repair station for propeller and airplane maintenance — which has been in California for nearly five decades.”
Who is really behind the minimum wage hike? The SEIU:
California’s drive to hike the minimum wage has little to do with average workers and everything to do with the Golden State’s all-powerful government employee unions.
Nationally, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is known for representing lower skilled workers. But, of the SEIU’s 2.1 million dues-paying members, half work for the government. In California, that translates to clout with much of the $50 million SEIU spent in the U.S. on political activities and lobbying spent in California. In fact, out of the 12 “yes” votes for the minimum wage bill in the Assembly Committee on Appropriations on March 30, the SEIU had contributed almost $100,000 out of the three-quarters of a million contributed by public employee unions—yielding a far higher return on investment than anything Wall Street could produce.
Unions represent about 59 percent of all government workers in California. Many union contracts are tied to the minimum wage — boost the minimum wage and government union workers reap a huge windfall, courtesy of the overworked California taxpayer.
“California’s taxes and regulations are crushing businesses, and there are more opportunities in Texas for people to start new companies, get good jobs, and create better lives for their families,” said Nathan Nascimento, the director of state initiatives at Freedom Partners. “When tax and regulatory climates are bad, people will move to better economic environments—this phenomenon isn’t a mystery, it’s how marketplaces work. Not only should other state governments take note of this, but so should the federal government.”
According to Tom Gray of the Manhattan Institute, people may be leaving California for the employment opportunities, tax breaks, or less crowded living arrangements that other states offer.
“States with low unemployment rates, such as Texas, are drawing people from California, whose rate is above the national average,” Gray wrote. “Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs.”
“Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes,” Gray wrote. “States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that may cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.”
It’s not just pensions: “The state paid $458 million in 2001 (0.6 percent of the general fund) for state worker retiree health care and is expected to pay $2 billion (1.7 percent of the general fund) next fiscal year — up 80 percent in just the last decade.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
How to fix San Francisco’s dysfunctional housing market. “Failed public policy and political leadership has resulted in a massive imbalance between how much the city’s population has grown this century versus how much housing has been built. The last thirteen years worth of new housing units built is approximately equal to the population growth of the last two years.” Also: “The city is forcing people out. Only the rich can live here because of the policies created by so-called progressives and so-called housing advocates.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Calls for UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi to resign, she of the supergenius “pay $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative postings about the pepper-spraying of students in 2011” plan.
75% of current Toyota employees are willing to move to Texas to work at Toyota’s new U.S. headquarters.
California isn’t the only place delusional politicians are pushing a “railroad to nowhere.” The Lone Star Rail District wants to keep getting and spending money despite the fact that Union Pacific said they couldn’t use their freight lines for a commuter train between Austin and San Antonio. The tiny little problem being that the Union Pacific line was the only one under consideration…
To a certain extent, this Texas vs. California roundup is incomplete, since we’re hot and heavy into the new legislative session and I haven’t had a chance to fully digest the proposed budget numbers yet. By the Legislative Budget Boards numbers, they’re only projecting a 1.5% increase in the 2016-2017 biennium budget over 2014-2015. But see the first link…
Though not nearly as bad as California, Texas state and local public employee pensions are also in need of reform.
California’s Kern County declares a fiscal emergency over dropping oil prices. “Collapsing crude prices are squeezing the finances of Kern County, home to three-fourths of California’s oil production.” Thankfully, oil and gas extraction is a lot more widespread in Texas.
“Fresno? No one goes to Fresno anymore!” Except for job growth percentage, that is, where Fresno outpaced Silicon Valley.
Remember the Newport Beach police department firing a whistler-blower? Via Dwight comes a followup: “A husband and wife who sued Newport Beach and its police department for alleged retaliation and wrongful termination have settled their lawsuits for $500,000, according to city officials.”
“Physician-assisted suicide has returned to California’s political agenda.” Well, why not? California’s ruling Democrats have been attempting fiscal suicide for well over a decade now…
If Stockton bankruptcy judge’s ruling is upheld, a lot of California cities could actually start working for citizens again, rather than public employee unions.
There are plenty of lessons to be learned from Stockton’s bankruptcy. Too bad Stockton’s officials seem unwilling to learn them:
Pension contributions for public-safety workers now amount to 41 percent of payroll. That would put the total cost of salary, health benefits, and pensions at about $120,000 annually for a fifth-year officer…The long saga of Stockton’s decline dramatizes the inefficiency and illogic of union-dominated, monopolistic, government-labor markets.
According to the September labor report, California did manage to add 313,900 jobs between August 2013 and August 2014. But Texas added 395,200. (Hat tip: WILLisms Twitter feed.)
California legislature decides that students don’t need any of that stinking due process.
Hey, remember those “temporary” tax hikes Jerry Brown got voters to approve? Guess what?
The California-based manufacturing facility of Colorado-based Boulder Electric Vehicle shuts down after receiving a $3 million grant from the California Energy Commission.
How California’s for-profit Thomas Jefferson Law School got itself into serious financial trouble through excessive dependence on loans (both the student type and the tax-exempt bond type).
Californian Trip Hawkins, of EA, Apple and 3DO fame, filed for bankruptcy in 2011. This year, the 9th circuit ruled that a profligate life style (for certain values of “profligate”), does not, in fact, constitute a “willful” attempt to avoid bankruptcy. Mr. Hawkins seemed to be living well, but not necessarily living large…
California owner of Akron, Ohio mall abandoned since 2008 declares bankruptcy. And since it’s the Halloween season, and abandoned malls are wonderfully creepy places, here’s a pic:
Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
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