Bernie Sanders

Kamala Harris: Candidate of Big Tech

April 11, 2019 By Joel Kotkin 1 Comment

In the free-form, roller derby race for the Democratic presidential nomination, few candidates are better positioned than California’s Senator Kamala Harris. She is a fresh and attractive mid-fifties face, compared with septuagenarian frontrunners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, or the aging progressive Elizabeth Warren. Part Asian-Indian, part Afro-Caribbean, and female, Harris seems the frontrunner in the intersectionality sweepstakes that currently largely defines Democratic politics. Yet the national obsession with ethnicity and novelty obscures the more important reality: Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party. She has been a hit in all the important places—the Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—that financed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Unlike Warren and Sanders, or Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms. These corporate behemoths now occupy 20 percent of Silicon Valley’s office space, and they have undermined the start-up culturethat once drove the area’s growth.

When I started covering Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s, most top executives—such as David Packard—tended to be middle-of-the-road Republicans, supportive of some government role in the economy, including providing for physical infrastructure, but strongly committed to the idea of competition-driven innovation. This pattern changed dramatically as the Valley began to move away from manufacturing products—often by shifting production to less-expensive states and then, ultimately, to Asia—toward a focus largely on media, advertising, and Internet search. These new companies, unlike, say, chip manufacturers, were less concerned with electricity prices, road conditions, or environmental regulations. Many of these “second wave” firms are essentially involved in “information peddling,” which requires a workforce divided between elite managers and a large, impermanent base of coders, many living only for a brief time in the Bay Area. Such firms, which don’t require as many longtime employees as traditional companies, have largely emerged from San Francisco, arguably the most progressive city in the United States.

The massive inequality that characterizes the region would seem to undercut the progressive narrative that sees California, and particularly the Bay Area, as a harbinger of a more enlightened future. Increasingly under fire from both left and right for abusing its power, Silicon Valley could find Kamala Harris a convenient way to counter criticism while maintaining a tolerant, “woke” facade.

The shift in tech firms’ focus has fit perfectly with the trajectory of Harris’s career. As district attorney of San Francisco, Harris had the opportunity to cultivate the tech aristocracy. Her intermittently “tough on crime” positions would not offend corporate executives who find themselves in a city that even the New York Times has labelled “dystopia by the bay”—rife with petty crime, homelessness, and sometimes violent mentally-ill people.

Elected state attorney general in 2010, Harris got decidedly mixed results, with some notable abuses of office and a demonstrated disinterest in individual rightsand privacy protections—a record that alienated some on the left. On economics, she talked tough on energy companies and homebuilders, but when it came to privacy legislation, she supported policies favored by her tech backers.

By the time Harris ran for the Senate, she could count on massive support from Bay Area law firms, real-estate developers, and Hollywood. More important, she appealed, early on, to tech mavens such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms such as Airbnb, Google, and Nest, who have collectively poured money into her campaigns. Their investment was not ill-considered. Harris seems a sure bet for the tech leaders. Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations.

This year, Harris keynoted the Joint Venture Silicon Valley conference, and she is once again reaping large donations from tech and media giants. As the most significant California candidate in the race, she has a big advantage in harvesting the lion’s share of these riches: California donors collectively contributed over $500 million to the 2016 campaign. The largest benefactors so far to Harris’s 2020 campaign include employees at Alphabet (the parent of Google)—including its former chairman, Eric Schmidt—Cisco, and Apple, as well as many prominent media and entertainment interests. For these companies, with few non-Asian minorities or women in senior positions, and some executives implicated in #MeToo infractions, Harris offers a low-impact way to connect to contemporary progressive concerns.

Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly defined by the progressive Left, with competing factions focused on basic economic issues, on the one hand, and identity politics (greens, gays, feminists, racial identity, and legalizing undocumented migrants) on the other. Another vital faction is made up of employees of public-employee unions, which dominate the party in California. Harris has already maneuvered to appeal to this powerful sector, proposing legislation that would send billions of dollars from Washington to pay teachers’ salaries. The more economically focused progressives like Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Ohio’s Tim Ryan seek primarily to address income inequality. They see the tech giants, in control of much information media, as a danger both to the economy and to democracy. Whatever one thinks of their approach, the economic populists at least reflect a tradition that seeks to make capitalism more beneficial for working people. They don’t excuse the tech firms for their offshoring practices, lack of unionization, and stifling of competition.

Harris’s appeal to Silicon Valley is that she can appeal to restive progressive tech employees, who bristle against working for the Pentagon or ICE, while also connecting with the left-leaning (often tech-financed) nonprofits that sometimes hector the wealthy to engage in virtue-signaling. To appeal to middle-class voters, Harris favors a massive redistribution of income, through the tax system, a measure supported by many of her wealthy allies.

Harris’ alliance with the tech giants provides her with a potentially bottomless cash hoard, as well as the cooperation of skilled Obama-era operatives, many doing well in their new roles as top executives of tech firms. This cohort includes Chris Lehane, the Obama strategist who now heads global policy and public affairs at Airbnb, as well as other officials who have landed gigs at Uber, Netflix, and Amazon. Once politically disengaged, firms like Apple and Google enjoyed extensive access to the Obama administration—some 250 people moving back and forth from the company to the government—and they could expect similar treatment under a President Harris. Her proposals to underwrite massive spending on new government technology certainly please these backers.

Perhaps even more important, Harris is almost certain to be treated well by the mainstream media, so much of which is now owned directly by tech leaders or their heirs. (The Atlantic, owned by Laurene Powell, has already published a warm profile of Harris.) Those who threaten tech wealth, as Bernie Sanders did in 2016, will likely find themselves less positively regarded. More important still, firms like Facebook and Google, which control a growing percentage of the flow of news, will probably favor Harris over her more genuinely populist Democratic opponents—and certainly over President Trump.

Yet Harris’s liaison with the Valley could backfire, whether in the Democratic primaries or in the general election, if she gets that far. Warren and Sanders can cast her, with some justification, as too friendly to the tech giants, and Trump will have a field day linking her to San Francisco, a city with more drug addictsthan high school students, and which has so much feces on the street that one website has created a “poop map.” More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement because of rising costs. Nevertheless, Harris is a formidable opportunist and a focused campaigner. And her willingness to stretch the truth, for example, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, might also prove useful in today’s partisan climate.

Given the media’s obsession with style, race, and gender, we would do well to understand what agenda lurks behind Harris’s atmospherics. The reality: if she wins, the tech oligarchy—titans of today’s Gilded Age—will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Silicon Valley

Berniecrats Should Visit Havana

December 22, 2017 By Don Wagner 5 Comments

I recently returned from a trip to Havana, Cuba. Bernie Sanders and all of his young acolytes should visit for the fine cigars, good rum and, most importantly for them, an up close view of socialism in the real world. I brought home legal amounts of the former two commodities, and have re-affirmed that I want no part of the latter.

A romantic notion of Cuba, and Havana in particular, one that I shared before my visit, is that Cuba is stuck in the 1950s. There is a very real nostalgia in modern pictures of those cool now 60 year old cars with vibrant paint jobs, still running on cobblestone streets among old buildings haunted by the likes of Earnest Hemingway and unsavory long-gone underworld figures. To me, at least from the pictures of a Havana so firmly planted in the fifties, it seemed like Hemingway – or decidedly worse, Che Guevara or Fidel Castro himself – might come around a corner at any moment.

But my trip very much changed my mind. The real Havana is quite different, much worse, and socialism is to blame.

Havana is not stuck in a time warp. The fifties ended there, just like they did everywhere else. The difference is, because of socialism, no one has fixed anything in Havana since the fifties. Those sweet old cars? Get in one and all illusions disappears. They ride like they are rolling across railroad tracks. The interiors are gutted. The doors are practically rusted shut, and more rust peaks out from beneath those fancy paint jobs.

Meanwhile, the buildings are dilapidated – those that are not already crumbling to the ground. On a tour bus, my guide informed us that “we are now entering the wealthy part of town.” You would never know it because the “wealthy” neighborhoods are those that were new in the fifties. Today, they are as run down as all the other neighborhoods. From their appearance, virtually nothing has been done to maintain them. Indeed, virtually nothing except hideous sixties-era soviet style blockish apartment housing appears to have been built in Havana since the nineteen-fifties. And then nothing has been done to repair any of it since.

I even had a chance to see Revolution Square, the central spot where Castro would deliver his hours long harangues to the assembled masses. It was eye opening. I expected something like the Mall in Washington, D.C., a vast, well maintained public space and place of pride for Cuba. In fact, it is a parking lot. Literally. With grass and weeds sprouting up through asphalt cracks.

Nothing in Havana is new or maintained, from those photogenic cars to the housing to the public spaces. Time did not stop in the fifties. It soldiered on, leaving a tired, worn out, run down town, with a public spirit seemingly as dead and buried as Hemingway, Guevara and now Fidel.

Again, socialism is to blame.

“How so?” a young Berniecrat might fairly ask.

One of my tour guides explained: Following the “success of the Revolution,” private ownership disappeared. The public – meaning of course, the government – owns everything. Gradually, some private property has returned. For example, it is possible for a Cuban to own his or her own apartment. But, my tour guide continued, the people own the apartment building itself.

Not surprisingly, “the people” are unwilling to pay to maintain “their” buildings. That is socialism. When everyone owns the building, no one fixes the plumbing or heating or the crumbling infrastructure. When everyone owns the park, no one weeds or otherwise cares for the grounds. Havana demonstrates that socialism is a recipe for creeping dilapidation. Even Berniecrats should want no part of that.

It need not be this way. Before the “success of the Revolution,” Havana was by all accounts truly a wealthy, vibrant place. It had money, a functioning economy, and a robust private sector. No one would argue that it was without fault, just as no one would argue that any society anywhere at any time in the history of the world is without fault. But Havana was not then crumbling into poverty and stale disrepair.

The city has much to offer. The people were friendly and open, the cuisine delicious. Havana’s history could support a vibrant tourist trade, with its commodities of world-class cigars and rum merely leading the list of commercial opportunities to pull this island nation from poverty.

But “success of the Revolution?” Hardly. Poor, tired, old Havana is what you get with what the socialist are selling. Go to Havana and take a look at it in real life, not theory. Bring back cigars if you are so inclined, but leave the ideology there.

Don Wagner is the Mayor of Irvine, a former California State Assembly Member, and attorney with Best Best & Krieger LLP.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Cuba, Don Wagner, Fidel Castro, Havana, Socialism

WikiLeaks: Clinton Strategists Considered Moving CA Primary to Aid Campaign

October 23, 2016 By Matt Fleming 4 Comments

Prominent Democratic strategists who would eventually get top posts in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign debated the political strategy of moving the date of California’s primary election, according to hacked emails recently released by WikiLeaks.

In December 2014, prior to Clinton announcing her candidacy, Robby Mook and John Podesta (who would become Clinton’s campaign manager and campaign chairman, respectively) discussed their preference to keep blue stats like California late in the primary process.

Mook had been contacted by another Democratic strategist, Chris Lehane, who served in Bill Clinton’s administration. According to the email, Lehane had called Mook about the California primary after speaking with Podesta, who had given Lehane the impression that he wanted to move the date.

Mook sought clarification, as he believed there was already a strategy in place to keep reliably Democratic states late in the primary process.

“FYI–Lehane called me about CA primary and I told him that the operating strategy is to keep blue states late (i.e. don’t move CA),” Mook wrote to Podesta. “He said he was at dinner with you and was under the impression that you wanted to move it earlier. He’s wondering how to proceed and I said I’d try to get us on the same page and go back with an answer. Are you ok with me saying that we both want CA to stay where it is?”

There was no reply from Podesta in the email dump. But an email from March 2015 — just weeks before Clinton officially announced her candidacy — showed Mook hoping California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon would weigh in on the timing of the primary.

“I met with Cal State Senate President. Super enthusiastic,” Podesta wrote to Mook in an email with the Los Angeles Democrat’s name in the subject line. “Do anything including travel to other states. Also volunteered to line up other state senators.”

“Fantastic,” Mook exclaimed. “Did he mention moving the primary date at all?”

A spokesman for de Leon did not immediately return requests for comment. Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond as well.

Complaints of a rigged process

This election cycle has been rife with complaints and conspiracy theories that the Democratic nomination process was skewed toward Clinton.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley complained the Democratic National Committee scheduled the debates to favor Clinton. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders had his own concerns.

Indeed, the complaints of a rigged process from the public and Clinton’s primary opponents and their supporters — some of the complaints were supported by other Wikileaks dumps — were so great that Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was ousted from her perch atop the DNC.

No biggie?

As voters know, the date of California’s primary did not change. And Clinton won handily in June, as well as in 2008 against Barack Obama.

According to John J. Pitney, Jr., a Roy P. Crocker professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, those two facts should quiet concerns of a “rigged” election in a “Clinton-friendly state.”

“Conspiracy-minded Democrats might pounce on the staff chatter, but it’s not the kind of thing that makes a difference to voters,” Pitney said. “The issue might get more traction if there are revelations that states did shift dates in a deliberate effort to help Clinton, or if Clinton herself was involved in the effort.”

This piece was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Robby Mook, WikiLeads

Wikileaks: Jerry Brown Planned to Back Hillary Clinton All Along

October 14, 2016 By Joel B. Pollak 1 Comment

Photo courtesy Steve Rhodes, flickr

A Wikileaks email release this week suggests that California Gov. Jerry Brown planned to endorse Hillary Clinton all along, despite remaining publicly neutral between Clinton and rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) throughout most of the primary election, until it was almost over.

The email, dated November 2014 and sent by Clinton aide Cheryl Mills to campaign chair John Podesta, indicated: “He wants folks to privately know he is ready to go when she is. If she runs, he’s ready to help.”

More than a year and a half later, with just one week to go before the California primary, Brown made his support for Clinton public. However, his support was rather bland, citing the fact that Clinton’s nomination had become inevitable, and arguing that she would be a better choice than Republican Donald Trump — rather than making a strong positive case for Clinton. He also was at great pains to praise Sanders, even drawing parallels between Sanders’s campaign and his own 1992 run:

I have closely watched the primaries and am deeply impressed with how well Bernie Sanders has done. He has driven home the message that the top one percent has unfairly captured way too much of America’s wealth, leaving the majority of people far behind. In 1992, I attempted a similar campaign.

Brown seemed to entertain the idea of a run of his own, telling NBC News’ Chuck Todd that he would have tried to reach the White House for a fourth time if he were ten years younger. He stressed that climate change would be among the more important issues that any president would have to face in office.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

This piece was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Chuck Todd, Hillary Clinton, Jerry Brown

Pro-Sanders Delegates Censored at DNC, Claim California Contingent

August 1, 2016 By Aaron Sankin 3 Comments

As reported by the Daily Dot:

When Eden McFadden got to her seat at the Wells Fargo Convention Center in Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon, she discovered someone was already sitting there. Technically, a sign on the seat said it was reserved and, technically, it wasn’t actually her seat.

Instead, as a pro-Bernie Sanders member of California’s delegation to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the blocked-off set of seats in the area where McFadden and her #NeverHillary compatriots had been sitting for the past few days represented just another incident in a series of indignities she argues is part of an intentional effort by DNC officials to prevent anything from cracking the public facade of a party unified to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.

Watching the proceedings from the the outside, the first night of the DNC seemed like chaos. A searchable database of emails stolen from the DNC’s servers and posted online in a searchable database by Wikileaks late last week revealed efforts by DNC officials to bolster the Clinton campaign at the expense of Sanders—who had never, in his three decade career in office, run as a Democrat prior to last year. For Sanders supporters who had long suspected a bias toward Clinton among the party’s formal infrastructure, the emails turned a long-simmering fire into an near-apocalyptic conflagration.

From the very first moments of the convention, a constant din of piercing jeers from Sanders supporters served as a reminder of how much work the party needed to do to heal its primary-induced fracture.

Much of that visible chaos subsided over the course of the week, following the resignation of controversial DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Sanders’s full-throated endorsement on Monday night. In a mass text message sent out on Thursday, Sanders urged his supporters not to interrupt Clinton’s speech.

However, concerns that their voices were silenced during the primary has led to fears that party officials were doing something similar at the convention itself—especially among Sanders’s California contingent, which has been the loudest in its opposition to Clinton and many of the policies with which she has been associated, especially the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

For McFadden and other California delegates, the fight for the future of America was encapsulated by those roped-off seats. …

Click here to read the full story

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: #NeverHillary, Bernie Sanders, DNC, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton

Populist Unity Can Overcome the Establishment’s Supermajority

July 14, 2016 By Ed Ring Leave a Comment

Back in 2012, the California Policy Center published an article entitled “The Forgotten 33%,” which included a graphic entitled “American Voter Breakdown 2012.” It depicted the U.S. electorate as comprised of 46% who pay zero net taxes, 20% who work for the government and are net tax consumers, the 1% “super rich,” and the “forgotten 33%,” who work in the private sector and earn enough to be positive net taxpayers.

The point of the article, then and now, was that people with an intrinsic preference for big government comprise a super-majority of voters in America. But something has changed since 2012…

AMERICAN VOTER BREAKDOWN 2016

The emergence of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as serious contenders to become president of the U.S. reflects a growing awareness among voters in all of the above categories that things can and should be better. The 33% who constitute America’s beleaguered taxpayers were angry four years ago, and this time around they’re furious. Their ire is the most easily explained: Now more than ever, they work long hours for less wages or lower profits, all while being told by the establishment press, by mainstream academia, and by left-wing politicians that they’re “privileged,” and still aren’t paying their “fair share.” If they’re white, they’re told their success is the undeserved result of their color, when in fact they’ve been the recipients of institutionalized reverse discrimination for nearly two generations. And no matter what their ethnicity, they confront soaring prices for housing, health care, and college tuition for their children.

The 33% who work and make enough to pay taxes are angry. And they should be. But what about the 46% who pay no net taxes?

The anger of the 46% takes various forms, nearly all of it justified. Many of them work, but qualify for the earned income tax credit and subsidized health care, which makes them net tax consumers. Many of them would like to work harder, but the only jobs available are part-time with unpredictable schedules which makes it impossible for them to work two jobs. Many of them would like to get a better education, but they are the products of failing schools where teacher tenure is more important than student achievement. And if they’re people of color and haven’t yet been successful, they’re perpetually told by the establishment press, by mainstream academia, and by left-wing politicians that they are victims of discrimination and their failures are not their responsibility – fueling additional anger.

And what of the 20% who work for the government? They are, for the most part, ensured decent health care and a secure retirement. But they are the targets of relentless propaganda from their unions, who have waged a multi-decade campaign to convince them they are underpaid, underappreciated and overworked. Many of them succumb to this nonsense. Others, and more than a few, are disgruntled for the opposite reason – they resent working for a unionized government where merit means less than seniority, and innovation is a threat.

But why are taxes consuming the 33%? Why are opportunities for good jobs and education being denied the 46%? And why does government get bigger every year but deliver less?

There’s a simple answer. Government unions. Especially at the state and local level, government unions have destroyed our public schools and driven our public institutions to the brink of bankruptcy. These government unions perpetually lobby for higher taxes, bigger government – more employees with more pay and benefits, more job killing regulations, and more programs ostensibly intended to help the less fortunate – regardless of their cost or actual effectiveness. The government union agenda is to increase their power and influence – a goal that has no connection with the public interest.

Government unions control state and local politicians, who in turn control every scrap of legislation sought after by big business. They encourage and enable cronyism. Their union controlled pension funds and their union backed government bond underwriting make them the biggest players on Wall Street. They ARE the “establishment” that has gotten everyone so agitated this time around.

Donald Trump, for all his hapless gaffes and hideous vitriol, is far too intelligent to identify government unions as the root cause of most of the problems in America. Unions make or break Trump’s development projects. And even if Trump did attack the government unions, he’d risk confusing voters, who by and large still don’t make a distinction between public and private sector unions.

Bernie Sanders, despite his belated attempts to pander to the African American left by challenging police organizations, is unwilling or unable to make the distinction between police personnel, whom we are lucky to have among us, and police unions that protect bad cops and intimidate politicians. And even if Sanders did take on the police unions, he would never take on the teachers unions – despite the fact they’ve practically destroyed public education in America.

Populist anger in America today is justified, and there is a unifying target for the anger – the “establishment” as represented by government unions and their clients; monopolistic corporations, America’s overbuilt financial sector, and the extreme environmentalist lobby that provides a phony moral cover for their iniquitous schemes. If public sector unions were illegal, this entire corrupt establishment would be threatened as never before. As it is, this awakening national dissent has seismic power, diffused in all directions, turning only on itself.

* * *

Ed Ring is the president of the California Policy Center.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ed Ring, Hillary Clinton, Taxpayers

Election Day: Questions, What to Look For and a Few Predictions

June 7, 2016 By Joel Fox Leave a Comment

Election primary day is finally here in California. Watching much of the rest of the country’s voters engage in the process of choosing presidential nominees is little more than a spectator sport for Californians. While the choices of whom to vote for have been limited by those other states’ voters, Californians now will get a chance to speak through the ballot. Other important races will be decided, as well, and analysts will be looking for trends that could indicate how November campaigns turn out.

A few items to think about and a look into a cloudy and cracked crystal ball:

The Presidential Campaigns

Questions/What to Look For: Is the reported surge in Democratic registration a sign that the Bernie Sanders campaign is bringing in new voters? Will they show up on Election Day? On the Republican side, does Trump’s presumptive nominee status keep some Republicans away from the polls affecting down ticket races? Is there a protest vote against Trump by some GOP voters who either skip the presidential ballot or vote for another name in the Republican column?

Prediction: Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic primary by a larger margin than the 2-percent edge most polls have been predicting. A protest vote against Trump will be measured by his securing about 75% of the Republicans who vote, meaning one-quarter of the Republicans are not satisfied with the GOP presumptive nominee.

U.S. Senate

Questions/What to Look for: Will Attorney General Kamala Harris have a large commanding lead over the second place finisher or will the race be within 10-15%. If the latter, and that second place finisher is Congress member Loretta Sanchez, that will set up an interesting fall campaign for the first major seat affected by the top two primary. Will Latino voters rally to Sanchez in big numbers? (And how will that affect the thinking of those considering statewide races in 2018? I’m thinking of you, Antonio.)

Prediction: Harris has a comfortable win. If Sanchez qualifies for the finals, her fall campaign will turn on how Sanchez manages to find the sweet spot of corralling enough Democrats while attracting a strong Republican vote.

Shaping the Legislature

Questions/What to Look for: Outside competing interests are pouring in big money to help shape a legislature supportive of their issues. Will a trend of more business friendly Democrats continue to blossom or will labor and progressive candidates score big? Much of the independent expenditures come from advocates on both sides of education and environmental issues and success could lead to dramatic changes on how those issues are addressed by the next legislature. If the environmental candidates do well, will that increase the interest of environmentalist/financial player Tom Steyer to consider a gubernatorial run? Will a dominant Democratic showing increase the chances of the Democrats securing supermajorities in both houses in November? Or will supermajority even matter if a large number of Democratic victors are considered pro-business Democrats?

Prediction: Californians deep-blue hue will only become deeper—at least on the surface. However, business will do well enough to make for some interesting top two runoffs in November and keep the intramural conflicts within the Democratic Party active.

Local Measures

Questions/What to Look for: Many tax and bond measures appear on local ballots. Will success or failure of these measures be a harbinger for how voters will respond to statewide tax and bond measures in the fall? Will success of a nine-county parcel tax to protect the San Francisco Bay mean more regional ventures around the state in the future?

Predictions: According to the historical record, a large number of the tax and bond measures pass at the local level. That record remains intact. However, this may not be an indication of how voters will respond to statewide measures in November. The statewide measures often have more sophisticated opposition campaigns than local measures face. If the San Francisco Bay parcel taxes pass–close, but I think the measure will pass–it will encourage those who believe dealing with some of California’s problems over a sprawling area calls for regional solutions and we will see more efforts in that direction.

This piece was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Election, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Loretta Sanchez, Primary, Tom Steyer

Business Bashing in the Golden State — How to Reverse Course

March 26, 2016 By Joseph Vranich 4 Comments

Recently, when my firm completed a study that found about 10,000 companies left California in the last eight years, it hardly surprised leaders in the business community.

Some say there is one thing in California worse than taxes – and that is the complex set of directives enforced by unforgiving state inspectors. In fact, many business owners consider the state’s regulatory environment to be worse than its notorious tax burden.

California’s political elite and their regulatory enforcers don’t understand that business owners enjoy running their enterprises and virtually all of them try to do the right thing. One example can be found in Kallisto Greenhouses, which closed in Fontana in response to Sacramento stinging them from many directions like a group of killer bees.

Suffocating a Nursery

Even a non-polluting, greenhouse-gas reducing, job-creating, tax-paying, greenhouse run by good employers can’t escape the punishing regulatory noose.

Kallisto Greenhouses operated with a peak of 36 employees shipping tropical indoor plants to ten western states and Calgary Canada since 1977. But the owners padlocked the doors because of actions by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and California’s Occupational Safety and Health office (Cal-OSHA).

CARB required heaters that underperformed despite costing tens of thousands of dollars and also insisted that their truck – which almost certainly would be legal in most states – be replaced by a new vehicle with an unaffordable price tag.

“Contributing factors included the ripple effect of an increase in the minimum wage and addition of paid sick leave,” said Kathye Rietkerk, co-owner. “But the nail in the coffin was Cal-OSHA. We got a letter saying we had the choice to invite in a visit by a Cal-OSHA consultant to review employee manuals or take the chance of being visited by an inspector.”

Naturally, the company opted for help from the state’s consultant. Upon his arrival he noted that a numerical calculation on a certain OSHA form was in the wrong column, which resulted in a $5,000 fine. Not that the number was incorrect. Only that it was in the wrong place on the form.

By the time he was done, the fines he felt he could assess had he visited not as a consultant but as an “inspector” would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for similar mistakes.

“Also, the corrections to procedures and existing manuals were deemed not exact enough to suit the Cal-OSHA consultant, so it took six months of staff time to satisfy him.” she said. “They wanted us to be rigorous on things that aren’t that important.”

For example, the agency wanted a requirement that mandatory disciplinary proceedings be initiated for certain employee mistakes even if the employer doesn’t want to treat long-term employees that way.

“To be forced to be inflexible makes you an adversary to your employees, and we should be allowed to determine when discipline makes sense and when it does not,” Rietkerk said. I contacted workplace expert Tom Martin of People Management Professionals in Riverside, Calif., who confirmed her viewpoint that Cal-OSHA indeed makes inflexible “one size fits all” demands.

Company Hit Hard

Meanwhile, the company’s operating costs kept increasing as water bills rose despite having installed $300,000 in sophisticated water-saving technology, health insurance prices went up, electricity became more expensive, and taxes continued to climb.

“The day after the OSHA consultant left we called the developers who had been seeking to buy our property for yet another distribution warehouse to serve ‘products imported from abroad,’” Rietkerk said. The company owned ten acres, six of which were covered by 257,000 square feet of greenhouses.

Kallisto Greenhouses had loyal employees (76 percent with more than 20 years of service) and offered health insurance since the early 1980’s, three weeks vacation to long-term employees, seven paid holidays and flexible working conditions.

“We were forced to make decisions we never dreamed of because of the incredibly hostile small business environment in California,” she said. “It is sad that government programs that are ideally intended to protect employees can result in complete job loss instead.”

“We got into business because it was enjoyable and we loved producing a product that enhanced people’s lives. People who create jobs are not ‘the enemy’ and we were grateful to have choices when the onslaught of regulations made the choice of closing more attractive,” Rietkerk said.

It appears that the majority of California legislators, Gov. Jerry Brown’s “jobs czar” Michael Rossi, and state bureaucrats are just fine with ignoring the hardships the state imposed on Kallisto Greenhouses and continues to inflict on other businesses.

Hold the State Accountable

It’s time we make life uncomfortable for state inspectors who have been allowed to remain anonymous while inflicting unreasonable demands on entrepreneurs.

I have such a way – it’s called accountability.

Let’s begin requiring that California regulatory agencies publish online the names of inspectors every time a business shuts down or leaves the state because they decided there was a regulatory “failure.” The inspector would be free to list the details of infractions, but, in the same posting, an option should be available for the company’s leadership to tell their side of the story.

Doing so would help journalists and the public better understand how harsh treatment by public agencies motivates companies to transfer jobs and capital to other states or close their doors.

California needs such disclosures because the majority of voters are ill-informed about what it takes to run a successful enterprise. Such voters elect majorities of business-bashing politicians to the state legislature and to city councils in liberal strongholds like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Consider the popularity of Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders, a fierce socialist who attracted a huge crowd in San Diego on Tuesday. It seems that the ranks of voters antagonistic toward business are expanding.

If we fail to expose how California politicians and their regulatory armies treat companies, the proverbial man in the street will continue to be unaware of the pain that leaders of commercial enterprises have to endure.

An Astonishing Contrast

Many California Democrats represent a Jekyll-and-Hyde disorder by being contemptuous toward business interests while coddling state agencies that are guilty of far worse behavior.

For example, legislators recently blocked the State Auditor from examining financial mismanagement at the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA); they did that after eliminating the rail agency’s obligation to report twice yearly on a project likely to cost in excess of 100 billion. Now, the CHSRA must report only once every two years despite evidence of serious cost overruns, dubious changes in plans and multiple statements that lack credibility.

Members of the Authority’s board ignore the stipulations contained in Proposition 1A, which voters passed into law in the 2008 election. California propositions that pass at the ballot box become law, and that high-speed rail law is being violated in so many ways that the list is too long to publish here.

Can you imagine the outcry if Kallisto Greenhouses had copycatted the High Speed Rail Authority by demanding elimination of audits by the California Franchise Tax Board or the Internal Revenue Service? Or obfuscated details in documents required by state law?

The double standard in the way California treats businesses and public agencies is enough to turn the stomach of any business owner. Without more voters becoming concerned, we will continue to see company relocations to friendlier states, or – as in the case of Kallisto Greenhouses – simply go out of business.

Joseph Vranich the Irvine-based Principal of Spectrum Location Solutions helps companies plan and select ideal sites for new facilities across the U.S. and internationally.

This piece was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, Business climate, high speed rail, Los Angeles, San Diego, san francisco