Understanding the California Mind

Divide this state up...

Understanding the California Mind
 Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.

I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.

Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.

They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

Much Ruin in a State


On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays. I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s.

In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information.

But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.

On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall.

Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid.

Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.

The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs.

All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago.

Traveling Halfway in Reverse


In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.

Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust?

They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.

1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.

The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.

2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”

The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)

3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.

The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)

4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling.

In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?

Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared.

Progressive Winners and Losers


There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class.

Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government.

Cynicism is rampant. Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.

A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.

I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.

In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do.

In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.

Hillary Clinton’s Fingerprints

She looks great in stripes... the Malania of the Orange-wearers!

Hillary Clinton’s Fingerprints Are All Over The FBI’s Investigation Into Trump’s Russia Ties

Rachel Stoltzfoos, The Federalist

Her campaign is linked to at least three separate pieces of information fed to the FBI, including the dossier the FBI used as a pretext to spy on a Trump campaign associate.

A significant part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basis for investigating the Trump campaign’s Russia ties is looking more and more like a political hit job carried out by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Her campaign’s fingerprints are on at least three separate pieces of information fed to the FBI, including the Christopher Steele dossier Republicans say formed the basis of a secret warrant obtained to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

A former State Department official confirmed on the record Thursday that Clinton associates were funneling information to Steele as he was compiling a dossier commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and DNC. That’s on top of the recent revelation that a top Department of Justice official fed the FBI information compiled by his wife, who was working for the firm Clinton and the DNC were paying to dig up dirt on Trump, Fusion GPS.

The dossier was quoted “extensively” in the FBI’s application to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, according to a memo released by Republicans on the House intelligence committee. In a January letter to the FBI made public this week, two Senate Republicans also said Steele’s information formed a “significant portion” of the warrant application.

“It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,” Sens. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham wrote in the letter referring Steele to the FBI for a criminal investigation.

Taken together, here’s what we know so far about the extent of Clinton’s involvement in the FBI’s case.

1. Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal funneled information to the FBI through a contact at the State Department.

In an account published by The Washington Post, former State Department official Jonathan Winer describes how research compiled by a Clinton ally made its way into his hands and then to the FBI. Winer was in charge of combating transnational organized crime at the State Department under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and returned under the Obama administration to work on international law enforcement. Between his two gigs, he became friends with Steele, who as a result began feeding information to the State Department, and tipped Winer off in Sept. 2016 to the Trump dossier he was compiling.

That same month, Winer met Blumenthal, who provided him with notes on Trump and Russia compiled by another Clinton insider, Cody Shearer. “What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources,” Winer writes in The Washington Post. He decided to show the notes to Steele, who told him the information could be used to corroborate his dossier. Steele walked away with a copy of the notes, which he provided to the FBI.

Shearer and Blumenthal, known respectively as “Mr. Fixer” and “Vicious Sid” in Clinton world, are staunch allies of the Clintons. Winer notes he didn’t know whether the information Blumenthal fed him was accurate, but says he fed it to Steel anyway because he was “alarmed at Russia’s role in the 2016 election.”

Grassley and Graham express concern in their criminal referral that Steele was “vulnerable to manipulation” while compiling his dossier on Trump, as he has admitted to meeting with at least four different news outlets during that time (in violation of an agreement he had with the FBI), and indicated he received unsolicited and unverified tips on Trump and included them in his dossier. “Simply put, the more people who contemporaneously knew that Mr. Steele was compiling his dossier, the more likely it was vulnerable to manipulation,” they wrote in their letter.

Of course, the Clinton network knew to some extent about the dossier, since Hillary’s campaign and the DNC had commissioned and funded the effort through Fusion GPS. Whether Blumenthal was planting bogus information to manipulate Steele or passing along what he regarded as a legitimate tip is unclear, but it’s certainly not a good look.

Regardless, this second unverified and unsolicited dossier made its way to the FBI thanks to the Clinton camp.

2. Steele was at that same time compiling a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

As noted, Steele was already well into work on a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and DNC regarding Trump’s Russia ties when Winer approached him. Perkins Coie, a law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, had hired Fusion GPS to dig up opposition research on Trump prior to the election. Fusion in turn employed Steele, a former British spy, to compile the dossier. His work was entirely funded by Democrats.

The FBI was never able to verify the salacious claims in Steele’s dossier, so relied heavily on his reputation to infuse the document with credibility before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, according to the Republican memo and criminal referral. The bureau continued to vouch for him before the court in subsequent applications to renew the warrant, even after learning he was “desperate” to stop Trump from getting elected, had broken the bureau’s trust by dishing to the press in one case, and potentially lied to the bureau outright in several other instances — a criminal offense. The court learned none of this, and continued to grant the FBI permission to spy on a U.S. citizen based in part on Steele’s research.

3. A top DOJ official fed the FBI research on Trump from his wife also paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

The third piece of information provided to the FBI in connection with Clinton allies is research compiled by the wife of former senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who worked closely with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and her replacement, Rod Rosenstein. Ohr was also a friend of Steele.

Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to help compile opposition research on Trump. According to the Republican memo, Ohr eventually turned over all of the information she compiled — while working ultimately for the Clinton campaign and the DNC — to the FBI. It’s unclear whether this information made it into the FISA applications, but it’s one more example of evidence received by the FBI that can be traced back to the Clinton campaign.

According to the Republican memo, the FISA court was never informed of the Ohr’s connections to Fusion GPS and Steele.

In sum: To obtain a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign associate, the FBI relied heavily on a dossier that was never substantiated, put together by a former spy “desperate” to stop Trump. That dossier was paid for by powerful Democrats on Trump’s rival campaign, who also paid for opposition research the FBI received from a powerful couple inside President Obama’s DOJ. Separately, two Clinton allies worked together to funnel a second unsubstantiated dossier to the FBI through the State Department.

Rachel Stoltzfoos is managing editor of The Federalist.

FISA-gate Is Scarier than Watergate

FISA-gate Is Scarier than Watergate

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

The press used to uncover government wrongdoing. Today’s press is defending it. 

The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in. 

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign. 

Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press. 

Nor did officials add that a Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, had met privately with Steele — or that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, had been hired to work on the dossier. 

Unfortunately, such disclosures may be only the beginning of the FISA-gate scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s national security team also may have requested the names of American citizens connected with the Trump campaign who had been swept up in other FISA surveillance. Those officials may have then improperly unmasked the names and leaked them to a compliant press — again, for apparent political purposes during a campaign. 

As a result of various controversies, the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, has resigned. Two FBI officials who had been working on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in the so-called Russia collusion probe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, have been reassigned for having an improper relationship and for displaying overt political biases in text messages to each other. 

The new FBI director, Christopher Wray, has also reassigned the FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, who purportedly leaked the Steele dossier to a sympathetic journalist. 

How does FISA-gate compare to Watergate and Iran-Contra? 

Once again, an administration is being accused of politicizing government agencies to further agendas, this time apparently to gain an advantage for Hillary Clinton in the run-up to an election. 

There is also the same sort of government resistance to releasing documents under the pretext of “national security.” 

There is a similar pattern of slandering congressional investigators and whistleblowers as disloyal and even treasonous. 

There is the rationale that just as the Watergate break-in was a two-bit affair, Carter Page was a nobody. 

But there is one huge (and ironic) difference. In the current FISA-gate scandal, most of the media and liberal civil libertarians are now opposing the disclosure of public documents. They are siding with those in the government who disingenuously sought surveillance to facilitate the efforts of a political campaign. 

This time around, the press is not after a hated Nixon administration. Civil libertarians are not demanding accountability from a conservative Reagan team. Instead, the roles are reversed. 

Barack Obama was a progressive constitutional lawyer who expressed distrust of the secretive “Deep State.” Yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled Associated Press communications and a Fox News journalist for reporting unfavorable news based on supposed leaks. 

Obama did not fit the past stereotypes of right-wing authoritarians subverting the Department of Justice and its agencies. Perhaps that is why there was little pushback against his administration’s efforts to assist the campaign of his likely replacement, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, “acid wash” hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens. 

FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI. 

Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime. 

The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie

The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie

Arthur Herman, National Review 

How an American victory was transformed into a symbol of defeat Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one. 

America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and the other networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post — decided to turn the major Communist Tet offensive against U.S. forces and South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, into an American defeat, rather than what it actually was: a major American victory.

We’ve all lived in the disorder and chaos that campaign set in motion ever since.

By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.

Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when  Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue. 

It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. By the end of 1969, over 70 percent of South Vietnam’s population was rated by the U.S. military as under government control, compared with 42 percent at the beginning of 1968.

The American public knew none of this, however. Almost from the moment the first shots were being fired, skeptics of the war effort in the mainstream media, including CBS News icon Walter Cronkite, would use Tet to prove that the war wasn’t being won as the Johnson administration was claiming. They went further, representing the failed attacks on the U.S. embassy in Saigon and other sites as symbols of Communist success. 

As the Washington Post’s own Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup documented in his book The Big Story, reporters caught in the fighting systematically used it to turn the reality of American victory into an image of American and South Vietnamese defeat (reporting for example that Vietcong had overrun five floors of the U.S. embassy when in fact the VC had never even gotten inside the building). Newsweek’s coverage of the siege of Khe Sanh showed 18 photos (out of a total of 29) of dead or wounded Marines or Marines huddling under cover, never mentioning that the Marines were steadily pushing back the NVA and inflicting heavy casualties. 

That campaign of misrepresentation culminated in Walter Cronkite’s half-hour TV special on February 27, when he told his viewers with an appropriately glum face that Tet had proved that America was now “mired in a stalemate” — even as American forces were breaking the siege around Khe Sanh and clearing out the last resistance in Hue. 

The misrepresentation by America’s most respected newsman and most trusted media outlets of what had actually happened during Tet stunned the American public and the body politic. Popular support for the war took a heavy hit, as the war’s critics now grabbed center stage. Gallup polls in December 1967 had shown Americans evenly split on whether entering Vietnam was a mistake. The barrage of negative coverage of Tet had nudged the doubters slightly ahead by February 1, 46 to 42 percent. By April, the doubters were ahead by eight points, and support for the war never recovered.

Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy seized on the news that the Vietcong “had seized a section of the Embassy” (which was entirely false) and entered Hue as proof that it was the Communists, not the Americans, who were winning the war. Cronkite’s TV broadcast all but doomed the reelection campaign of President Lyndon Baines Johnson; in April McCarthy won the Wisconsin primary by a stunning ten points and LBJ bowed out of the race. Robert Kennedy seized the opportunity to enter the race on an anti-war platform; less than three months later he was dead by an assassin’s bullet. The Democratic national convention descended into violence and chaos, as the Vietnam war became the key divisive issue in American politics — and a hot-button issue in our culture ever since. 

After Tet, American media had assumed a new mission for itself: to shape the nation’s politics by crafting a single coherent narrative, even if it meant omitting certain relevant facts and promoting other false or misleading ones. In March 1969, after Richard Nixon’s election, the executive producer of ABC News told his Saigon bureau: “I think the time has come to shift our focus from the battlefield . . . to themes and stories under the general heading, ‘We are on our way out of Vietnam.’” One of those “stories” would be the massacre at My Lai, which actually took place in the aftermath of Tet but only became “newsworthy” a year later when the media was looking for ways to convince Americans that Nixon’s decision to stay the course in Vietnam was destroying their country’s moral standing — just as they had convinced them a year earlier that America’s major victory was actually a major defeat.

So while many in mainstream news outlets wring their hands today about a widespread lack of trust in media, it’s important on this 50th anniversary to remember the part they played in squandering it.  

California, America’s Poverty Capital

California, America’s Poverty Capital

by Kerry Jackson, National Review

Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?

California — not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia — has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure — which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes non-cash government assistance as a form of income — nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when the state’s per capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).

It’s not as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now. Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states — principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia — initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. The common thread of the reformed welfare programs was strong work requirements placed on aid recipients. These overhauls were widely recognized as a big success, as welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the work force. The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s anti-poverty programs, however, have resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as if welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: Fifty-five percent of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives, according to City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz. 

Self-interest in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client back into the work force, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base — to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy — a unionized, public-sector work force that exercises tremendous power through voting and lobbying. Many work in social services.

Further contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis. Californians spent more than one-third of their incomes on housing in 2014, the third-highest rate in the country. A shortage of housing has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies. “Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle-income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire home-building projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law. California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. 

Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They are clearly unaffordable.” 

 Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022 — but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60 percent of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs, and studies suggest that it will likely cause many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard study found evidence that “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area, where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers. 

Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric Holder to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents. 

California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years. 

Image credit: Barbara Kelley

Why Socialism Fails

Paul R. Gregory, Hoover Institution

As the collapse of the Soviet Union approached, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy over planned socialism in his 1989 essay, “The End of History?” More than a quarter century later, the USSR has indeed disintegrated. Its former east European empire lies inside the European Union. China has a market economy, though the nation is led by a single party. And the “socialist” states of North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are in economic ruin.  Few now advocate “back to the USSR.” At the same time, many people still consider socialism an appealing economic system. Consider, for example, that Bernie Sanders—an avowed supporter of a socialist United States—is America’s most popular politician—and that as many millennials favor socialism as capitalism.

The analogy of the jockey and the horse explains the continued appeal of socialism. Socialists believe that socialist regimes have chosen the wrong jockeys to ride the socialist horse to its deserved victory. Bad jockeys such as Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Pol Pot, and Hugo Chavez chose tactics and policies that led their socialist horse astray. But actually, a look at how the Soviet Union actually worked reveals that it’s the horse itself that’s the problem.

After gaining power a century ago and then holding onto it through a civil war, the Soviet communists were intent on building a socialist state that would overwhelm capitalism. State ownership and scientific planning would replace the anarchy of the market. Material benefits would accrue to the working class. An equitable economy would supplant capitalist exploitation and a new socialist man would rise, prioritizing social above private interests. A dictatorship of the proletariat would guarantee the interests of the working class. Instead of extracting surpluses from workers, the socialist state would take tribute from capitalists to finance the building of socialism.

The basics of the Soviet “horse” were in place by the early 1930s. Under this system, Stalin and his Politburo set general priorities for industrial ministries and a state planning commission. The ministers and planners worked in tandem to draw up economic plans. Managers of the hundreds of thousands of plants, factories, food stores, and even farms were obligated by law to fulfill the plans handed down by their superiors.

The Soviets launched their planned socialist economy as the capitalist world sank into depression, trade wars, and hyperinflation. Soviet authorities bragged of unprecedented rates of growth. New industrial complexes grew from scratch. Magazines featured contented workers lounging in comfortable resorts. The message: The West was failing, and the Soviet economic system was the way to the future.

As the competition between capitalism and Soviet socialism became more pronounced during the Cold War, serious scholarly study of the Soviet economy began. The overarching research agenda of Western scholars was “scientific planning”—the socialist belief that expert technocrats could manage an economy better than spontaneous market forces. After all, would not experts know better than buyers and sellers what, how, and for whom to produce?

It was the Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who resisted this idea most forcefully. In their landmark critique laid out in a series of papers written from the 1920s through the 1940s, they concluded that socialism must fail. In modern economies, hundreds of thousands of enterprises produce millions of products. Even with the most sophisticated computer technology, managing such large numbers would be far too complex for an administrative body trying to allocate resources. Modern economies, therefore, are too complex to plan. Without markets and prices, decision-makers will not know what is scarce and what is abundant. If property belongs to all, what rules should those who manage assets for society follow? 

The Soviets’ solution to the complexity and information problems was a national plan that spelled out production goals only for broad sectors, not for specific transactions. In other words, rather than mandate the delivery of 10 tons of steel cable by factory A to factory B, the planners set a target for the total number of tons of cable to be produced nationwide. Only a few specific goods—such as crude oil, aluminum ore, brown coal, electricity, and freight-car dispatches—could be planned as actual transactions. Everything else had to be planned in crude quantities, such as several million square meters of textile products. Product specifications, delivery plans, and payments were worked out at lower levels and often with disastrous results.

Soviet scientific planning, in fact, directed only a minuscule portion of products. In the early 1950s, central agencies drew up less than 10,000 planned indexes, while industrial products numbered more than 20 million. Central agencies drew up generalized plans for industrial ministries, which issued more detailed plans to “main administrations,” which prepared plans for enterprises. There never was a pretense that the top officials would plan the production of specific products.

To make matters even more complicated, virtually all plans were “drafts” that could be changed at any time by higher state and party officials. This constant intervention, called “petty tutelage,” was an irritant from the first to the last day of the Soviet system, but it was a key pillar of resource allocation.

Central planners prepared preliminary plans for a small percentage of the economy. These “draft plans” set off huge “battles for the plan” as ministries and enterprises scrambled to fulfill their production targets and meet their delivery quotas, all of which could be changed by party and local officials at any time.

As the commissar of heavy industry, Sergo Ordzhonokidze complained in 1930: “I guess they think we are idiots. They give us every day decree after decree, each one without foundation.” An unnamed defense contractor echoed the same complaint a half century later: “They stick their heads into every single issue. We told them they were wrong, but they would demand that things be done their way.”

The manager’s task was presumably simple: The plan was the law; the manager’s job was to fulfill the plan. But the plan kept on changing. Moreover, it consisted of multiple tasks, such as deliveries, outputs, and an assortment program. Throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union, gross output (measured in tons, meters, or freight/miles) was the most important plan indicator and the most malleable. Nail producers, whose output was judged by weight, would produce only heavy nails. Tractor manufacturers, struggling to meet their tractor quota, were caught delivering tractors without engines to their customers, who accepted them anyway for their spare parts. Shoe manufacturers, whose plans were based on quantity, produced one size and one color to the chagrin of customers. Other targets, such as cost reductions or new technologies, were ignored as counting less towards fulfillment of the plan.

Under scientific planning, supply had to roughly equal demand—and, given their distaste for the anarchy of markets, Soviet planners could not balance supply and demand by raising and lowering prices. Instead, they compiled “material balances” using primitive accounting to compare what materials were on hand with what were, in some sense, needed.

Soviet material-balance planning suffered from a number of deficiencies. For example, only a few balances could be compiled—in 1938, only 379 central balances were prepared in a market of millions of goods. And then, the balances were based on distorted information. Producers of goods in the balance lobbied for easy targets that concealed their capacity. Industrial users in the balance overstated what they needed to be sure of fulfilling their own plans.

Figuring out the proper balance was an exhausting exercise—and Soviet planners did not reinvent the wheel each year. Instead, they resorted to what came to be known as “planning from the achieved level,” which meant that each year’s plan was last year’s plus some minor adjustments.

By the early 1930s, supply agencies were distributing materials based on what they did in the previous year. A fast forward to the 1980s reveals the same practice in place: When a producer of welded materials wished to use thinner metals, the official answer was: “I don’t care about new technology. Just do it so that everything remains the same.” Material-balance planning was hostile to new products and new technologies because they required a reworking of an already fragile system of balances. American economists who were studying Soviet industrial production in the 1950s were astonished that the same machines were produced over decades without modification, something unheard of in the West.

Material-balance planning was the most fundamental weakness of the Soviet system. It froze the Soviet economy in place. Each year’s production was a replica of the previous year. A Soviet manager from 1985 would have felt quite at home in the same enterprise in 1935.

Beyond material-balance planning, soft budgets constituted another key defect. The economist Janos Kornai of Harvard University grew up in Hungary under planned socialism. His research, which draws on his first-hand experiences, focuses on the economic losses associated with soft budget constraints. As Kornai, if enterprises do not face the risk of bankruptcy, they will not seek out cost economies and other survival strategies. From day one of the Soviet system, loss-making enterprises understood they would be bailed out automatically, if not right away.

The primary cause of soft budgets was that the Soviet system was based on output plans. One enterprise’s output was another’s input. If output plans failed widely, the whole plan would fail. Taking an enterprise out of production due to insolvency was simply not an option.

In practice, loss-making enterprises paid for deliveries with IOUs. Unsettled IOUs would grow until they reached crisis proportions. Gosbank, the state bank, would then step in and make good on the unpaid bills by issuing money and creating what Soviet banking officials called a monetary overhang—more rubles chasing goods than there were goods to buy. In fact, Gosbank’s main business in the early years of the Soviet Union was organizing bailouts. When one was completed, it was time to start working on the next.

The problem with socialism isn’t a bad jockey—it’s the horse itself. The Soviet economic system suffered from pathologies that would ultimately doom it. Starting in the late 1960s, the USSR economy went into a long decline, which came to be called the “period of stagnation.” Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 on the pledge that he, as a radical reformer, would reverse the decline.

Gorbachev failed because the core of the Soviet planned system was rotten Despite his reform inclinations, he remained a believer in socialism. He was determined to save Soviet socialism by making it more like capitalism. In so doing, he created an economy that was neither planned nor a market—a chaotic free-for-all, which the Russian people regrettably associate to this day with that they came to call “wild capitalism.”  

Restoring the Rule of Law to the Protection of Classified Information

Former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy is a natural teacher. In his current NRO column, he gives a short course on the intent element of criminal statutes. All our criminal laws set forth the elements of an offense. The intent element of a given crime (generally, the intent to perform an act) is to be distinguished from motive (the reason for performing the act). Scott Johnson, Powerline

Restoring the Rule of Law to the Protection of Classified Information

Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

In the Clinton-email case, her intent, regardless of her motive, was clearly criminal. 

The Justice Department is reviving investigations involving Hillary Clinton’s emails and the degree to which the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary was put in the service of the Clinton Foundation. Good. Indeed, it is long overdue. It underscores a point we’ve tried to make repeatedly here: You don’t need a special counsel for this kind of thing; such investigations are what we have a Justice Department full of career prosecutors for. The perverse institution of the independent prosecutor should be shunned whenever possible — and its jurisdiction tightly confined in the rare necessary case. 

All that said, investigations involving the mishandling of classified information by officials with privileged access to it will go nowhere unless the Justice Department restores the rule of law: investigators and prosecutors applying congressional statutes, not rewriting them as dictated by their political masters.

As we have recounted (see, e.g., here), in April 2016, when the Clinton-emails investigation was in full swing but before it was anywhere close to completion, President Obama gave a nationally televised interview in which he made clear that he did not want criminal charges brought against his former secretary of state — and the already certain Democratic candidate to succeed him. Obama made two duplicitous points: Mrs. Clinton 1) had exhibited “carelessness,” but nothing worse, by using a private, non-secure email system to conduct State Department business, and 2) had not intended to endanger American national security when she stored and transmitted classified information on this system. 

The FBI has taken the heat because it ultimately applied these disingenuous guidelines publicly and without apology. But it was the political leadership of the executive branch that called the tune — which seems like news only because the media’s revulsion over presidential attempts to influence criminal investigations would await Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

Obama’s first point led to one of the great head-fakes in modern law-enforcement history — one that reverberates to this day. Using his bully pulpit, the president framed the Clinton case as one of negligence. The portrayal stuck: Incessantly, the Justice Department, the media, and eventually James Comey, then-director of the FBI, addressed the case in terms of Mrs. Clinton’s purported carelessness — a hardworking public official’s regrettable but forgivable inattention to detail. 

Even now, critics of Clinton and the FBI are in a lather over reports that, as Comey’s team drafted his remarks exonerating Clinton (notwithstanding that key witnesses, including Clinton herself, had not been interviewed), agent Peter Strzok changed the term “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” Substantively, these terms are indistinguishable. The emendation is said to be critical, though, because the statute applicable to Clinton’s conduct criminalizes “gross negligence.” If Comey had said the words “grossly negligent,” so the story goes, it would be the equivalent of pronouncing Clinton guilty. 

That is, it would be impossible to rationalize not charging her because, after all, this case was all about negligence. 

But it wasn’t. Never. 

The principal felony offense in Mrs. Clinton’s case is the willful retention or transmission of classified information. This was a straightforward case of criminal intent. Negligence was the fallback position — for a prosecutor, an “even if” theory, as in: “Even if you’re not convinced by our overwhelming evidence of Clinton’s willfully illegal retention and transmission of classified information, you can still comfortably find her guilty if you conclude that she was grossly negligent — which, as the judge will tell you in his instructions, simply means ‘extremely careless.’”

Mrs. Clinton’s criminal intent was so clear that its obfuscation also required Obama’s second point: Mrs. Clinton’s lack of intent to imperil the United States. Director Comey hammered his boss’s legerdemain again and again. And why not? After all, it was true — Clinton unquestionably had no desire to endanger our country. It’s always good to go with the truth . . . especially if you have the luxury of a Democrat-smitten media that won’t ask whether the truth you’ve highlighted is relevant to the matter under investigation.

Obama is a Harvard-trained lawyer. What he and those who echoed him executed was a not uncommon defense-attorney stratagem: The conflation of motive and criminal intent, two significantly distinct concepts. Motive is the reason why we do something; intent is our state of awareness in doing it — the understanding that, regardless of why we are doing something, we know we are doing it and we are doing it on purpose. To prove someone guilty of a crime, no motive need be established, but intent must always be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Espionage Act (section 793 of the federal penal code) prescribes a sliding scale of classified-information offenses, from the most to the least serious. Let’s put aside the red herring of the Clinton emails case, gross negligence — at subsection (f), the bottom of the scale.

The principal felony offense in Mrs. Clinton’s case is the willful retention or transmission of classified information — subsections (d) and (e) of the act. To prove this offense, the prosecutor must prove that the official 1) had possession of the information, 2) had “reason to believe [it] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” 3) transmitted it to an authorized person or place, or failed to deliver it on demand to an authorized government agency, and 4) acted willfully, which means acting intentionally and with an understanding that one’s actions are wrongful.

Two things to notice. First, there is no requirement to prove an intent to harm the United States. The statute calls only for an awareness that the information could be used to hurt the U.S. or benefit a foreign nation. To be guilty, the official does not need to want that to happen; she must merely be aware that it could happen. Of course, every government official who is privileged to hold a security clearance is well aware of this. Making the official aware of it and having the official expressly acknowledge her awareness are essential parts of the indoctrination that is a condition of getting the clearance. And thus every government official with a security clearance knows it is wrongful to transfer classified information to a person not authorized to have it or to a place where its storage is not authorized.

Second, you may be saying to yourself: “But ‘intent to harm the United States’ is significant, so it should be part of a classified-information offense.” That’s right, and that’s why it is a part of a classified-information offense — it just happens not to be the offense we’re talking about in Mrs. Clinton’s case.

If an official illegally transmits classified information “with an intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States,” then that official commits the more serious felony offense prescribed at the top of the Espionage Act’s scale — subsection (a). If someone had suggested charging Mrs. Clinton with this treasonous offense, then she, President Obama, and Director Comey would have been quite right to stress that she had no such intent. But no one suggested that. Rather, it was urged that she had transmitted classified information on purpose, but not with intent to do the country harm. That is less heinous than the treasonous offense. But it is still egregious. It is a crime that puts the lives of intelligence sources and the effectiveness of life-saving intelligence operations at risk.

That Clinton did not intend that any harm come to the United States does not make her innocent of willfully transmitting classified information to unauthorized persons or places. Moreover, it is a black-letter principle that a person’s innocence of Crime A is inadmissible to prove that the person has not committed Crime B. For example, the fact that I have not personally sold drugs has no bearing on whether I laundered drug money. And the fact that Mrs. Clinton did not intend that any harm come to the United States does not make her innocent of willfully transmitting classified information to unauthorized persons or places, or of retaining it when she left the government and when the State Department finally requested that she surrender the government records in her possession.

Motive is different from intent, but it is easy even for lawyers to confound the two. Unless a criminal statute explicitly makes motive a part of the offense, there is no requirement that it be proved. Yet we can’t say that motive is completely irrelevant because the prosecutor is always permitted to offer motive evidence. This is not because a motive must be established; it is because intent must be established, and a person who has a motive is likely to have acted intentionally rather than mistakenly. Motive evidence is thus admissible because it helps prove intent. But that does not turn intent into motive, and it does not mean a particular motive, such as wanting to hurt the country, must be proved before we can find that someone who illegally transferred classified information acted intentionally, cognizant that what she was doing was wrong.

As for Mrs. Clinton’s motives, no sensible person believes she wanted to imperil the country; many, however, justifiably believe she put her own interests ahead of the potential that the country could be threatened. I have always believed her motive in setting up a private communications network for her government work was twofold: to conceal the links between State Department business and Clinton Foundation business; and, as she was contemplating a presidential bid, to insulate her communications from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, congressional oversight, and other government-transparency measures.

Regardless of whether my motive theory is sound, however, the evidence that Clinton willfully mishandled classified information is mountainous.

Before she was ever secretary of state, Clinton lived and worked in a White House where classified-information protocols were observed. She had to apply these protocols for years as a senator whose committee assignments were intelligence-intensive. Before becoming secretary of state, she was indoctrinated in the handling of classified information and signed documentation attesting that she had read and understood the relevant executive orders about intelligence classification and handling.

Clinton well understood that the position of secretary of state involved immersion in classified information. She wrote in her memoir about the extraordinary steps she was required to take to safeguard classified information. Given the nature of her responsibilities for foreign relations and national security, her decision to conduct all her government business on a private server system made it inevitable that classified information would be transmitted in and stored on the private system. There is no possibility that she did not know this. The private system she set up was in violation of government and State Department regulations. Her loyal staff fought efforts to bring her into the government email system – even though she forced the resignation of an ambassador over, among other things, his conducting of government business over an unauthorized private email system.

When the request was made that Clinton surrender her emails to the State Department, she turned them over to her own lawyers and subordinates who did not have the security clearances required for access to the information. She destroyed tens of thousands of emails, even though they were under subpoena, so that they could not be reviewed by the State Department or the FBI. Of the 30,000 she deigned to surrender to the State Department, over 2,000 contained classified information, some of it among the nation’s most highly classified national-defense secrets. And she serially lied in her public statements about her emails, in congressional testimony (in which she brazenly claimed to have turned over all work-related email to the State Department, and that her lawyers had carefully reviewed every email before designating which should be surrendered and which withheld), and in her FBI interview (in which she pretended not to know what the ubiquitous “[C]” designation — for confidential — in classified documents meant).

Any prosecutor who understood there was no need to prove intent to harm the United States would be delighted to take that case to the jury — especially once the prosecutor realized he’d get to tell the jury: “Even if you suspend disbelief and buy the defense argument that she didn’t mean to horde and transmit classified information, you must still find her guilty if you conclude she was grossly negligent — as in ‘extremely careless.’”

The Trump administration and its Justice Department say they want to stop rampant leaking by government officials. It won’t stop absent a reversal of the last administration’s fiction that the prosecutor must establish a motive to harm the United States. The law does not require it. The rule of law requires correcting it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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