Will Gavin Newsom Become the New “Teflon” Politician?

When reality hit the Democratic Party and its ruling-class allies the day after the election, one Democrat must have been relieved: California governor Gavin Newsom. The Kamala Harris loss not only ends her political career—at least at the presidential level—but also clears the way for Newsom to pursue the White House himself.

A Harris victory would have delayed Newsom’s quest for eight years, but now he can start laying the groundwork now for a run in 2028. Newsom will spend the next two years in office before becoming a full-time candidate, and, given the constitutional limit on two terms, the Republicans won’t have the advantage (or the weight) of incumbency and will likely present a candidate with less name recognition than Newsom possesses.

The New York Times already has jumped in feet-first in its “Style” section with a hagiographic portrayal of Newsom, hair gel and all. The writer breathlessly wrote:

Last year, he debated Ron DeSantis on that network, landing rhetorical jabs like “You’re nothing but a bully.” The appearances have burnished his reputation as someone who saunters into the conservative lion’s den and comes out with his slicked hair unruffled.

His first post-election “heroic” move was to call for a special session of the California legislature:

…to protect “California values” in preparation for former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Less than 36 hours after Trump’s resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the California governor — a prominent opponent of the former president during his first term — called to bolster the state’s legal resources with the aim of protecting reproductive healthcare, climate policies and immigrant communities in California.

One might think that we are looking at something that is light years away, politically speaking, but in the world of presidential ambition, successful candidates spend years scheming to reach that office. John F. Kennedy’s father was planning the political careers of his sons long before they reached full adulthood, Ronald Reagan coveted the presidency more than 10 years before he was elected in 1980, and Jimmy Carter and his advisers quietly launched their quest long before the Watergate scandal gave him a major opening.

In presidential politics, four years is tomorrow and no doubt Newsom and those surrounding him already are at work. However, as Harris has found out, what constitutes success in California politics might prove a liability elsewhere, and that is especially the case regarding the state’s draconian policies on energy and climate change.

One imagines that most people believe California to be a weird and exotic place on the nation’s west coast that is an expensive place to live but has little relevance in their own lives. Sure, the state has stringent environmental laws, but the effects are limited to California, or one might think. However, California’s energy and climate policies affect nearly everyone in this country.

The election of Donald Trump brings an opponent of California’s policies to the White House, where he is:

…expected to try to blow up California’s climate policies, which have set the pace for the rest of the nation and the world. The state is requiring about three-quarters of new trucks sold there after 2035 to be zero emissions. And in a request that is pending, California wants permission from the Biden administration to enact one of the most ambitious climate rules of any nation: a ban on the sale of new gas-powered passenger vehicles in the state after 2035.

Both rules are far tougher than federal policy and could have influence beyond the United States, given California’s standing as the world’s fifth-largest economy. China and the European Union have already adopted parts of California’s car and truck tailpipe emissions reduction programs.

The Democratic-controlled state legislature has also passed a first-in-the-nation law requiring major companies to disclose their greenhouse emissions. And it has strengthened the authority of local governments to shut down oil and gas projects in their communities. Next month, Californians will be asked to approve a ballot measure to create a $10 billion “climate bond” to pay for climate and environmental projects.

While the New York Times writes approvingly of California’s policies, in reality they will be disastrous for the rest of the country if put into place. In 2023, the California legislature passed a law aimed at outlawing all internal combustion engines in trucks within a decade, a law so draconian that 19 state attorneys general filed suit in federal court to block it. The impact this law would have on the trucking industry would be enormous, especially given how much freight is carried overland on trucks and how inadequate electric vehicles would be to carry it:

Electric trucks suffer major disadvantages when compared to diesel trucks. Diesel trucks can travel about 1200 miles after filling the tank in 15 minutes. The range of electric trucks is about 150-330 miles and recharging may take hours, even on a high-speed charger.

Electric truck cabs cost two to three times as much as diesel cabs, an incremental cost of as much as $300,000 per truck. Electric cabs also weigh about 10,000 pounds more than comparable diesel versions. This can reduce net freight carried by as much as 20 percent.

Part of the problem is that California’s environmental standards often become the precursors to standards for the entire country, but thanks to the Jones Act, California policy has a disproportionate effect upon the lives of others. Because of California’s proximity to Asia (and especially China), it is a natural place for container ships coming from Asia to bring goods imported into the US, and at the present time, about 40 percent of all US imports come through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Because of the Jones Act, those foreign-owned ships cannot take goods to any other US port unless they stop at a foreign port that is some distance away. Thus, they cannot take some goods to California and then sail to the US east coast and take goods there. The effect of this law is that a huge amount of imported goods going elsewhere in the US must be transported by truck or rail through California, and given the strict regulations for transfer trucks, carrying goods through that state is very expensive.

Given that the laws governing transfer trucks will be even more stringent, that only can raise costs—unless the Jones Act is repealed, which is highly unlikely, given its almost religious support by Democrats and labor unions, despite the hardships it causes. Because Newsom supports the draconian legislation regulating trucks in California, he also is playing a direct role in California being a transportation bottleneck for the rest of the country, a situation that will only become worse in the next four years.

To writers from the New York Times, economic crises caused by things like environmental regulations simply don’t happen, or if they do, the fault lies with capitalism. However, if California can proceed with radical restrictions on transporting goods, there can be no spinning the inevitable results. They will mean higher prices, empty shelves, and more hardships for those who are not wealthy. Newsom’s policies will at least be partly to blame, but will voters connect the dots, especially since journalists won’t?

Four decades ago, a former governor from California occupied the White House. Because the media and their governmental allies could not pin any scandals on Ronald Reagan, they derisively called him the “Teflon President.” Given the fawning coverage that Newsom receives in the media, the fact that California has the nation’s highest poverty rates, ruinous environmental laws, and one of the nation’s highest net out-migration rates, one would think that the most prominent political architect of these woes would at least pay something akin to a political price.

But think again. If there ever has been a “Teflon” politician, it is Gavin Newsom. Be prepared to see numerous fawning pieces from mainstream media outlets that present him as a demigod. They are coming.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30