If California is So Totally Awesome, Why Are So Many Residents Leaving?

The ruling class of elite politicians, media and oligarchs are so far removed from the people, most have no idea that or why so many California residents are leaving the state for friendlier pastures, nor do they seem to care. At one Senate hearing in May, Sen. Hannah Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) described herself, as a “reluctant landlord,” and said, “I am frankly tired of hearing how people in the state of California are leaving.”  Jackson said when people are stuck in the on legendary traffic on the 405 in Los Angeles, or the 101 in Santa Barbara County, “people aren’t leaving the state. They are going from place to place.”

“It’s a fiction we keep hearing about all of these people leaving California,” Jackson said. “We’ve still got more than enough to take care of the economy and keep it going in a robust fashion.”

California Globe was the only media outlet to report Jackson’s astoundingly out-of-touch comments.

The Line Between Journalism and Political Activism Has Become Blurred

Is this the beginning of the end of journalism? The California Capitol Press Corps has so dramatically diminished in size over the last decade, that rarely do reporters cover important legislative committee hearings, other than to occasionally watch them on the Capitol closed circuit TV from the comfort of their desks in a far away office. Most of the media camped out at the Capitol are local Sacramento television stations and their camera crews. Media desks assigned to media in the Assembly Chambers sit empty, as do the media bays, most days.

So many former television, radio and print reporters left their media jobs or were downsized, only to join state government in search of a stable job, health benefits and a generous pension. The majority of these media pros found jobs in Democrat lawmakers offices. Others were hired as Public Information Officers for state agencies.

How can a journalist hold government agencies and politicians accountable if he’s got his eye on a job working for the politician or government agency?

The line between journalism and political activism has become blurred.

Most of the media who still cover the California Legislature and Governor do so without objectivity. Entire policy issues are ignored or glossed over if they might show lawmakers or the governor in a negative light.

Some are acting as mere government functionaries. This could explain how the American media have largely abandoned the mission “to seek the truth and report it,” and “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,” as the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states.

In California’s capitol, I researched and counted more than 40 former news reporters, television reporters and radio newscasters who work inside the state Capitol or for a state agency back in 2013. Today it’s a much larger number.

Diminished Citizen Representation

Capitol Assembly members each represent more than 500,000; Senators represent more than one million constituents. They don’t know you, your family, your neighbors or what your gripes are. And most like it that way.

As California doubled its population in the last 30 years fro 20 million to nearly 40 million residents, the 40 State Senators and 80 Assembly members has stayed static. While California gained more members of Congress, the California Legislature did not expand.

New Jersey also has 40 State Senators and 80 Assembly members. The Garden State has 8.9 million residents.

The Gentrification of California

California’s wealthy are becoming wealthier, while the middle class, working class, and lower income families are more economically diametric.

City Journal reports that very year, the state falls roughly 100,000 units short of what it needs to keep up with the severe housing shortage. The Legislature continues to pass rent control measures, despite voters rejecting a proposition recently.

Those in the State Illegally

While many illegal immigrants are self-deporting back home, in California they aren’t. Imagine how much more housing would be available for actual citizens if those here illegally were not. It is almost miraculous that illegal aliens manage to find housing, when the state’s hundreds of thousands homeless vagrants cannot – according to lawmakers, who have doubled down their hair brain claim that the homeless explosion is only an affordable housing problem.

The reality is California has millions of illegal immigrants competing for scarce affordable housing with our legal poorest citizens. The tragic scenario is the state’s lawmakers support and provide more benefits for illegal immigrants than its citizens.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center in 2017 showed just how much illegal immigrants have been embedded into the culture and economy of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported. “Woven, often seamlessly, into dozens of cities’ infrastructures, they have become a workforce and community that makes up much of the fabric of Southern California.”

Benefits the state and local governments provide including welfare, and food stamps (EBT), subsidized housing, Covered California healthcare (approved by the CA Legislature), public education, a California drivers license,  access to free legal assistance with immigration lawyers, protection from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s easy to see the tangled web government has created to ensure a permanent poverty class of cheaper labor in California while poor California citizens suffer.

Loss of Law and Order

Passage of Gov. Jerry Brown’s A.B. 109 “realigned” California’s overcrowded prison system, shifting responsibility of repeat, newly classified “nonviolent” offenders from state prisons to county jails. Those released were assigned county probation officers rather than state parole officers. Many of those newly “non-violent” criminals let out of county jails are living on California streets, on parkways, rivers, and canals, and using the streets as their toilets.

Proposition 47, titled The Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act, reduced a host of felonies to misdemeanors, including drug crimes, date rape, and all thefts under $950, even for repeat offenders who steal every day.

Proposition 57, titled Juvenile Criminal Proceedings and Sentencing, was billed to the public as criminal justice reform, allowing early release for “non-violent offenders,” but the initiative not only failed to define who qualified as a “non-violent offender,” numerous heinous crimes qualified as “non-violent” under Prop. 57.

These serious changes lead to hundreds of thousands of drug addicted “homeless” vagrants living on our streets, stealing anything that isn’t nailed down on private property to support their drug habits, and thieving up to $950 a day of goods from retail stores. Many of these “homeless” have serious mental illness, are violent (see video below) and dangerous, and desperately need treatment and incarceration in many cases.

Death Penalty Reprieve

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in March putting a moratorium on the executions of the inmates currently incarcerated in California’s death row, sparing the lives of murderers and rapists. Twenty-four of those on death row have exhausted their appeals, and were eligible for execution under Newsom’s administration. Marc Klaas, the father of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was brutally raped and murdered in 1993 by Richard Allen Davis, said it was even worse than just re-victimization.

Theft of Taxes

Through an Executive Order, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently redirected gas tax money to fund railway systems and other projects. The gas tax revenue, first passed in a bill by the Legislature, survived a ballot initiative to overturn the tax, would have repaired and upgraded the state’s broken highways and roads, and bridges.

Californians pay the highest gas prices in the nation, most of which is taxes.

What is disappearing faster than any state, is California’s middle class. California’s homeownership rates now rank among the lowest in the nation and Los Angeles-Orange County suffers the lowest level of homeownership of any major region.

Where did that middle class go?  Some simply became poorer.  Others have left to find jobs in states without income taxes like Texas, Washington, Florida, and states with low income taxes Nevada and Arizona. More than 5 million Californians have moved out of the state in the past decade. Statistics for 2017 show more than 140,000 Californians left.

Current real estate records show nearly 700,000 moved out of California last year.

And businesses are leaving just as fast.

Residents have had it. Some are afraid. Some are angry. And every day on social media people post their plans to move, or post that they have already moved. And these are the people who work, they own small businesses, and some have nice pensions which they now vow they will never spend in California.

NBCLA Channel 4 Report: “Murders on the Rise”