CA Gov. Jerry Brown’s Failed Shadow Presidency
While California drowns in debt, its public schools are failing and ranked with some of the lowest reading scores in the country, criminals are being let out of prison and jails and crime is spiking, water is cut off to our farmers, illegal aliens and “refugees” are arriving in droves as Democrats are trying to pass legislation making California a sanctuary state, one dam we know of may still blow apart (who knows about the rest…), bridges are falling down, highways are crumbling, and Democrats flout federal election laws by allowing millions of illegals to vote, Jerry and his corrupt Democrats in the statehouse (and feckless Republicans) are introducing bills at lightning speed to add regulations, massive tax increases, more gun control, restricting more freedoms, all while prattling on about climate change and nuclear war.
My analogy: Our house is falling down, the roof is leaking, the power and water has been turned off, the foundation is leaning, and Democrats want to borrow money at a high interest rate to put in a new swimming pool.
Jerry Brown, California’s notoriously off-beat, liberal four-term governor, recently indulged adoring reporters at a press conference by saying he wouldn’t rule out running for President. Again.
Brown has served as governor of California from 1975 to 1983, and then again from 2011 to present.
Running for the Democratic nomination for President is something he’s done three times: in the 1976, 1980 and 1992 elections. Many speculated he would throw his hat into the ring during the 2016 presidential campaign (including me), but he instead eventually endorsed Hillary Clinton. And when Trump beat Clinton, Jerry Brown vowed to fight Trump and the administration on every policy.
Brown threatened to build a wall around California. “If Trump were ever elected, we’d have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country,” Brown told a group of labor organizers, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Brown also said the country has benefited from the influx of illegal aliens.
“Some of these old white guys ought to recognize that the whole pension system would collapse if we didn’t have a bunch of young people coming into this country and into this state,” Brown said.
Last December, Brown said California would put up “its own damn satellites” if Trump cuts funding for certain space projects.
And While Trump has been unraveling the Obama administrations’ business-killing climate change regulations and executive orders, Brown has been downright defiant, promising to adopt every EPA policy the Trump administration overturns.
President Trump announced in June that the United States would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. He said his decision was “a reassertion of America’s sovereignty”, and he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” As President Trump and other world leaders met in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit, Gov. Jerry Brown defiantly announced in a video to the Hamburg Climate conference that Trump does not speak for most Americans when it comes to dealing with environmental concerns.
And then Brown shamelessly traveled to China, met with President Xi Jinping (at the governor’s request), to discuss a more commanding role for China in fighting climate change.
Brown announced his own climate summit, to be held this month in San Francisco.
“It’s brazen on several levels,” from “stepping on the president’s trip” to “thinking he speaks for the American people,” said Bill Whalen, a longtime GOP strategist and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The San Francisco summit is not likely to accomplish much, Whalen said, besides gathering people to “collectively thumb their nose at the American president.”
It’s as if Jerry Brown is operating as a shadow President, negotiating international climate change policy with foreign leaders. But wait… isn’t Jerry the governor of one state within the 50 United States?
Brown has been a vocal critique of President Trump on nearly every issue, including Trump’s State of the State speech earlier this year, specifically targeting Trump’s immigration policies and defending climate science. This constant disparagement of President Trump only serves as a reminder that Jerry Brown has three Presidential run losses to Trump’s big win, and makes Brown look petty and scornful.
And now Brown announced he is heading to Russia to push climate change with regional and world leaders. Brown will be attending the Eastern Economic Forum and said it will be “an occasion to promote investment and strengthen the state’s commitment to decarbonizing the economy,” the Sacramento Bee reported.
It’s as if Gov. Jerry Brown thinks chatting up world leaders about climate change will undermine Donald Trump.
The Devious Gov. Brown: Obstructionist in Chief
The man who desperately wants to be President – even if he has to play shadow President – is the great force behind the decline of California.
Jerry Brown “is mulling ways to prevent the end of the world,” according to the SacBee. “I think the world is getting closer to the brink of destruction,” Gov. Brown said, sounding like a Mad Scientist. “It’s bad. And there is goofing off on a bunch of sidebar activity, in my opinion. What we have to do is everything possible to at least start talking.”
In an attempt to lock in environmental protections before President-Elect Donald Trump took office, Brown sent a letter to then-President Obama saying that allowing any new oil and gas drilling would be detrimental to climate change goals and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
President Barack Obama released a plan in November 2016 to ban any new drilling off the coasts of California, Oregon or Washington until 2022.
A six-year ban on oil and gas drilling wasn’t enough for Gov. Jerry Brown, whose ploy was another in a long line of maneuvers to set California apart from the rest of the country on climate change policy, and to end-run Trump, who announced prior to taking office plans roll back environmental policy at the Environmental Protections Agency.
Gov. Brown and fellow state legislative Democrats have operated a sort of shadow government in California when it comes to climate change laws and policy. And in doing so, are continuing to preempt President Trump. Getting Obama to sign a permanent ban on oil and gas exploration in California was a devious obstructionist move, but not one that can’t be overturned.
The Real State of the State
California’s unemployment insurance system is stuck in a deep hole, with the state paying out about $5.5 billion a year in jobless benefits. I have been reporting for years about the $10 billion the State borrowed from the federal government to cover the payments.
Jerry’s High Speed Train project, doomed from the beginning as nothing more than a cash cow for cronies, has been besieged with problems from the beginning, including many legal troubles, is his Jonah. But he stubbornly refuses to give it up, wasting millions of taxpayers’ funds with nothing to show for it. And his misguided Delta Tunnels project isn’t any better. Both projects are bold reminders that todays Democrats are incompetent leaders, and even worse project managers.
Destroy the middle class in America, and Socialism takes over—economic growth is killed, people turn on each other, free speech is attacked, the government grows and becomes more tyrannical, and individuals are not treated equally under the law. Hmm, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
And, subsidies grow as it becomes more “profitable” not to work.
The magical California job creation engine has shifted from a healthy manufacturing economy, to a service economy—from high-paying jobs with benefits and growth potential, to low-wage, nowhere minimum wage jobs.
Rather than creating policies to make California a healthy business state once again to incentivize businesses, Jerry Brown and California Democrats have instead created a permanent poverty class, by only focusing on low-paying jobs, treating the symptoms instead of curing the disease. Every increase in the state’s minimum wage serves only to boost job creation in Arizona, Texas and Nevada.
Add California regulations and highest in the nation taxes into the mix, and it’s goodbye ‘California Dreamin’ and hello Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Monroe, Louisiana, or Albany, Georgia, the poorest cities in America, according to 24/7 Wall Street.
In 2016 I wrote: State leaders could have used the recession as a starting point to implement measures to pay down the debt, and end the abusive budgeting tricks and games. Instead, California has an ongoing exodus of businesses and wealthy individuals, coupled with a growing illegal immigrant class—a recipe for disaster.
Californians, gird your loins in anticipation of the tax onslaught.
And Governor Moonbeam, in his Shadow Presidency, is mulling ways to prevent the end of the world.
