On Friday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report, original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael noted three seemingly unrelated stories in the news today to illustrate how the Left is effectively dominating critical sectors of life across across the country.
TRANSCRIPT
Crom Carmichael:
Michael, like so many of my recent commentaries, it’s kind of a theme – pulling from a bunch of different stories on seemingly unrelated topics.
But this is a headline from the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman, “Has the Bay Area Hit Bottom?” and what it goes on to point out is just how terrible things are in San Francisco and in Oakland.
And there’s one there’s one quote in here. It’s by Mr. Chachas acquired Gump’s department stores following a chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018. And here’s what he wrote – and it was published in the local paper there.
San Francisco now suffers from a tyranny of the minority behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.
The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating had been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks to openly distribute and use illegal drugs to harass the public and defile the city streets.
Such abject disregard for civilized conduct makes San Francisco unlivable for its residents, unsafe for its employees and unwelcoming to visitors from around the world.
Now, you’d think that he would get a lot of blow back because that’s very politically incorrect and not very woke at all.
Well, it turns out that he got a tremendous number of kudos and there was great support for what he said. But here’s my question. Will the mayor of San Francisco change anything? I think not. Will the governor of California, Gavin Newsom? This was the greatest city in his state.
Now as this citizen in San Francisco points out, it’s falling apart and it’s unlivable.
Will Gavin Newsom change anything? No.
Which causes me to wonder, you know, politically – you had Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, who was deemed to be so terrible as mayor that she couldn’t even win her own primary in running for reelection, and they ended up picking somebody even worse.
And so, I’m trying to figure out when they, the author here, James Freeman, is actually quite hopeful that San Francisco is hitting bottom and that they’ll turn around. And I haven’t seen any evidence in anyplace else of that happening.
The inequity in public school fundings – here’s another story – where states across the country, the blue states in particular, underfund charter schools to the extent that they exist at all compared to the regular schools.
And yet the charter schools show tremendous success compared to the government-run schools or the ones that are run by the unions – let’s put it that way.
But yet the officials in seeing, now, the clear evidence that charter schools help lower income kids and government-run schools don’t, they don’t do anything about it. It won’t change a thing.
Here’s a story, “Hawaiian Electric knew of the wildfire wildfire threats.”
Hawaiian Electric is the big utility company in Hawaii. There’s now more and more evidence that shows that it was a spark or sparks from the utilities’ power lines that caused the fires. But yet they’ve had years of warnings and they’ve actually had wildfires that didn’t grow to the size of these that gave them warnings.
Quoting from the story here, “Nearly four years later, the company has completed little such work” talking about improvements on safety between 2019 and 2022. The utility company invested less than $245,000 on wildfire specific projects, but where did they invest a tremendous amounts of money? Green energy.
And so the Left in Hawaii decided to ignore the clear warnings that a wildfire of this magnitude could very easily happen. And then you have ‘Bidenomics’ and the new political subsidy economy. And what this article points out in the Wall Street Journal is that, is that Bidenomics is really spending enormous – trillions – of dollars on very specific industries and very specific topics, all to increase the power and the size of unions in our country, and that is to the detriment of everyone else.
So there’s about 20 percent to 25 percent of our population that is getting tremendous, short-term benefits to the long-term detriment of not only them, but also to all those who are not participating in the subsidies. What we have here is Biden just literally thinks, and the Democrats believe, that if they spend enough money and they can buy enough votes to win another election, and they can consolidate power even further.
And whether or not those things are true or not, frankly, I have no idea. But I look at Chicago and its inability to correct its own course, its own voters. I look at San Francisco and the decline of that city is amazing in speed. I look at the whole state of California that is becoming less and less livable as a state, even though it has some of the greatest geographic advantages in the world.
And then I look at our own national economy. You see the stock market this week has not done particularly well – I don’t generally look at the stock market in the short term, but there are a lot of cracks in our own economy.
You have long-term interest rates – while the rate of inflation seems to be going down, long-term interest rates continue to go up. And that means that the market is saying that this decline in inflation is, in fact, going to be transitory and that we are likely going have to live with higher rates of inflation due to this massive amount of government spending that is inappropriately targeted to very special interests and crowding out regular investments that drive the market to get to the kind of improvements and prosperity that we’re accustomed to.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio or Spotify.
Photo “Hawaii Fire Help” by FEMA.
