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One party areas are notoriously corrupt. And that goes for both parties. When you don’t have checks and balances, then power is routinely abused and corruption festers. The New York Times has a new report on how California became the nation’s ground zero for political corruption.
Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
What do all those places have in common?
Over the last ten years, California solidified its status as a one-party state where Republicans hardly exist.
But political analysts say the Democrats’ present lock on political power leaves little opportunity for Republicans to effectively raise the issue of corruption as a campaign issue.
“When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power, there’s no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines,” said Dan Schnur, a former head of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a former Republican who is now an independent.
The last Republican governor (such as he was) ended his term a little over a decade ago. The same incestuous band of Democrats run the place and even the Times is almost willing to say it.
A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.
The local media has always been irrelevant. LA is not a newspaper town. Local TV news was a joke even before TV died. And the LA Times is now a shill for a radical billionaire’s daughter.
The Democratic supermajority is an issue and beyond that it’s a political machine that uses ballot harvesting and community organizing to render elections virtually irrelevant.
No one seriously believes that Karen Bass legitimately won the mayoral election with that last-minute flood of ballots. Polls repeatedly show lefty politicians underwater only to have them win elections with a flood of votes from nowhere. And so people rarely bother to vote. (The California GOP deserves some of the blame for the sheer ineptitude of its operations. Right now there’s a Senate race in which the Republican candidate, despite being a popular local celeb, hardly shows up anywhere.)
Large foreign populations that make up ghost districts and sign whatever they’re told has turned parts of California into banana republics. And the Times comes close to saying it.
What happened in Los Angeles had been playing out on a smaller scale for years in the small industrial cities of Los Angeles County that have been described as a “corridor of corruption”: South Gate, Bell, Lynwood and Vernon, among others, where civic leaders were prosecuted for taking bribes or tapping into city funds.
“You have large immigrant populations, largely marginalized communities that do not have the resources to watch their politicians closely,” said Mr. Estrada, the U.S. attorney, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala. “I think you have a pretty unique cauldron of factors in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area that allow for these things to happen.”
People who don’t speak the language, have no real understanding of politics, and take part in bloc voting are going to breed corruption like a plague.
But that’s the ‘diversity’ championed by the party overseeing the corruption. This is Kamala’s California. Or should that be Kalifornia?
Excellent coverage. One thing to emphasize is the dumbing down of the population, who don’t even realize what the corrupt practices are. And the general ignorance of the law, even by politicians. Out of area people don’t realize how bad it is, since the corruption is generally covered only in the local press, and generally covered very badly, or not at all Then there is the widespread DEI hiring where incompetent grifters are hired for high positions, and wreck the organization involved, while driving out the good and competent employees. And generally press and politicians are afraid of criticizing DEI hiring, or too delusional to realize DEI hiring is a disaster.
How different California was when Ronald Reagan was the Governor, and then the President. My gosh see the Reagan movie and see how far we have fallen, and how communism is destroying the USA. What an excellent movie. The best in a Decade with great Actors.. Takes one back to better, more prosperous times, peace through strength, and a leader with guts and determination.
I’ll have to watch that. I’ve always liked Dennis Quaid.
Kamalafornia is the historically (and hysterically) significant place where she got her career start (referring to turning fries at McDonalds). She then made a nsme for herself in REFUSING to prosecute child molestors and pedophiles in San Francisco.. Her values never changed since then, which is why she is the ding dong socialist mentally-challenged fraud she is today.
When Obama was in office I remember living in a town in CA where a result in a local election was disqualified. I think it was for mayor. I don’t remember any fuss made about it. It was in a semi out-of-the-way kind of place but with enough local media that I could search out a couple of local articles on it. But even after doing that I couldn’t quite understand what the problem had been.
But I do remember some quotes though toward the end of one of the articles by someone speaking on behalf of the county about how certain residents who were of a particular ethnicity constituted a significant percentage of the local population but had yet to have anyone representing them in the office for which the election result had been ruled against. I can’t speculate about it too much. It was suspicious enough at the time for me to read a couple of local articles about it, but I soon lost interest in it. I can’t even say what happened with it later.
Maybe there was a genuine problem with election and I just didn’t understand the technicalities of it, but it’s maddening regardless since what the person quoted in the article characterized as an unfairness caused by some kind of race based demographic injustice was really just what everyone living in places like that knows is simply varying levels of voluntary voter participation and/or eligibility.
The whole purpose of let’s destruction of law and order is for the criminals and terrorists to take over.
Sad. L.A. used to be a rather fun place, or, at least, parts of it were, in the 70s. The freeway shootings in the 80s were a sign that things were deteriorating, and you could not pay me to live there now.
No one sings California Here We Come rge trouble is our states been taken over by the Dopeheads and their decedents from the 70’s