While California’s raging wildfires have sent smoke billowing as far away as Kansas, the Biden-Harris ticket would extend its political power to the Midwest, too. California politicians have been looting middle America and the placement of Kamala Harris as the shadow president would pick midwesterners’ pockets even further.
California already controls the House of Representatives through Nancy Pelosi as its Speaker. The San Francisco-based Pelosi effectively holds the purse strings for our entire Nation and can shut down the government until she gets what she wants.
On the other side of the Capitol, both California Senators sit on the powerful Judiciary Committee, where they brutally harangued Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation in 2018. Dianne Feinstein is the oldest sitting U.S. Senator and one of its most influential members.
Electing the Biden-Harris ticket would accomplish a trifecta by placing a liberal California politician in the White House, too. Given Joe Biden’s declining capacity, it would effectively put the fringe Leftists who run the San Francisco-based Big Tech industry in charge of the entire nation.
Ouch to the Midwest if this happens. Already California politicians have been transferring wealth and jobs away from the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. The shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic boosted Big Tech by forcing people to rely more on the internet, while hurting auto manufacturers who had to close their factories and suffer declines in sales.
Radical environmentalists would extend their reach if Democrats win in November, and they have already been forcing the transfer of billions from the heartland to California. Biased global warming regulations, which penalize some pollution in favor of others, have caused Detroit automakers to pay billions to the electric car maker Tesla as regulatory credits.
California is home to the wealthiest corporations in the world, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and now Tesla, whose stock market value is higher than all the other automakers combined. Michigan’s auto industry should not be compelled to transfer billions of dollars to Tesla based on misguided regulations about climate change.
The batteries required for electric cars cause as much pollution as traditional cars do, but with different toxins. Batteries require rare metals which are mined in ways detrimental to the environment, and both the manufacturing and disposal of batteries pollute our scarce water supplies more than traditional cars do.
West Virginia voters have gotten the message about how radical environmentalists cost them jobs, and Trump carried that formerly Democrat state by a whopping 42% in 2016. Ohio voters, too, have awakened to the harm caused by the liberal elite to their economy, and Trump carried it by 8% last time.
Next door, Pennsylvania faces many of the same energy issues as West Virginia and Ohio. A Chamber of Commerce study estimates that 609,000 jobs in Pennsylvania depend on fracking, and that it would increase the cost of living there by $4,654 annually if fracking were prohibited, as Kamala Harris promised last year.
Joe Biden, or “Hiden” as Trump calls him for hiding out for months in his home during the coronavirus pandemic, was born and raised in Pennsylvania and enjoys a few percentage-points advantage based on that. But the economic harm to be caused by stopping Pennsylvania’s burgeoning energy industry could become a 10-point issue on Election Day.
Another way Californians tax the Midwest is through litigation, where liberals forum-shop to file in federal court in San Francisco in order to obtain a Democrat-appointed judge. That is what plaintiffs’ attorneys have done in looting the 120-year-old midwestern company Monsanto, now owned by Bayer.
The lawsuits over Roundup, Monsanto’s effective weed killer used widely by farmers and homeowners, are taking more than $12 billion from workers and shareholders located predominantly outside the jurisdiction of California’s courts. That money enriches liberal attorneys, and some of it goes into politics to defeat Republican candidates for office.
When Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General, she aggressively harassed out-of-state companies to force them to make enormous payments for having made the mistake of selling products in the liberal state. In 2016, she shook down Volkswagen for a shocking sum of $14.7 billion. She then allocated $2.7 billion of that to “a trust fund for environmental mitigation projects,” which finances environmentalist groups to look for the next target to shake down.
Many of those targets are midwestern companies that provide much-needed manufacturing jobs in the heartland. President Trump has added more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs to our economy after Obama-Biden caused hundreds of thousands of such jobs to be lost, which Biden defiantly said would never come back.
On Monday, the S&P 500 Index declined to include the California company Tesla, which sent its stock spiraling downward. California environmentalists, through Biden-Harris, are likewise not worthy of controlling the White House.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
