Turn left for Chaos.

I love evidence and there is plenty evidence, huge piles of evidence, that says that following the “leadership” of the left will only lead to chaos.

I’m a onetime Democrat but now a pretty moderate conservative Republican. I can already hear a lot of teeth gnashing just from saying that. But bear with me, if you have the guts to do so, as I explain, beyond a doubt why my opening statement is true.

Here are some truisms from the business world as a backdrop: When one looks at a business, either to work there, invest, or perhaps even buy, one should pay close attention to that businesses vital signs. Makes sense, right? How does it run? How are its finances? What is the record of its performance? What does its prospectus look like? Pretty obvious stuff, because if these things, and many more, don’t “look right” you’re probably best to find another company. (Or if you think it is a great company with just poor management or leadership, then buy it and fire all the “leaders” and put in people that can make it work. But that’s a different story.)

The vital signs of a company are a reflection of the decisions that the leadership of that company has made over time. Often decisions made years or even decades before will have a profound impact on the company’s vitality today, and viability going forward into the future. Those are just a few of the rules of life. There are plenty of other examples of how poor decisions made over long periods of time lead to bad things. (Too many cheeseburgers and heart health, for example.) Hopefully you get the analogy.

Anyway, now let’s look at our country through that same aperture. Let’s start with San Francisco; though there are any number of cities that would show the same reality I live near San Francisco and I have a personal connection to it.

Sadly, San Francisco is a mess. Their crime stats are through the roof. Homelessness is rampant. Drug addicts are everywhere. The infrastructure is crumbling. The cost of living is stupidly high. Law enforcement organizations are becoming endangered species.

But, just so you don’t think I abandoned my aforementioned love of evidence, here are some San Francisco stats for you from their own website sfgov.org.

Thefts from vehicles are up more than 20% between 2016 and 2018, reaching 24,920 in 2018…or almost 3 every hour.

Total property crime has nearly doubled since 2009.

Their “pavement condition index” numbers are rated “at risk”. Other than Oakland, it is the worst of the Northern California big cities.

Homelessness is up nearly 15% in 2019 compared to 2015.

The SF Department of Public Health reports giving out nearly 4.5 MILLION syringes to drug users in 2018; a number that has been increasing steadily each year.

San Francisco has embraced a “drug normalization” mentality, meaning that it OK to do drugs and there is no price to pay for such behavior.

According to a National Public Radio report, San Franciscans live in a squalor of trash, and needles and human feces on their streets. “ San Francisco’s streets are so filthy that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.” https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634626538/san-francisco-squalor-city-streets-strewn-with-trash-needles-and-human-feces

Enough about San Francisco; we could have looked at Los Angeles, Sacramento, Chicago or New York, and sadly, the evidence would paint the same picture.

But now let’s take a quick look at California. I’ve lived here essentially all my life, so again I have a personal connection.

California’s infrastructure is a mess. I doubt I need to tell you that our power grid is like those of the third world. We now have regular power blackouts for the purpose of preventing forest fires. This is because our electrical power suppliers, in particular Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have not kept up with minimum maintenance, repairs and upgrades on their electrical grid. When the wind blows wires strike trees, or vice versa, and catastrophe ensues.

The State leaders, like Governor Newsom, are quick to thump their proverbial chests and blame PG&E, and PG&E should definitely carry their share of the blame, but the State is complicit in the problem as well. The State’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) receives billions of tax-payer dollars to protect our state and its citizens from just such problems. ($1.6 billion for 2018–19 year according to the California Legislative Analysts Office). Yet they did not. They failed us miserably, and it is not the first time.

Just so I’m clear, the PUC has authority under Article 12 of the California Constitution. They are appointed by the Governor and report to that office and the Legislature. The Legislature has the power to remove any or all members of the PUC for incompetence. They are all in the boat with PG&E and complicit in the situation, even if they try to suggest otherwise.

But even when the State is told there is an imminent crisis they have too often remained derelict and incapable to providing the care the citizens need, deserve and elect them to do. The spillway at the Oroville dam is an example of such dereliction. At 770 feet high, the Oroville Dam is the tallest in the US. Behind it is the second largest man-made lake in the State, holding some 1.1 trillion gallons of water. In February of 2017 its main spillway failed, eventually causing billions of dollars of damage. How could such a thing happen, people asked? Turns out that the State knew there were defects in the spillway structure that made just such a problem likely…and they knew about it for years, more than a decade, yet chose to do nothing.

The State of California is by far the nations leader in homelessness. With nearly 130,000 in 2018 it was #1 in the nation with more than 5 times more homeless that Texas. (In fact, the top 5 states with the highest percentages of homeless (30 or more per 10,00 residents)are California, New York, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. (All lead by the leftist politicians…but I digress.)

I could go on about the demise of California, but it hurts to know that my home state, the Golden State, has been and continues to be lead into the abyss by people that don’t get it. They don’t care a xxxx about keeping California the great State it used to be. They are in it for the power…not the people. (There I go digressing again! Sorry.)

Like the city of San Francisco, the State of California has lived under the “leadership” of a Democrat majority for decades. In fact, many of the “leaders’ of San Francisco have gone on to become “leaders” in the State and now “leaders” in the country. US Senator Dianne Feinstein was the Mayor of San Francisco, as was current California Governor Gavin Newsom. US Senator Kamala Harris was the District Attorney for San Francisco, and Attorney General for the State of California. These, and other members of the Democratic Party, were the leaders that made the decisions that have manifested into the City of San Francisco and the State of California today. These people and their philosophies and political tendencies are who turned one of the most beautiful cities in the world into a cesspool of crime, crumbling infrastructure and streets cluttered with used syringes and coated in human feces. It is their policies, the policies of the left, that has brought this about. It was not the people! It is not the corporations! It is not a lack of money; we have the highest tax rates in the country.

So, why are this city and this state in this terrible situation? Well, when you look back at where San Francisco was to where it is now, you have to realize that like a poorly run company, it is the reflection of the decisions and policies of the past leadership. When you look back at California the same thing applies. Both that city and that state got to where they are by following the “leaders” the voters empowered to do so. All of those leaders and their policies and principles are those of the left. All the evidence, a huge pile of evidence, says if we continue to follow their lead we can only expect to end up in that same chaos; in our cities, in our states and in our country.

What was that old saying about the definition of insanity?