“When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power, there’s no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines"

August 29, 2024 by Daniel Greenfield 1 Comment

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?