Fed up with decades of powerful railroads corrupting the state board that was supposed to regulate them, California voters created the modern Public Utilities Commission in 1911. Now, some 114 years later, Californians have reached their limit with the cozy cronyism between the commission and the private utilities it is required to keep in check.

That voter initiative in the early 20th century made the commission the primary protector of California’s families and businesses against rapacious or unsafe electric and gas utilities. California statutes are filled with requirements that the utilities commission ensures that each cost to provide electricity and gas to customers is both necessary, as well “just and reasonably” priced.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it during a 1932 campaign stop in Oregon, state utility commissions have a “delegated authority and duty to act as the agent of the public themselves; that it is not a mere arbitrator as between the people and the public utilities, but was created for the purpose of seeing that the public utilities do two things: first, give adequate service; second, charge reasonable rates.”

“This means,” he continued, “when that duty is properly exercised, positive and active protection of the people against private greed!”

Commission Loses Its Way

Today, Californians are again faced with what FDR called “a systematic, subtle, deliberate and unprincipled campaign of misinformation, of propaganda, … lies and falsehoods” — bought and paid for by private utilities, he remarked.

More than a century later, California’s utilities commission has lost its way. Over the past 10 years, each and every time California’s private utility companies have wanted more of our money, the state’s appointed commissioners have willingly agreed.

Between 2019 and 2023, average residential electricity rates increased 47%, outpacing inflation, the Legislative Analyst’s Office noted in a January report. Last year alone, the commission approved six increases for PG&E, while it raked in record-breaking profits.

California’s utilities commission is neglecting its primary responsibility. The companies claim that they know best what money and programs they need in order to provide gas and electric service to their customers. They ask us to trust them to spend customer money wisely, without suffocating their businesses with regulatory bureaucrats standing over their shoulders, second-guessing every dollar spent. The CPUC has increasingly obliged, allowing the utilities to choose for themselves what they will spend money on or decide how much they will charge for electric and gas service — gold-plating profit potential without sticking to job one: safe and reliable service at a reasonable cost.

Ignoring Oversight and Audits

Over and over again, the utilities ask and the commission gives them whatever they want. In the past three years the CPUC has created a pernicious practice of “interim” rate increases, handing the utilities billions of dollars more without even having to list or provide any detail for the specific costs they presented for payment.

These interim rate decisions abrogate the CPUC’s fundamental role to dig into the utilities’ cost proposals, figure out what we actually should pay for safe service, and reject the expensive baubles and trinkets Californians shouldn’t be on the hook for.

The commission also ignored independent audits of the utilities’ wildfire spending. In 2021, California’s big three utilities either could not account for or diverted $240 million, $700 million and $1.5 billion in money the CPUC had already allowed the companies to collect for programs they proposed, planned and profited off. The audits urged commissioners to withhold money for additional wildfire prevention projects until the utilities could explain what they spent the initial funding on.

Read More: Californians pay billions for power companies’ wildfire prevention efforts. Are they cost-effective?

That didn’t happen. Both PG&E and Southern California Edison were given the vast majority of what they asked for in new funding, without any true up or requirement that they explain how they spent the previous tranche of public dollars.

Highest Rates in the Nation

So it’s not surprising that California families now face the second-highest utility rates in the nation, and California businesses own the dubious prize of paying the highest business rates in the country.

What’s surprising is why, for so long, we have tolerated the commission’s abdication of its central duty: To protect us while making sure that needed and reasonable investments are made to keep the lights on. When will we require our elected officials to stop the gravy train and make the state utilities commission do its job?

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

About the Author

Loretta Lynch served as president of the California Public Utilities Commission from 2000 through 2002 and as a commissioner until January 2005.

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GV Wire encourages vigorous debate from people and organizations on local, state, and national issues. Submit your op-ed to bmcewen@gvwire.com for consideration.

The post Over a Century Later, California May Need Another Revolt Against Its Utility Companies appeared first on GV Wire.

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of President Donald Trump’s broad imposition of tariffs on imported goods.

“President Trump’s unlawful tariffs are wreaking chaos on California families, businesses, and our economy, driving up prices and threatening jobs,” Newsom said in a statement.

The tariffs could have all of those negative impacts, but California’s economy was already sluggish.

As Gabe Petek, the Legislature’s budget analyst, said in a January response to Newsom’s state revenue forecast, “These gains are not tied to improvements in the state’s broader economy, which has been lackluster, with elevated unemployment, a stagnant job market outside of government and healthcare, and sluggish consumer spending.”

California has more than a million unemployed workers and its unemployment rate is tied for second-highest among the states.

Key Industries Facing Headwinds

“Jobs growth remains concentrated in government and government supported health care and social services while other private industries in total continue to shed jobs,” according to the Center for Jobs and the Economy, an arm of the California Business Roundtable trade group.

Virtually every major segment of California’s economy has been facing stiff headwinds in recent years, but the only one enjoying political notice has been Southern California’s film industry, which is seeing other states and nations lure production away with lower costs and subsidies.

“Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry’s thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen,” the New York Times reported.

Newsom and the Legislature are planning a major increase in state subsidies to keep production in California, but it may be too little and too late.

Tech Sector Troubles

Meanwhile, “The substantial loss of technology jobs in the Bay Area so far this year is a huge shock to the Bay Area economy and labor market,” Scott Anderson, chief economist with BMO Capital Markets, recently told the East Bay Times. “The technology job loss trend has been in place for some time now, but the deterioration in the first two months of the year is concerning.”

Tariffs could hit Southern California’s most important economic driver — the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the warehouse complexes in the region’s interior — especially hard. But this sector was already facing rising costs that undercut its competitiveness.

The Goods Movement Alliance, a coalition of business groups, is backing Newsom’s challenge to tariffs, but also cites the state’s policies, industrial electricity rates twice the national average and high gasoline and diesel fuel prices as negative factors, as well as new pollution controls on ships and anti-warehousing legislation.

California’s largest-in-the-nation agricultural industry, including its famous winemaking sector, is also shrinking, largely due to uncertain water supplies, labor shortages and the same high costs for electricity and fuel that the logistics industry faces.

The Public Policy Institute of California has estimated that, “even in the best-case scenario, some 500,000 acres may need to be fallowed in the San Joaquin Valley” due to restrictions on pumping irrigation water from underground aquifers.

Government Sector Also Strained

Finally, even though government has been California’s foremost employment driver — including government-financed medical services — in recent years, it is also facing bleak times. The state budget is mired in what fiscal experts call a “structural deficit” and virtually every major city, some counties and large school districts are in the same pickle. Los Angeles and San Francisco are particularly plagued after several years of of overspending and their leaders, such as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, are warning that layoffs may be inevitable.

Trump’s tariffs might make things worse, but California’s economic woes predate Trump. Much of it was self-inflicted.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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The only way that happens is when we force Fresno Unified to finally get its act together and provide our community’s children with the quality of education they need and deserve.

Sadly, Fresno Unified — which has some of the nation’s worst test scores, especially for black and brown kids — is up to its old tricks. Not only did the trustees shroud a promised national search for a new superintendent in secrecy, but they’re also ready to promote an insider, Misty Her, to the top job.

There are no rational reasons for this appointment other than politics and an insidious need to protect the district’s bloated bureaucracy. I understand why a board would want to keep an insider: you can control that person much easier, and you know they won’t be replacing the existing executive staff that trustees have established relationships with.

To our community’s shame, the trustees are passing on three highly qualified outside candidates with proven records of success as superintendents. One was the 2020 National Superintendent of the Year.

Related Story: The Superintendent Search Document FUSD Does Not Want You to See

How Much Longer Must Fresno’s Children Wait?

How much longer are we going to sacrifice our children’s and our community’s future on the altar of political ambition by trustees like Keshia Thomas and Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas, both city council seekers?

How much longer are we going to bow to the highly paid Fresno Unified bureaucrats who fear an outsider will show them to the door because of their incompetence and indifference?

Misty Her has been the interim superintendent for a year without moving the needle on student learning or improving chaotic operations. The district remains mired in special ed challenges, an abundance of litigation, and a culture of retaliation.

In addition, she long has been part of the district’s failing team. It is very difficult and costly, not to mention disruptive for students, to remove a superintendent. Bob Nelson was superintendent for eight years with no demonstrable improvement in outcomes and would still be there today if he had not accepted a teaching position at Fresno State.

Related Story: Trustees Select Fresno Unified’s New Superintendent. Was ‘the ...

We need a leader with the expertise and backbone to do right by students. I am not sure Misty Her wants to be that person, because if she did, she would have already made many changes to her cabinet and the hiring process.

Central Unified recently let its superintendent go and brought in a proven winner, Eimear O’Brien, as the interim. In just one month, she is setting high standards and making sure that every employee does their job with urgency and in the best interests of students!

I’ll wrap up with a call to action: Show up at the Fresno Unified board meeting downtown on Wednesday at 4:30 pm and voice your opinion. If you can’t attend, email the trustees with your thoughts.

Let’s not sentence Fresno’s next generation to lives of poverty and despair, as we have done so many times before.

 

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(Video: FTA President Manuel Bonilla sharing his insights on the superintendent search and FTA’s offer to host a public forum featuring the final candidates.)

About the Author

Darius Assemi of Fresno is a builder and philanthropist. He is the president/CEO of Granville Homes and publisher of the award-winning GV Wire.

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GV Wire encourages vigorous debate from people and organizations on local, state, and national issues. Submit your op-ed to bmcewen@gvwire.com for consideration.

The post Will Fresno Unified Sacrifice Another Generation of Students? The Choice Is Ours appeared first on GV Wire.

President Donald Trump may forever reshape the boundaries of executive power. For his new New York Times Opinion podcast, “Interesting Times,” columnist Ross Douthat spoke with Jack Goldsmith, who led the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, about the legal issues that have arisen during Trump’s second term.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full episode and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: In a recent essay, you wrote that Donald Trump is “taking a moonshot on executive power.” What does that mean, and how is this administration different from all other administrations?

Jack Goldsmith: The Trump administration is pushing executive power to unprecedented places in new ways on many dimensions.

First, vertically down through the executive branch, the administration has taken an unprecedentedly broad view of the unitary executive theory. The basic idea is that the president gets to completely control the executive branch. Its decisions. Its firings. The interpretation of the law. The president’s views of the law prevail for the entire executive branch, and everyone has to get in line for that. And there have been elements of this before, but this is much more extreme than ever. That’s the vertical dimension.

The horizontal dimension is that they are asserting super broad executive power claims vis-a-vis other institutions that have checkpoints against them, trying to weaken those institutions.

Let’s start with Congress. The executive branch has basically been attacking Congress’ appropriation power, its core power. It’s been attacking Congress’ traditional ability to determine which agencies are which and how they’re organized. And it’s doing something analogous with courts. It has been extremely aggressive in pushing back against and game playing with courts. I would not say that there has been any sort of systematic defiance yet, but they’ve come close to the line and they’re being extremely disrespectful toward courts.

And then they’re pushing out executive power against civil society. You see this in the law firms, the universities and the like.

So, horizontally and vertically, they’re pushing executive power, sometimes through interpretation of statutes, sometimes through Article II.

Douthat: I think it was clear from the beginning that Trump back in power was going to be a more aggressive figure. What in this area has surprised you the most?

Goldsmith: I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the onslaught. It’s really just remarkable how many things they’re doing, especially inside the executive branch, to try to bring complete control of the president. And I wasn’t expecting the extent of the loyalty tests and the insistence that the president gets to determine what the law is and that there’s no independent legal check.

Traditionally, my old office, the Office of Legal Counsel, made legal interpretations for the executive branch subject indeed to the review of the attorney general and the president. That office has been basically set aside and the White House is interpreting law, and the basic rule appears to be if the president wants to do something, it’s lawful.

That really does seem to be the operating principle. So, the extent of that surprises me. The extortionate elements of the administration, the shakedown elements. They remind me of a book I wrote about Hoffa and the mob. That has all surprised me.

Douthat: This is the law firms.

Goldsmith: And arguably what they’re doing a little bit with the universities. I didn’t anticipate that form of aggressiveness.

Trump and his administration were pretty bad in their disrespect of courts in the first term. In fact, it was about eight years ago that the chief justice issued an announcement not unlike the one from a few weeks ago saying that the president needs to stand down a little bit in his criticisms, but this time, they’ve gone much further.

And frankly, I don’t really understand the strategy. It has been a strategy of utter contempt for the courts. Reading directives narrowly, filing massively disrespectful briefs, threatening noncompliance. I didn’t expect the extent of that, and I don’t fully understand what goal it serves.

Douthat: There’s been a lot of talk just in the first few months from critics and skeptics of the administration saying: We’re already in a constitutional crisis. The administration is messing with the courts, being disrespectful to the courts, not following congressional statute and so on. In your view, what is a constitutional crisis, and how will we know we’re in one?

Goldsmith: So, I’m going to give you an answer you won’t like. I don’t like that terminology. I don’t like that conceptualization because it gives one a sense that there’s an all-or-nothing line, after which we’re in a crisis. And I’m not quite sure what happens when that crisis hits.

Here’s the way I think about it: There has definitely been a significant diminution in legal checks on the president. He’s wiped them out inside the executive branch. Congress has not only been silent, but it’s facilitated the wiping out of congressional prerogatives by confirming people who they knew were going to do things that were going to emaciate Congress.

The only real legal check right now on this presidency is the courts. And so if the courts were issuing directives on a regular basis and he was defying them, or if the game playing continues to such a degree that they’re not really paying attention to law, then we would be in a place where the president was approaching lawlessness. I don’t think we’re close to that yet.

I want to emphasize: It’s extremely early in the judicial process. There’s a lot going on. There are 150 cases, and the administration can do a lot of damage before courts can weigh in and set boundaries.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Ross Douthat/Eric Lee
c. 2025 The New York Times Company

The post What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power? appeared first on GV Wire.

In a commentary aired Sunday on CNN, Zakaria highlighted historical parallels to the 1920s, noting a similar pattern of robust growth followed by protectionist trade policies.

He said agricultural decline back then fueled populist movements, and the tariffs worsened the Great Depression.

Zakaria argues that the U.S. is again favoring a nostalgic view of manufacturing by imposing broad tariffs that hurt the larger service-based economy.

The post Zakaria Draws Parallels Between Trump’s Tariffs, Failed 1930s Economic Policies appeared first on GV Wire.

On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.

I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony,” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “Amen.”

In that small chapel by a freeway in Arkansas, I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure.

I had that, and I left it all.

I never really wanted to leave my faith. I wasn’t interested in exile — familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.

My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the past 30 years. I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. About 40 million Americans have left churches over the past few decades, and about 30% of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

That’s what I did, too. I spent my 20s worshipping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been, and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace, and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92% of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.”

In Washington, religious conservatives are ascendant. President Donald Trump claims God saved him from a bullet so he could make America great again. The Supreme Court has the most pro-religion justices since at least the 1950s. Nearly half of Americans believe the United States should be a Christian nation. And singer Grimes recently said, “I think killing God was a mistake.”

The Rise of the ‘Nones’

I remember the first time I saw Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion.” I was in middle school, at a Barnes & Noble in a strip mall down the street from my church. I stopped in front of the shelves, confronted with an astonishing possibility: It was an option not to believe.

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, intended to provoke. He was one of the patriarchs of New Atheism, a movement that began around the turn of the century. Disruptive forces — technological change, globalization and 9/11 — invited people to question both their relationship to faith and the role of religion in society. The New Atheists’ ideas helped make that interrogation permissible.

Religion was no longer sacrosanct, but potentially suspect. By 2021, about 30% of America identified as “nones” — people who have no religious affiliation.

But even as people left religion, mysticism persisted. More people began identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” In 2015, researchers at Harvard University began studying where these Americans were turning to express their spirituality. Reporters did, too. The answers included: yoga, CrossFit, SoulCycle, supper clubs and meditation.

“Secularization in the West was not about the segregation of belief from the world, but the promiscuous opening of belief to the world,” said Ethan H. Shagan, a historian of religion at the University of California, Berkeley.

Related Story: Trump Tells Prayer Breakfast He Wants to Root Out ‘Anti-Christian Bias’ and Urges ‘Bring God Back’

Happier, Healthier, More Fulfilled

Religion provides what sociologists call the “three B’s”: belief, belonging and behaviors. It offers beliefs that supply answers to the tough questions of life. It gives people a place they feel they belong, a community where they are known. And it tells them how to behave, or at least what tenets should guide their action. Religious institutions have spent millennia getting really good at offering these benefits to people.

“There is overwhelming empirical support for the value of being at a house of worship on a regular basis on all kinds of metrics — mental health, physical health, having more friends, being less lonely,” said Ryan Burge, a former pastor and a leading researcher on religious trends.

Pew’s findings corroborate that idea: Actively religious people tend to report they are happier than people who don’t practice religion. Religious Americans are healthier, too. They are significantly less likely to be depressed or to die by suicide, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular illness or other causes.

Answering Hard Questions

In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most important, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

People also want to belong to richer, more robust communities, ones that wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They’re looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption — for answers.

Erin Germaine Mahoney, a 37-year-old in New York City, was an evangelical Christian for most of her life. She left her church in part because she disagreed with its views on women but said she has struggled to find something to fill the void. She wants a place to express her spirituality that aligns with her values.

She hesitated before saying, “I haven’t found satisfaction.”

“That scares me,” she added, “because I don’t want that to be true.”

Like Mahoney and many other “nones,” I, too, feel stuck. I miss what I had. In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary. I lost answers about planets, galaxies, eternity.

But I don’t feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the Sabbath) that were once off-limits to me. Most important, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Lauren Jackson/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2025 The New York Times Company

The post Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion appeared first on GV Wire.

“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Donald Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?

A Cruel Farce Unfolding

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the workforce of the future.

He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day — and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”

But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned, Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

Eroding Global Confidence

And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.

First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.

“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasurys?” asked The Wall Street Journal editorial page Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.

The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.

The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to El Salvadoran prisons.

Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’ Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead.

China’s Long-Term Strategy

You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners.

And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.

In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”

Does that mean China will leave us in the dust? No. Beijing is making a huge mistake if it thinks the rest of the world is going to let China indefinitely suppress its domestic demand for goods and services so the government can go on subsidizing export industries and try to make everything for everyone, leaving other countries hollowed out and dependent. Beijing needs to rebalance its economy, and Trump is right to pressure it to do so.

But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.

The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.

Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.

So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos.

If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

c. 2025 The New York Times Company

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The spiraling cost of housing in California has affected virtually every facet of life.

California has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population and among the highest rates of cost-burdened renters and overcrowded homes.

One reason for the seemingly endless upward trajectory of rents is how expensive it is to build new apartments in California. Those costs are a major contributor to “break-even rents,” or what must be charged for a project to be financially feasible.

Comparing Costs Across States

I recently led a study that compared total apartment development costs in California to those in Colorado and Texas. The average apartment in Texas costs roughly $150,000 to produce; in California, building the same apartment costs around $430,000, or 2.8 times more. Colorado occupies a middle ground, with an average cost of around $240,000 per unit.

For publicly subsidized, affordable apartments — a sector that California has spent billions on in recent years — the gap is even worse. These cost over four times as much as affordable apartment units in Colorado and Texas.

There’s no single factor driving these huge differences. Land costs in California are over three times the Texas average. “Hard costs,” or those related to improving the land and constructing buildings, are 2.2 times those in Texas. California’s “soft costs,” which include financing, architectural and engineering fees, and development fees charged by local governments, are 3.8 times the Texas average.

Breaking Down California’s High Costs

There are some unavoidable California-specific costs, like ensuring buildings are resilient to shaking from earthquakes. But the truly lifesaving seismic requirements explain only around 6% of hard-cost differences, the study estimated. The state’s strict energy efficiency requirements add around 7%.

California’s high cost of living may drive up the price of labor, but we found that construction wage differences explain only 6% to 10% of hard-cost differences for market-rate apartments. However, for publicly subsidized apartment projects, which are often mandated to pay union-level wages, labor expenses explain as much as 20% to 35% of the total difference in costs between California and Texas.

“Soft costs” in California are a major culprit. California property developers pay remarkably high fees for architectural and engineering services — triple the average cost in Texas. It’s five times as much or more if you’re building publicly funded, affordable apartments in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas.

Seismic engineering requirements play a role. The bigger factor are complex and burdensome design requirements for affordable housing. These are dictated by state and local funding sources, and have little to do with habitability or safety but contribute substantially to these astonishing differences.

Development fees to local governments make up the largest soft-cost difference in California. Such fees, which were the subject of a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case, average around $30,000 per unit. In Texas, the average is about $800. (Again, Colorado occupies a middle ground at around $12,000.)

In San Diego, for example, these fees on average eat up 14% of total development costs per apartment.

The Biggest Culprit: Time

But the biggest thing driving up California apartment costs? Time.

A privately financed apartment building that takes just over two years to produce from start to finish in Texas would take over four years in California. It takes twice as long to gain project approvals and the construction timeline is 1.5 times longer.

That means land costs must be carried for longer, equipment and labor are on jobsites longer, and that loans are taken out for a longer term, and so on.

Most of the differences that the study uncovered stem from policy choices made by state and local governments. Many are legacies of the so-called “slow growth movement” in California, which has shaped housing production since the 1980s.

Those efforts worked. Population growth in the state went negative for a few years after 2020, due primarily to the high cost of housing. Even more recently, California’s growth was half the numbers seen in Texas and Florida, with younger and higher earners disproportionately leaving.

These departures have dire implications for the state’s fiscal future and political influence nationally. California recently lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history. If current national population trends hold, it could lose four or five seats in 2030.

The California Legislature has become increasingly focused on reducing the cost of living, but meeting this goal requires substantial progress on lowering housing costs. New proposals to exempt urban infill housing production from state environmental law and a package of permitting reforms are steps in that direction.

Will policymakers also take lessons from Texas and Colorado’s cheaper housing methods? That remains to be seen. But the future of California may well hinge on it.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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GV Wire encourages vigorous debate from people and organizations on local, state, and national issues. Submit your op-ed to bmcewen@gvwire.com for consideration.

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Countless dirty secrets swirl around the way animals on factory farms live, but an even uglier one may be the way they sometimes die.

“If everyone had to work a day in a meatpacking plant, these slaughterhouses would not exist,” said Ian Packer, 36, an undercover investigator from Florida. Packer should know: He worked for two months late last year at Manning Beef LLC, a slaughterhouse in Los Angeles, and he took hard-to-watch videos of animals that in some cases appear to be alive as they are cut up.

“I looked in the eyes of cows who could feel every slice of the knife as their ears were cut off and their faces were skinned, the workers holding the cows in place while they gasped for air and struggled to move away from the pain,” said Packer, who investigated on behalf of a nonprofit called Animal Outlook. “Watching those animals be butchered alive will haunt me.”

The great majority of livestock and poultry, to be sure, are not butchered alive — and the owner of the Manning slaughterhouse denies that it ever happens at his site. Some of the videos are open to debate, as it can be hard to discern whether an animal is jerking from pain or from postmortem reflexes. But to me at least, the video and testimony raise fundamental questions about industry claims of “humane slaughter.”

Trump’s Downsizing May Mean Less Oversight

The situation is now poised to get worse, for the Trump administration’s downsizing of the federal government may mean less oversight than ever of the slaughter industry.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are cutting unnecessary red tape, empowering businesses to operate more efficiently,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced last month. Cutting red tape is great, but the department is also allowing permanent increases in assembly line speed in certain slaughterhouses, adding to the risk of animals being processed before they die. The department also dissolved two food safety advisory panels, including one on meat and poultry inspection.

Cattle are supposed to be stunned and rendered insensible to pain with a bolt or bullet in the head before they are processed. But the stunning does not always work properly. In those cases, Packer said, he sometimes saw conscious animals hoisted upside down, bled and skinned even as they struggled and showed signs of pain.

Anthony DiMaria, the owner of Manning Beef, flatly denied this. “There’s no way an animal can be hoisted up alive,” he told me. He noted that there are federal inspectors working in his plant, empowered to shut it down if they see such a violation.

The problem, according to Packer, is that the inspectors moved around the plant and mostly weren’t there to see live animals being hoisted. And inspectors sometimes do take action: In 2022, the Department of Agriculture suspended the Manning slaughterhouse after inspectors observed a worker hoisting an animal that was still apparently conscious — and inspectors said that was the sixth incident of incomplete slaughter in about a month.

I’m no expert on animal sensibility. But Lester C. Friedlander, a veterinarian who worked for 10 years in slaughterhouse inspection, reviewed Packer’s videos and said that a number of the animals shown being hoisted and cut were still alive and responding to pain.

There can be disagreement. I showed several of the video clips to another expert, Temple Grandin of Colorado State University, who has worked with the industry to design livestock handling systems. In one case, she said the animal in the video was dead, and in another she couldn’t be sure.

4% of Animals Require Second Shot Before Death

The Meat Institute says that its standard is that 96% of animals should be rendered insensible after one shot in the head with a bolt, which still means that 4% require a second shot or, critics say, may even be at risk of being processed while alive.

Animal welfare may seem an odd thing to write about when our country is at a historic juncture and facing enormous risks. But current political challenges shouldn’t let us lose sight of every other issue, including the systematic brutality that we tolerate in our food industry — or its scale, with some 300 chickens, cattle, pigs or sheep slaughtered in the United States each second on average.

Some day, I suspect, we will wonder how we could have allowed so many animals to endure such profound suffering. As a onetime farm boy who raised sheep, cattle, geese, chickens and other animals, I understand that these aren’t just industrial cogs but animals with personalities not so different from our dogs and cats.

I’ve written about how the slaughter of pigs can go wrong, causing them to suffocate slowly. I’ve documented how chickens on the assembly line sometimes are scalded to death in boiling water. We have evolved a system that is a triumph of efficiency, providing Americans with cheap protein and holding down grocery bills. But all this comes at a monumental cost in animal suffering.

Laws and inspections have led to progress in slaughter conditions over the decades, and more could be done: It would help if an inspector was constantly observing animals being stunned and making sure they are insensible when they are hoisted and cut into. By my calculations, that would cost less than one-tenth of a cent per pound of beef.

What I keep thinking is this: If you torture one animal, you’re arrested and considered a psychopath. But if you abuse millions of animals in a systematic, industrial process, you’re hailed for your business acumen. That’s an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of modern dining.

—

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.)

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Nicholas Kristof/Damon Winter
c. 2025 The New York Times Company

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Trump paused his sweeping tariffs for 90 days — except on China — despite previously refusing to ease trade penalties and attacking those who urged him to do so.

Zakaria, speaking on his CNN program, said the shift risks transforming the U.S. from a model of free-market principles into “the leading example of crony capitalism.” He pointed to studies from Trump’s first term that found companies with Republican ties were more likely to receive tariff exemptions.

“The American bazaar is now open,” Zakaria said, warning that foreign governments and businesses will flood Washington seeking special deals and exemptions.

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