Thursday, July 9, 2026
Congratulations you're getting $20 per hour but for zero hours
California’s $20 wage disaster pushes over a dozen Fresno fast-food hotspots to vaporize
Democrats in California backdoor promotion of prostitution...read about the ages of these prostitutes and prepare to be revolted
Figueroa: Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener’s canyon of despair
Figueroa Corridor is one of California’s most notorious sex markets. Here, prostitutes gather, night after night, selling sex acts.
Last year, members and associates of a gang were indicted after allegedly trafficking adults and minors — including foster children — along the corridor and branding them with tattoos.
This was all the predictable result of public policy.
In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law decriminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. When he signed the bill, Newsom suggested it would help would reduce the harassment of women.
We went to Figueroa to see the results for ourselves. As we walked the corridor, saw the sex market and rode along with a former LAPD vice cop, one thing became clear: On Figueroa, human flesh is big business — something state leaders appear to have no desire to change.
The scene stretches across almost 4 miles of hot, dusty cement. Nearly nude women cluster at the start of side streets just off the main road. Lines of cars slowly cruise along, apparently hoping to buy.
Pimps either oversee the prostitutes themselves, on a nearby phone, or through hired low-level watchers. Sirens blare constantly, but officers often just roll on by.
Stephany Powell, a former sergeant in an LAPD Vice unit and former executive director at Journey Out, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit serving human trafficking victims, rode with us along the corridor.
“Statistically, the average age of entry for human sex trafficking is between the ages of 12 and 14 years old,” she said. “We’d see 14-, 15-year-olds that were out on the prostitution tracks. We also would see 25-to-30-year-olds . . . some of them had been out on the streets on the prostitution tracks since age 13. And in those cases, nine times out of 10, they had a trafficker.”
Figueroa has been a sex-trafficking den for decades. But recent policy changes have made the corridor harder to police. In California, it had been a crime to loiter with the intent of committing prostitution since at least 1995. Patrol officers could use this law to curtail the street market — and stop, identify and rescue trafficked minors.
That began to change in 2016. That year, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 1322, prohibiting minors from being charged with solicitation of and loitering with intent to commit prostitution. The law was arguably well-intentioned, reflecting a belief that trafficked children shouldn’t be treated as criminals.
But that wasn’t enough for the state’s progressives. In 2021, state Sen. Scott Wiener sponsored SB 357, a bill that would fully decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution. A trio of the state’s most powerful progressive institutions — the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU’s California chapter and Equality California — rallied behind the bill, which passed in 2022.
Newsom signed the bill in July of that year. He referenced “transgender adults,” seemingly endorsing LGBT activists’ view that the loitering statute had criminalized “walking while trans.”
“Black adults accounted for 56.1% of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017–2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city’s population,” Newsom wrote. “To be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution. It simply revokes provisions of the law that have led to disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults.”
Since the law’s passage, however, Figueroa has more prostitutes than it did before. More minors are apparently being trafficked, too. The law itself is driving these trends.
Before SB 357, police officers could use a woman’s attire and behavior to determine that she was loitering to commit prostitution. Once that behavior was decriminalized, prostitutes began wearing hardly any clothes — and law enforcement found itself helpless to control the sex trade.
SB 357 has also enabled traffickers. In the past, a patrol officer could arrest a loitering prostitute to get her off the streets and encourage her to testify against a trafficker. Today, law enforcement has to use resource-strapped undercover units to target traffickers one-by-one.
The situation is so dire that the federal government intervened. In August 2025, First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli spearheaded the region’s first-ever RICO human trafficking case against the vicious Hoover Criminal Gang. Essayli’s office charged six members and associates of the Hoovers with various crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, money laundering and sexual exploitation of a child.
On July 1, a federal follow-up operation took down another 10 suspects, including the operator of a seedy motel, who was charged with “financially benefiting from the Hoover gang’s sex trafficking operation.”
When he signed SB 357, Gavin Newsom suggested that the new law would help reduce harassment against women. What it enabled instead is a wave of crime, suffering and abuse.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
The NYC government school education system money pit
Report Shows Mass Failure in NYC Schools as Spending Keeps Soaring Under Mamdani
New York City, like so many other big, blue cities, serves as an excellent model for how spending overwhelming amounts of taxpayer money can get so much less than underwhelming results.
A recent report created a damning picture of New York City public schools as mass factories of educational failure.
New York Success Academy, a charter school network in New York, dug through public data to show “New Yorkers how deep this failure runs” and how long it has been running.
The results are both sad and infuriating.
The study found that 906 schools in the city, roughly half of the total number, “had fewer than half their students passing math, reading, or both on state exams last year.”
“Those 906 schools enroll 409,379 students: 43 percent of all NYC public school children. In 503 of those schools, the majority of students failed both math and reading,” the report noted.
It said the data came from “NYS Education Department school accountability records, NYC Department of Education school quality and expenditure data, federal school improvement designation databases, and standardized test results spanning more than a decade.”
Not only are the schools failing by national test metrics, but according to the report, many of the public schools have been trying to hide their bad report cards from the public with methods like grade inflation, lowering test cut scores so it appears more students are passing, and “a school survey designed to measure satisfaction rather than learning.”
Fox News reported on a New York Public Schools official’s response to the report. The official said that it is “riddled with misdirections, misinformation, and allegations not based in fact” and that they are “proud of the gains that have been made in reading and math across schools and demographics this past year.”
The public data, however, hardly looks like something the city should be proud of.
“Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties,” the report says. “No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way.”
New York State public school performance has been worsening for some time, at least since the early 2010s. And the decline became precipitous during the COVID-19 lockdowns that New York was particularly zealous about.
This after being near the top of the heap in the early 2000s.
The problem appears to be even more acute in New York City as poor test scores are combined with collapsing enrollment.
The New York Times reported in May that the New York City public school system has lost “more than 123,000 students” since the start of the pandemic and is projected to lose 153,000 more over the next decade.
Steep declines in enrollment have hit other big cities too, though few have been as dramatic as those in New York.
Given the data from the Success Academy report, it’s not hard to find at least one reason why this is happening. Far too many of the city’s schools are failing students. Or—to be more precise—the students are failing, the schools are flailing, and they appear to be sweeping this problem under the rug rather than fixing it.
And that gets to the second big failure in New York City (on top of the failing test scores). Instead of assessing and fixing the problem, the city is just throwing money at it.
New York City already spends more money per pupil than any other state, including the District of Columbia, according to 2024 census data.
But the New York Post reported on Monday that the New York Department of Education under Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly added $680 million to its already massive, nearly $40 billion budget. This despite Mamdani’s promise to get costs under control by tamping down on “contracts and consultants.”
“We have to always ensure that every dollar of that budget is being spent effectively,” Mamdani said of the education budget in November.
Cue the laugh track.
Oh, and you will be shocked to learn that teachers unions are doing their part to make sure the money keeps flowing to the failing schools and the students remain on the road to educational perdition.
Their plan to set things right appears to just be filing lawsuits to block their competition.
The Washington Free Beacon, which reported on the Success Academy study, noted that the report wasn’t specifically framed as an indictment of Mamdani’s leadership—the problems existed under predecessors like far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio too.
But, according to the Free Beacon, it does make a sham of Mamdani’s administration’s claim that New York public schools had “another incredible year” last year.
It was only incredible if you mean incredibly bad.
When you combine the abject failure to teach children the basics of reading and writing with the noxious focus on ideology and indoctrination, it’s not hard to see why the public school system is facing a collapse in New York City and elsewhere.• July 8, 2026Just what California doesn't need...another tyrannical bureaucratic agency
There’s A New Consumer Sheriff In California
There’s a new agency in California that promises to “protect consumers, support honest businesses, and advance affordability for Californians.” If Vegas were to give odds, they would be heavily against any of those ever occurring.
It’s called the California Business and Consumer Services Agency, and it’s a cabinet-level department headed by Rohit Chopra, who was sworn in on July 1. It already has a bureaucratic acronym: BCSA. Catchy, isn’t it?
Chopra promises his office “will sharpen and accelerate work to promote economic growth and protect the public from abuses.”
Let us translate that from California-government-speak. What it really means is he will bully companies in a state that already is losing businesses at an alarming rate.
What is Chopra’s qualification for the job? He previously headed the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If that doesn’t ring a bell, maybe this will: It was the wholly unnecessary and unconstitutional bureaucracy dreamed up by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren almost two decades ago.
The CFPB, an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve Bank, has much the same mission as California’s Business and Consumer Services Agency has been given. CFPB’s duty is to implement and enforce “federal consumer financial law” while ensuring “that markets for consumer financial products are transparent, fair, and competitive.”
But it goes beyond that benign-sounding purpose. As author and investigative journalist Paul Sperry argues, the CFPB was granted sweeping, autocratic authority “to determine the ‘fairness’ of virtually every financial transaction in America.”
CFPB backers claim the agency has a record to be proud of. But those affected disagree. For instance, bankers, whose institutions are already under the thumb of other regulating agencies, complain the CFPB “has too much power, is too partisan and has abused its regulatory authority,” says Sperry.
Chopra was fired last year by President Donald Trump, who has tried to shut down the CFPB. But he still left his mark after heading the agency for four years under President Biden.
Under Chopra, the CFPB “pursued novel efforts to extend its jurisdiction” It has a history of abusive behavior toward private-sector actors going back to its founding. Its rules have “tended to be extremely long and complicated, imposing a huge compliance burden on financial institutions — which pass on those costs on to consumers in the form of higher fees or reduced product choices,” according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
As is often the case with government solutions, the CFPB created problems it was supposed to be solving. And it seemed to never tire of tormenting Americans for their own good.
For instance, in the last days of the Biden administration, the CFPB granted itself unprecedented authority to regulate checking accounts. Banks were given two choices: they could cap overdraft fees at $5, one-seventh of the $35 average, or they could consider the overdraft to be a credit.
The rule indulges customers who spend money that isn’t theirs while those who bank responsibly pay the penalty. And the costs are passed on to all customers.
The CFPB has also gone hard after small-dollar lenders. It proposed “such onerous restrictions” on them that it threatened a “lifeline for tens of millions of American families every year who rely on them to buy groceries, to put gas in the tank, or to pay the rent.”
Hester Peirce, a commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission, says that “business as usual” at the CFPB “means compromising customer privacy,” as it “collects a lot of information from consumers,” while “ignoring the legal boundaries Congress set for the agency.” In at least one instance, the CFPB gamed out “different options for getting around” its statutory limits.
The CFPB was a mistake from the beginning, says Cato Institute scholar Norbert J. Michel, a reality that was obvious to many “even before it abused its power.”
Even so, the CFPB has become a plaything for those who “see the world through the lens of class warfare, as a zero-sum game.” It’s a damaging mindset, deadly to the innovation, dynamic enterprise and economic growth that pushes us all upward.
We bring all this up because Californians will soon get the same treatment, even though it’s already “the most regulated state in the union,” according to the California-based Pacific Research Institute.
With Chopra now heading California’s latest regulatory mistake, you can bet there will be further damage to the former Golden State’s economy, which already on the rocks.
Since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, 287 major corporations have moved their headquarters out of state. And more are pulling up stakes every day to move to Texas, Arizona, Utah, North Carolina, Colorado, Tennessee, and other states. Anywhere but California.
California voters may think they’ll get more consumer protection, but what they’ll really get is more dangerous, unneeded regulation that will raise their cost of living, limit their choices and hurt their state’s economy.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
