Newsom withdraws effort closer to vote
Gavin Newsom, governor of California, recalls the ballot as 1.1 million signatures are submitted; Remember Gavin Newsom, senior adviser to Randy Economy, joins ‘Fox and Friends Weekend’.
Former Newport Beach Mayor Will O’Neill took to Facebook on Friday to pay attention to the Government of California Gavin Newsom’s use of ‘paid off payments’, a technically legal but extremely opaque practice that is innumerable amounts of ‘donations’ can generate to politicians’ preferred projects and non-profit organizations.
O’Neill, who was mayor of the coastal town of Orange County between 2019 and 2020, asked readers to suggest they run a company, and Newsom asked for a donation “for a cause he cares about.”
“It looks like a shutdown, doesn’t it? No, completely legal. It’s called a payment,” O’Neill wrote.
California law requires payments of more than $ 5,000 to be reported. But unlike political donations, there are no caps. The practice is relatively unclear and is not used regularly. In 2019, for example, Newsom’s administration reported only $ 12 million in taxed payments.
But in 2020, during which the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and the governor’s emergency powers expanded, payments to various entities – on Newsom’s orders – skyrocketed to $ 226 million, according to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). ).
Paid payments increased to $ 226 million in 2020 – compared to $ 12 million the previous year.
(FPPC)
In 2020, Newsom raised $ 45 million from Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente for its housing initiative. Blue Shield’s president and CEO, Paul Markovich, later served as co-chair in the governor’s COVID-19 Testing Task Force. And last month, the governor selected both Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente to help manage the distribution of vaccines in California.
Since the outbreak, Verily Life Sciences – which is part of the same parent company as Google – has received up to $ 44 million in three separate contracts from the governor’s office for emergency services to operate COVID-19 test sites.
O’Neill quoted reports from CapRadio, a SACramento NPR subsidiary, showing that between 2018 and 2019, UnitedHealth donated $ 220,000 to Newsom-controlled political committees, which later awarded $ 492 million in contracts to subsidiaries of UnitedHealth in no and non-fast situations.
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Bloom Energy, a California company, contributed about $ 85,000 to Newsom between September 2018 and October 2020, reports CapRadio. In March 2020, the company received a $ 1 million contract that was not offered – later increased to $ 2 million – to refurbish fans, according to the outlet.
CapRadio also reported that the Chinese manufacturing company BYD made two $ 20,000 contributions to Newsom between March 2018 and November 2019. In April 2020, the company received a nearly $ 1 billion contract for masks.
In his Facebook post, O’Neill quoted Bob Stern, a registered Democrat and former general counsel at the FPPC in California, as saying, “I really think the governor has a look left over. receiving major contributions to the campaign and providing sole source contracts for companies that made these contributions to him. ‘
” Blikoor ‘is one way of saying it. What would you call it? ‘ ‘O’Neill.
FILE: Gavin Newsom, governor of California, holds a vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Kaiser Permanent Los Angeles Medical Center in Los Angeles.
(AP)
This is not the first time the former Republican mayor has called for the Democratic governor. Last May, when California – like the rest of the country – was strictly shut down to curb the spread of the coronavirus, O’Neill slammed Newsom over his order to close beaches in Orange County.
During an appearance on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’, O’Neill accused Newsom of closing 43 miles off the beaches of Orange County, “not because of data, but because of politics.”
“In our local hospital we have 475 beds. They have never treated more than 25 people at a given time, and yesterday there were nine people who treated them, and only one percent of their ventilators are used.”
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The criticism of appropriate payments comes as Newsom faces the possible prospect of a recall election due to its draconian response to the pandemic. Remember Gavin 2020 senior adviser Randy Economy told Fox News on Sunday that the campaign had collected more than 1.72 million signatures. That is more than 200,000 above the required threshold to qualify for a vote, but organizers aim to compensate 2 million signatures for invalid signatures by the March 17 deadline.
“Our work continues … we stop (until) the last day on March 17,” Economy told Fox News. “We are delighted with the progress and this movement is changing politics as we know it here in California and throughout America.”
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Fox News repeatedly tried to contact Newsom’s press office with a request for comment on the recall, but received no response.