Sex Abuse Settlements Bankrupt Democrat States

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Los Angeles County is struggling with a massive budget crunch.

Sales taxes are rising to over 10% in some areas and many departments are being cut down the line over what Fesia Davenport, the county’s first black female CEO, has described as “unprecedented financial challenges” and “extraordinary budgetary pressures.”

But those challenges are not coming so much from the massive wildfires that devastated Los Angeles over the winter, but from the even more massive tide of sexual abuse complaints.

Los Angeles County is dealing with $2 billion in costs from the wildfires, after the city’s first black female mayor and first lesbian fire chief badly mishandled the blazes, but the $4 billion in sex abuse settlements are double the worst fires in the area’s history.

What does it say that sex abuse lawsuits have done twice as much damage to LA as the fires?

That $4 billion settlement over alleged abuses in county juvenile halls and foster homes, the largest in the county’s history, makes up nearly 9% of the county’s $47.9 billion budget.

And the bad news has just begun to arrive from the nearly 7,000 sex abuse claims filed so far.

“This is not a one-year, not even a one-decade impact. We anticipate that we will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year until 2030, and then millions more each year through fiscal year 2050,” Los Angeles County CEO Davenport warned.

Paying off the sex abuse claims from as far back as 40 years ago will require LA to issue bonds, divert money from reserve funds and make deep cuts in its budgets for the next 25 years.

And that’s not even the end of it.

The $4 billion is a group settlement which does not include all possible plaintiffs. Side negotiations are still taking place with more lawyers who want even more money. County lawyers had previously warned that “If all those cases were to proceed to verdict, the estimated liability could be in the tens of billions of dollars and bankrupt the county.”

Since Assembly Bill 218, which lifted the time limit on sex abuse lawsuits, is a state bill, Los Angeles could be the first of multiple California counties hit with multi-billion dollar bills.

An LA Times article called it as “a looming threat” that “could bankrupt California counties” and reported on a claim by Ventura County lawyers that it “threatens the ‘financial viability’ of every county and public school district in California” and represents a “statewide crisis”.

If a major red state were facing bankruptcy over decades of sex abuses, it would be a huge national story that the media would cover as indicative of the rot in its culture, but since the events are taking place in the bluest part of California, they remain a local story.

And yet Los Angeles County is not the only liberal area in the country being bankrupted by sex abuse settlements. The entire state of Maryland which is in a sex abuse crisis mode.

Like Los Angeles, Maryland unleashed a tidal wave of sex abuse claims by passing a law lifting time limits for sex abuse lawsuits against the state. And then quickly regretted it.

Maryland’s Child Victims Act was only passed in 2023, but legislators rushed to shut it down after it was estimated that the state was facing $4 billion in liabilities.

The same Democrat legislators, under Gov. Wes Moore, who had bragged about their passage of the Child Victims Act, corruptly rushed through a ‘fix’ through the state House, Senate and to Gov. Moore’s desk in a record two days to cover themselves. The ‘fix’ caps settlements for government institutions at $400,000 (and $700,000 for private ones) because, as Del. David Moon (D) explained, the state of Maryland “does not have the option of bankruptcy”.

Sen. Will Smith (D) explained that the ‘fix’ to the bill he had voted for was urgently needed because what “we could never have anticipated was just the sheer volume of cases that ensued”.

A state facing sex abuse bankruptcy and hypocritically rushing through a cap at the last minute should have been bigger news, but once again the national media tried to keep it quiet.

Why did California, Maryland and other state legislatures open the door to these lawsuits?

Democratic legislators were lobbied by politically connected law firms, often using alleged ‘victims’ as a front, with the promise of scoring big payouts from the Catholic Church. California and Maryland officials had been warned that they were exposing their states to untold billions in liability over accusations from a generation ago that could not be defended against.

The dirty little secret of the accusations is how few of them can even be verified.

With over 7,000 claims and over $4 billion in payouts so far, it would seem reasonable that hundreds of sex abusers had also been named and are being arrested and prosecuted.

The actual number in Los Angeles is 2. Not 2,000 or 200. Only 2.

As of 2023, the LA County DA’s office was reviewing the cases of two men, one of whom had allegedly groped a 17-year-old back in 2006, among 21 employees who had been placed on leave. As of now, there has yet to be any word of action actually being taken against them.

Either 2 men, or at best 21, molested thousands of teens, or there has been a massive failure of accountability. But more likely the actions of the California legislature unleashed a massive fraud. Local TV channels were filled with ads for lawyers promising big payouts and the lawsuits could be filed based on little to no evidence based on events that had happened in the 1980s.

One law firm, bragging that it was part of the “$500 million club” of the “National Academy of Sexual Abuse Lawyers” (no such organization appears to exist) even solicited clients by offering “cash advances” on their cases. Plaintiffs could get money just for making an allegation.

Lawsuits could be filed even if there had been no complaint, arrest or prosecution at the time of the alleged abuse. Little more was needed than the word of an individual and perhaps ‘corroboration’ from one of their friends. While there were real abuses and real victims, the wave of thousands of complaints made them all but impossible to seriously investigate.

AB 218 was proposed by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher, whose husband, a former fellow assemblyman, had to step down after being sued for sexual assault. Law firms and lawyers represent a not insignificant part of her donor base. And that of many politicians.

While the law firms expect to reap a fortune from these lawsuits, it’s unclear how much the victims, real or fictional, will even end up with, but most of it will go to the ambulance chasers.

Contingency fee rates fall between 33% to 60% of most such settlements. With the species of aggressive law firms spending millions on marketing alone, it’s a safe bet that the fee rate will be on the higher side and that at least $2 billion of the $4 billion settlement will go to the lawyers.

But the more likely scenario is that the law firms will take a majority of the cash.

Any actual victims will have to split the money with an army of fraudsters drawn by the ads and will receive a tiny percentage of the settlement after the lawyers and scam artists cash in. After the lawyers take 60% and the 70% of scammers take the rest, the victims may be left with 12%.

The law firms can be expected to pass the money back to the California legislators who enabled their money grab. While counties raise taxes and local schools cut services, the politicians responsible for this planned disaster will see contributions to their campaigns and ‘dark money’ donations to their 501(c)(3) social welfare nonprofits from those same law firms.

The politicians, some of who have turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in their own offices and among their own allies, will tell taxpayers that they need to pay more in the name of justice.

And life in California will get worse while those destroying the state will get even richer.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

L.A. Raises Sales Tax to 11% Over Stolen ‘Homeless’ Billions

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

In Los Angeles County, spring is in the air and so are higher taxes. Beyond the usual punishing ritual of April 15, county residents also now face some of the highest sales taxes in the country.

Sales taxes in the area have shot up from 9.75% to as high as 11.25% to fund still more services for the ‘homeless’. The permanent sales tax increase is supposed to raise $1 billion a year to replace the stolen billions spent by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Families will pay even more for food so that LA’s politicians and nonprofits can steal even more.

In 2016 and 2017, LA voters approved $4.6 billion in homeless tax hikes on themselves that included a sales tax increase and Measure HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure to build 10,000 housing units for the homeless, that taken together were supposed to end homelessness.

“We need to seize this opportunity to make good things happen,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas promised at a ‘victory party’ for the massive spending package. “It is very, very important that we do this work in a way that the voters of the city feel they have done something good and going forward they will be rewarded by our results.”

Ridley-Thomas, who led LA’s homeless policies, and championed HHH, was charged with bribery and corruption. After his arrest, Ridley-Thomas vowed that he would continue “addressing the homeless and housing crisis.” The charges against the close ally of Mayor Karen Bass involved a scheme in the same USC social work school that also gave Bass a free “unsolicited $95,000 tuition award”. Ridley-Thomas was sentenced to 42 months in prison, but continues appearing at public events with Mayor Bass while appealing his conviction.

“Ridley-Thomas was at the center of L.A.’s fight against homelessness. What happens now?” the LA Times wondered, quoting Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the future head of the LA Homeless Services Authority who has now been forced to resign after $2.5 billion in unaccounted spending.

Ridley-Thomas had claimed that through Measure HHH, “we can help 45,000 men, women and children move from homelessness to stable housing in the next five years.”

“Within the next three to six months, with all the work we’ve done, we will see an improvement,” Councilman Jose Huizar promised. “And in two years … we’ll see a significant reduction in people living in the streets.”

Huizar, one of the “architects” of Measure HHH and had co-authored the Comprehensive Strategic Plan to Combat Homelessness, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for soliciting $1.5 million in bribes from developers including trips and prostitutes. The money included a $600,000 bribe from a fugitive Chinese real estate developer to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit.

The number of homeless not only didn’t go down, but shot up, and despite billions of dollars, the annual shortfall was being estimated at $270 million. Homeless housing was being approved at a cost of $479,000 an apartment and total development cost for Measure HHH hit $869 million.

By 2020, the average cost of apartments for the homeless was at $531,000 and by 2022, a city audit found that one project was running to $837,000 for each unit. An audit blamed “a lot of consultants”. After 4 years of this, only 228 apartments for the homeless had been built.

Los Angeles then launched a pilot program to build 8×8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each and then tent encampments for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent each month. The homeless services complex had managed to take something the homeless were already doing for themselves and charge as much for it as a decent apartment rental.

The 2018-2019 city budget included $430 million in homeless spending (more than $300 million on road maintenance) and the 2024-2025 budget is up to $961 million in homeless spending.

The Los Angeles homeless count for 2019 was 35,550 homeless. The 2024 count found 45,252 homeless in the city. LA County’s homeless population had risen from 58,936 to 75,312 during that same period. The county’s 2024 Homeless Initiative was at nearly $600 million in spending.

After billions raised and spent to end homelessness, the crisis was worse than ever. More money was being spent and more homeless were popping up everywhere in a vicious cycle.

But what no one could find out was where all the homeless billions were going.

An audit of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which gets money from the city, county and the federal government, found that it couldn’t account for $2.5 billion in spending. It also illegally refused to release information about $800,000 in payouts over abuses at the agency.

LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum, a crony of Mayor Karen Bass, who was being paid $430,000 a year, blamed the problems on COVID, and claimed that the billions spent with no paper trail or receipts were “an essential investment that contributed to achieving critical public health and service delivery outcomes.” That may have included the multi-million dollar contract she had signed with her husband’s nonprofit. A spokesperson claimed that she had only “inadvertently” signed the contract.

Critics said that LAHSA’s homeless count can’t be trusted, making it impossible to know how bad the problem that the agency’s nearly billion dollar budget was supposed to tackle really is..

Despite Mayor Bass’ protests, Kellum has resigned from LAHSA as the organization is wound down, but Gov. Newsom had previously appointed her to the Department of Housing’s ‘No Place Like Home Program Advisory Committee’ where there’s no sign that she’s being ousted.

The LA City Council mistrusts Bass so much that it’s refusing to fund her ‘homeless’ program. Most of last year’s $1.3 billion homeless budget, including $150 million from the ‘mansion tax’, was never spent because LA is taxing residents to fight homelessness faster than it can spend the money.

The LA County Board of Supervisors which had initiated the audit to seize control of the homeless program and its vast pot of cash from the mayor’s office are assembling a new county agency to spend it all. Measure A replaced the previous Measure H with a permanent sales tax.

And Los Angeles County residents walked into stores and are surprised that they’re suddenly being charged as much as 11% in sales tax to fund the latest plan to end homelessness.

Supervisor Jance Hahn praised LA voters for being “willing to continue to tax themselves” with Measure A to end homelessness. In reality, less than 2 million, or barely 1 in 5, of LA County residents, had voted for Measure A’s highest sales taxes in the country. And with LA elections and their notorious ballot harvesting, it’s unclear how many of those votes are even real.

Can the LA County Board of Supervisors be trusted any more than the city? Hahn and other BOS members had targeted former Sheriff Alex Villanueva after he raided the home of their former colleague Supervisor Sheila Kuehl in another nonprofit corruption investigation.

Supervisor Hahn had accused the sheriff of “using his office to go after political opponents”.

The Board of Supervisors seized power over the sheriff’s department making its members immune to any future raids. While the Supervisors amass control over another nearly billion dollar budget that promises to end homelessness once and for all, families are struggling with their higher sales taxes on top of the already high price of food and other necessities.

Homelessness keeps rising, homeless taxes keep rising and the money disappears.

Over the last 5 years, California spent $24 billion on ending homelessness. A statewide audit found that no one knew whethether the money was doing anything. The California Interagency Council on Homelessness didn’t even bother to analyze any spending after 2021.

When it comes to homeless spending, $24 billion can disappear as easily as $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile after the worst fires in LA history, partly caused by an underfunded fire department, Los Angeles is spending more money on ‘homelessness’ than on the fire department. The two are more related than you might think because the ‘homeless’, in reality drug-addicted mentally ill vagrants, are responsible for starting at least 17,000 fires in just one year.

Homeless fires made up a third of all LA fires last year.

Several of those proved devastating and the cause of some of the serious blazes that threatened the city and made worldwide news over the winter still remain unknown.

Mayor Bass is promising to counter that with even more homeless spending.

“We know that the cost of doing nothing is far greater,” her spokesman claimed.

And as long as LA voters continue to believe that, the endless homeless spending will continue, the homeless encampments will go on rising and the homeless fires will go on burning. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

Democrats Want to Save the Rats

Los Angeles isn’t the city of angels: it’s the city of rats. 

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Last year, LA shot up in the rankings of the “rattiest cities” from third to second place, and it’s closing in fast on Chicago. What is its secret? There is the fetid filth of the junkie vagrant camps where typhus, a medieval disease spread by rats, made a comeback almost as fast as crime once city officials legalized the ‘homeless’ trifecta of street living, drug use and shoplifting.

And like criminals and junkies, the rats have Democrats on their side.

In the fall of last year, Gov. Newsom signed into law a bill that banned more forms of rat poison after a previous rat poison ban in 2020. Newsom and other advocates for taking Los Angeles back to the rats pretended that the rat poison bans were about protecting mountain lions, but then two California Democrats put forward a bill that exposed the real ‘rats rights’ agenda.

Rep Ted Lieu of LA and Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank introduced the Glue Trap Prohibition Act which bans glue traps because they’re cruel to rats. It’s understandable that Lieu and Schiff would feel for the suffering of their fellow rattus americanus and Lieu moans that glue traps are “among the cruelest ways to eliminate rodents”. (The least cruel is electing them to Congress.)

Rep. Lieu serves on the advisory council of Democrats for the Protection of Animals which campaigns against eating turkeys on Thanksgiving, pony rides for children and glue traps for rats. So expect a congressional bill on banning turkey sandwiches and pony rides up next.

Rep. Lieu agonizes that rats in glue traps “that do not escape die of blood loss, suffocation, or dehydration.” He didn’t bother listing the symptoms of hantavirus, for which there is no known cure, typhus or the bubonic plague: among the rat borne diseases making a comeback.

But while Rep. Lieu cares about the suffering of rats, he doesn’t care about human suffering.

It’s already illegal in California to remove rats from your property. If you trap a rat, you either have to “euthanize” it on the spot or let it go. And rats rights activists are campaigning to expand the ban on ‘trapping’ larger animals like coyotes to also apply to rats which, between the bans on effective varieties of rat poisons and glue traps, would make it impossible to stop the rats.

West Hollywood, an LA County “city” of 16 blocks at its tallest and 5 blocks at its shortest, where PETA has a great deal of influence, led the way in banning glue traps within the 5 supermarkets in its borders forcing residents to drive 3 minutes extra to the Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard, and what goes in West Hollywood must now also be imposed on all of America by Rep. Lieu.

Rather than kindness to animals, LA’s love of rats began killing man’s best friend. Ever since Los Angeles began cracking down on rat control measures, dogs began sickening. Leptospirosis, one of the diseases spread through the waste of Rep. Lieu’s best rat friends, caused an epidemic among dogs in the county.

“It’s the rats,” Dr. Alan Schulman, a veterinary surgeon, explained. “They urinate places, they defecate places, dogs get it from them.”

Given a choice between protecting rats and killing dogs, Democrats killed the dogs.

But in New York City, Democrats went one better, killing people to protect rats.

In 2021, former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis pushed through a ban on rat poison. Leptospirosis cases jumped from 57 in 14 years to 15 in just one year. Over a dozen New Yorkers contracted leptospirosis and suffered from liver and kidney failure. One of them died. The symptoms of include fever, aches, and jaundice. Even those who survive can end up with brain damage.

But at least New York City Democrats had banned cruelty to rats and killed people and dogs.

Rather than end the ban on rat poison, Mayor Eric Adams appointed a Department of Education bureaucrat “rat czar” at a salary of $155,000 a year.

“Rats are smart, they are resilient,” Mayor Adams argued. “Many of us live in communities where rats think they run the city.”

Since the rat poison ban remains in place, rats actually do run the city. When people suffer and die for the convenience of rats, it’s not a human government, it’s a government of rats.

The New York Post warned that, “rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires”

Mayor Bill de Blasio, his predecessor, had tried to demonstrate that there was no need for rat poison by dumping dry ice on rat nests, only to have a rat run right through his demonstration. $30 million was spent when thousands of dollars spent on rat poison would have done the job.

Without rat poison or traps, state and city governments dump the burden on property owners to practice what they call “prevention and exclusion” by sealing everything. But as everyone who has dealt with rats knows, they’re smart and, like leftists, can sneak in through the smallest crack and, also like leftists, once they get inside, it takes determined efforts to get rid of them.

Especially if, like leftists, you can’t put out a glue trap with a copy of Das Kapital, then release them in their natural habitat of Cuba or North Korea, and count the problem over and done with.

From New York City to Los Angeles to Vancouver to San Francisco, rat poison bans led to explosions in the rat population. And the Democrats pretended they had nothing to do with it.

Democrats have been running out of victim groups to protect, and they were bound to eventually turn to rats. Not only can’t you spell ‘Democrats’ without “rats’, but the rattiest cities in America are Democrat enclaves. Now the Democrats and the rats are finally teaming up.

So far no Democrat has figured out how to get them to vote, but give them time.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Los Angeles Government Schools and the Case for School Choice

January 5, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

The case for school choice is very straightforward and very persuasive.

 

• Better educational outcomes.
• More educational freedom.
• Lower costs for taxpayers.
• Reining in teacher unions.
• Better government schools.

All of these factors help to explain why school choice is expanding all across the nation (at least in places where lawmakers are not controlled by teacher unions).

Today, though, let’s set aside the national arguments and focus on a local example from the reliably crazy state of California.

Heather McDonald has a sobering column about Los Angeles government schools in City Journal.

Much of her article focuses on ideological indoctrination of students, but here’s the passage that caught my attention.

Any school system that can afford climate advocates (as part of a black uplift plan, no less) is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Any school system that runs a massive system of subcontracting for “psychiatric social workers” and “counselors” is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Such a system has more money than it knows what to do with. Indeed, the LAUSD budget for the 2022–23 school year was $20 billion—more than that of some nations. Divide that pot among the district’s 397,623 K-12 students, and taxpayers are paying the equivalent of an Ivy League tuition—over $50,000—for every student, every year. Add “clients” in other functions that the LAUSD has embraced— early education centers, infant centers, and adult education—and the district spends a still-lavish $35,341 per student. The LAUSD is not underfunded. It is overfunded. The reasons for student failure lie elsewhere than in allegedly inadequate resources.

Wow.

I wrote about the failing Los Angeles government schools system back in 2010, but the focus then was about under-performing teachers.

Today, the issue is an over-funded system. The government schools are getting $35.000-$50,000 per student, yet doing a crummy job.

How crummy?

Howard Blume of the L.A. Times wrote about the bad news last October.

In math, …about 7 in 10 students do not meet standards. …for Black students…, only 19% met the learning standards in math. …Latinos make up about 3 in 4 students; about 24% met learning standards. …L.A. Unified math scores still were below levels from the 2017-18 school year, two years before the pandemic resulted in campus closures. The same is true for English scores, which were slightly down overall compared with last year, with 41.2% of students meeting standards. Among all district students, scores dropped by half a percentage point.

The only practical answer to this mess is school choice.

Instead of squandering $35,000-$50,000 per student of government schools that produce bad test scores, divvy up the money and give families some type of voucher or educational savings account that can be used to pay tuition at higher-performing private schools.

Families could opt to stay in government schools, of course, especially if they value indoctrination.

But it’s safe to assume most families will be more interested in better education.

Time to expand this map!

Another Crash at the Intersectionality

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Steven Hayward in California, Identity Politics

It was only four years ago that Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon was the new shiny object for California progressives. He finished second in California’s jungle primary for the U.S. Senate seat held by Dianne Feinstein, and even if he couldn’t beat the fellow Democrat in the general election, he appeared set up to succeed her when she finally retired or resigned from office. Just today Feinstein, who hasn’t been heard from in months, issued a statement that she intends to finish out her current term.

If Feinstein does have to step down for health reasons, Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said that he would appoint a Black woman to replace her. Why not De Leon? (Or another Hispanic? Or—eeek—a male?)

Oh that’s right: De Leon was caught on that leaked recording a couple months ago disparaging black politicians in LA. He’s refusing to resign from the City Council. This is not sitting well with LA blacks, who are now outnumbered by Hispanics, but can perceive who stands higher in the Democratic Party hierarchy of victimhood—demographics be damned.

Here’s how they greeted De Leon a couple days ago:.............To Read More...

The Hollywood Power Brokers Mugged by Reality

L.A.'s mayoral race pits a black congresswoman endorsed by Obama against a billionaire developer. "I can’t tell you the number of people who tell me, 'I’m voting for him, but I'm not telling anyone."

Peter Savodnik Nov 3

“This is like a breaking point,” said Nicole Avant, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama and is the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. We were talking about Los Angeles, where she was born and grew up and met her husband.

 “Who is in charge here? How is this happening? 

It’s the drug addicts in front of people’s houses, it’s people naked in the street—there’s so much chaos, and Rick is the opposite of that, and we just need to reel things in and do things in a different way.” She was referring to Rick Caruso, the billionaire real-estate developer running for mayor of the second-biggest city in the country.

Avant is black Hollywood royalty. Her father, Clarence Avant, now 91, was a legend in the music industry, managing the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Freddie Hubbard and Bill Withers. They called him the Black Godfather......

So you might think that Avant would be supporting Karen Bass’s bid to be mayor of Los Angeles. Bass, who is black, is a six-term Democratic congresswoman. In 2020, she was on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist. Days ago, Obama, Avant’s old boss, endorsed her.  

But Avant is backing Bass’s rival, Caruso—who was a Republican for years, and then, in 2011, switched his registration to “decline to state,” and then, in January of this year, switched to Democrat, just in time to run for mayor in a city overflowing with Democrats.....To Read More....

After Reinstating Mask Mandate, Here's the COVID Death Toll from LA County. Prepare to Be Angry Again.

Matt Vespa  Jul 19, 2021

 

Okay, enough. Enough now. I don’t mean to marginalize death from COVID, but panic porn peddlers just need to put it away right now because the latest fatality figures from LA County are beyond absurd if you want to make an argument for the new mask mandate. The county recently reimposed the mask mandate, even for the vaccinated, due to the spread of the Delta variant that isn’t more lethal and doesn’t make you sicker. Also, we’re back to the same store-bought masks that Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted does next to nothing when it comes to curbing COVID spread; it’s in his emails. So, what are we even doing here, folks? A mental safety blanket is not a replacement for sound public policy that's based in science. This is science fiction. We’ve known that for months.

On airplanes, which has never been a source of superspread EVER, passengers must still wear masks. Is it grounded in science? No. According to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, It’s out of respect. So, no—it’s another science fiction sideshow. It’s meant to keep people on edge, but back to LA County. Only nine people died of COVID over the weekend. Nine—out of a county with a population of a little over 10 million. As of July 18, only four new deaths have been reported.........To Read More....

 

L.A. Ordered to Pay NRA Six Figures After Losing First Amendment Case

By Catherine Smith October 2, 2020

The Washington Free Beacon reports, a federal court ordered the city of Los Angeles to pay the NRA’s lawyer fees of approximately $150,000, just months after he ruled a city ordinance violated the gun-rights group’s First Amendment rights.

The City of Los Angeles tried to penalize any contractor with ties to the NRA. The NRA sued over the ordinance and federal district court judge Stephen Wilson ruled it was an unconstitutional violation of the NRA’s First Amendment rights. The city eventually repealed it and on Tuesday, the judge ordered city officials to pay the NRA’s attorney fees totaling about $150,000.

“In this case, the text of the Ordinance, the Ordinance’s legislative history, and the concurrent public statements made by the Ordinance’s primary legislative sponsor evince a strong intent to suppress the speech of the NRA,” Judge Wilson ruled in December. “Even though the Ordinance only forces disclosure of activity that may not be expressive, the clear purpose of the disclosure is to undermine the NRA’s explicitly political speech........To Read More......

 

Police Union tells Garcetti to send his civilian staff to ‘turn off people’s electricity & cut off their water’

Susan Shelley, Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.) | Aug 13, 2020 | Fresh Ink | 37 

The union that represents LAPD officers informed Mayor Eric Garcetti that the police will not help him enforce his orders to shut off the water and power to houses where parties are held.  Garcetti said last week he is cracking down on people who have these prohibited gatherings. Of course, the mayor is one person. His ability to enforce anything depends on his ability to order someone to enforce it.

He can order the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to turn off the utilities, because the LADWP is a city-owned utility run by political appointees and staffed mostly by members of public-employee unions whose salary demands are negotiated with the city government.  Theoretically, he can also order the LAPD to enforce his orders. But union leaders are standing up for the officers.

“Mayor Garcetti wants to reimagine policing. He should send his civilian staff to turn off people’s electricity & cut off their water,” the Los Angeles Police Protective League said on Twitter last weekend, “Let officers deal with the rise in shootings and killings in L.A. We need a leader and not a political contortionist.”...........To Read More...

Whistleblower: LA Dept of Children and Families fabricates evidence to separate children from families

August 1st, 2019 By Victor Skinner

The County of Los Angeles faces a $750 million lawsuit over allegations its Department of Children and Family Services routinely fabricates or excludes evidence to separate children from their families.

Melinda Murphy, a former DCFS employee, recently testified that during her “just shy of 10 years” working in the department in “various capacities” she witnessed rampant misconduct that tore families apart, The Epoch Times reports. .............To Read More....

LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments Saturday, December 22, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

It wasn’t all that long ago that the nation watched transfixed in horror as fires tore apart California, destroying homes and claiming lives. In all the debates about global warming and forestry management, one singular cause of the fire was left unaddressed.

Global warming wasn’t starting the fires. People were.

Last December, the 422-acre Skirball Fire that forced the evacuation of 700 homes and took 10 days to put out was started by illegal cooking in a homeless encampment. The Leo Baeck Temple in Bel-Air, which celebrates "social justice", even sued Los Angeles (both city and county) over fire damage for ignoring multiple complaints about the homeless encampment and the fire hazard that it posed.

This November, the Los Angeles Zoo had to evacuate its animals over a fire in yet another homeless encampment. That fire not only endangered lives, but diverted resources from fighting the much more serious fires in Ventura County.

But instead of shutting down the encampments, Mayor Garcetti, who has done more to legalize and subsidize homelessness in Los Angeles than any of his predecessors, sent "outreach workers" from the expanding behemoth of the LA Homeless Services Agency to ask them to please move.

That worked about as well as expected.

Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer blasted Garcetti for condoning campfires and refusing to arrest "homeless firebugs" and "vagrants" because there weren’t enough "No Trespassing" signs. “It’s unclear to me how many signs Mayor Eric Garcetti thinks he would need to cover the Santa Monica Mountains behind Bel Air and the Getty Museum," he angrily wrote.

Brush fires are just one of the wages of the legalization and subsidization of the homeless. And while these fires are spectacular, they are not the most dangerous consequence.

Los Angeles had doubled its homeless budget to $450 million. Despite that its homeless population had only dropped to 39,826, a reduction of only 256 people. The only surprise in those statistics is that the population dropped at all. Homeless spending has the notorious effect of increasing homeless populations rather than diminishing them as vagrants swarm in and agencies inflate their numbers.

But while doubling its homeless budget didn’t significantly diminish the homeless population in Los Angeles, it did have another spectacular statistical effect on the wellbeing of city residents.

LAPD statistics showed that homeless crime actually increased by nearly 50%, jumping from 5,976 crime reports of homeless perpetrators in most of 2017 to 8,906 crime reports in most of 2018.

Los Angeles had doubled its homeless budget and doubled the amount of homeless crime.

Homeless advocates like to claim that the police wrongly arrest the homeless for quality of life offenses that other people get a pass on. If ordinary people aren’t arrested for public urination or campfires, why should the homeless?

That argument fueled the legalization of homelessness which allowed vagrants to urinate and defecate in public, resulting in businesses fleeing the affected areas, and Hepatitis outbreaks among homeless populations in Los Angeles and other major California cities, and it also allowed them to start fires.

Several epidemics and fires later, not to mention an outbreak of shoplifting and tents being set up in residential areas and outside small businesses, the full scale of homeless legalization looks even worse.

It’s not just the “quality of life” offenses or broken windows policing whose accomplishments helped bring back American cities in the 90s, but which the pro-Crime progressives have been reversing.

LAPD statistics showed that while the homeless were suspects in 4.3% of all crime in Los Angeles, they were the suspects in 12.6% of aggravated assaults. The footprint of homeless crime was three times as high when it came to aggravated assaults compared to the whole general geography of crime.

And that’s not surprising.

Despite the echo chamber of public officials and media talking heads claiming that the homeless are just “ordinary folks” who are down on their luck, the most visible homeless population is the one that stays outside the shelter system, that aggressively camps in public areas and that is mentally ill.

Drive around Los Angeles for a few hours and you will quickly encounter Third World street scenes. Ragged men and women stomp down deserted streets, threatening, cursing and violently gesticulating in the air. Legions of schizophrenics hang out in even the most expensive areas having angry debates with unseen antagonists. And sometimes they take a break from fighting ghosts to punch passerby.

Talk to enough people and the anecdotal stories of being threatened, punched or otherwise assaulted by the homeless population pile up. Most of these assaults aren’t serious and aren’t reported to the police. But they have frightened residents and made them more willing to shovel money into a homeless services system that only encourages and enables the very problem they are hoping to end.

The real story of the homeless crisis is not about economics, it’s about mental illness. And the way it has played out is another demonstration of how leftist activism can manage to wreak havoc on a city, a state or a country on behalf of an incrementally tiny and dysfunctional population.

LAPD statistics show 8,906 crime reports among a homeless population which has been measured at 39,826 people. The crime rate per population in Los Angeles is a little over 3%. Among the homeless, it’s 22%.

Out of 4 million people, 39,826 homeless are responsible for 12.6% or one eight of aggravated assaults.

Less than 1% of the population commits one eight of the aggravated assaults in a city of four million. Meanwhile 4.5% of a budget meant to serve those 4 million is going to 1% of the population.

As it turns out, there is a 1% that is responsible for many of the problems. It’s just the other 1%.

It’s not the people who work harder, who achieve more and who produce more that are the problem. Nor is it the people who have fallen on hard times, but are still looking to get back on their feet.

It’s the people who are wrecking everything.

The greatest lie that leftists have ever told is that they seek to help the less fortunate. They don’t. If they are accidentally helped, that’s collateral assistance. Instead they elevate the most disruptive elements, economically, politically, socially and culturally, in order to wreck cities, states and countries.

Lefty activism insists that everything stop to help that 1% which can’t stop dealing drugs, complaining about microaggressions or urinating in doorways. It inflates their numbers, their suffering and their significance to prop up a narrative of an uncaring society that must be taken over and reformed.

By the Left.

The opposite is true.

It’s not that we care too little. We care too much. The Left took over by playing on that empathy.

Our empathy often overpowers our common sense. We do what feels good, rather than what is good. But our good deeds don’t lead to good outcomes. We legalize homelessness and Hepatitis outbreaks follow among the very people we tried to help. The more money we spend on the homeless, the more homeless there are. And then violence, crime and brush fires break out because we listened to the Left.

The Left wants us to enable criminals and the mentally ill. But when we do that, it not only harms us, it harms them. Mental illness and crime are not social problems. They are individual problems. They only become social problems to the extent that we lose the ability to meaningfully address them. And that not only means that we can’t help ourselves, it also means that we can no longer help them.

California’s homeless crisis is a tragic demonstration of a society losing its values and its sense. The Hepatitis outbreaks, violent assaults and brush fires are just symptoms of what happens when the 99% allow the 1% and its progressive protectors to get away with anything in the name of social justice.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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