CommentsMAN’S OPINION ONE -In a nation founded on the basis that our Republic is the best form of government to secure the inalienable rights of every individual, Angelenos prefer feudalism.
As most CityWatch readers know, LA City Council votes unanimously 99% of the time due to its illegal vote trading system. This means that each councilmember is the lord or lady of his or her realm, provided they kowtow to Prince Garcetti. Decades of perpetual bribery takes its toll on the civic well-being, yet Angelenos remain as clueless as a blind man looking in a dark closet for a black hat which isn’t there.
Where are the investigations into the massive bribery-extortion system that runs LA City Council? Each councilmember gets 100% support for any project he proposes from every other councilmember in return to giving unwavering support for all other corrupt projects. The LA Times and the other media have an official policy of “see no evil, hear no evil, report no evil.”
Given that in the last 20 years, Los Angeles has nose-dived from the nation’s most favored destination city to the least desirable, with the worst traffic congestion in the world and the worst GINI Coefficient for any major U.S. urban area, one would think Angelenos might be ready for a change. But they’re not.
The death rate among LA’s homeless is worse than the death rate from Covid-19. Yet, Angelenos don’t care about the astronomical death rate among that population. They care that people without homes urinate and poop in the streets, but don’t care that the city has refused to provide adequate bathroom facilities for the homeless. For years, Garcetti’s policy has been “Just hold it in.”
Of course, one can tell Angelenos almost anything, except the truth about our reality, and they will believe it. From reading Pravda West (LA Times) and listening to the local TV stations, one would think that mental illness has caused the homeless crisis. But the media never goes deep enough to answer the obvious question: “What caused his sudden rise in mental illness which has resulted in people abandoning their homes to live on the streets?” (They don’t answer because there has been no sudden rise in mental illness.)
Thinking about this helps point us to answer the original question: “Why are LA Voters so Low Information?”
Answer: We live on a constant diet of propaganda.
The homelessness crisis may best highlight the nature of our disinformation. Angelenos have watched homelessness grow from the normal skid row problem where individual human troubles such as alcoholism did make a significant contribution to an individual losing everything and becoming homeless; people have witnessed the ubiquitous tents lining the streets. Let’s also be aware that for every tent on the street, there are homeless encampments hidden in the brush along the freeways; thousands are also living in cars and RVs.
Pravda West and the local TV media are the grand purveyors of disinformation about the causes and possible solutions to the crisis. The LA Times has always been the mouthpiece for LA’s elite since it was found in December 1881.
It was hoped that when billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased Pravda West, he would not be infected with LA’s elitism and might even reform the paper. Well, no. Things have gotten worse. Maybe with the paper’s former owners in Chicago, some of the reporters got away with spates of decent reporting such as when the LA Times exposed the massive bribery fraud around the Sea Breeze Project or published the article in January 2015 about the epidemic of judicial corruption. (“Misconduct” was federal judge Alex Kozinski’s term).
Despite the city’s continuing downhill trajectory, the LA media steadfastly keeps Angelenos in the dark about the causes of the decline. As I predicted years ago in CityWatch, LA is experiencing a net population loss. Has the LA Times apologized for its years of proclaiming the dramatic “breakthrough” of LA hitting the four million population mark?
How the media keeps Angelenos playing the roles of Dumb and Dumber
The primary season is upon us and one would think that Angelenos would want their national politicos to discuss the causes of problems. They won’t. Ole Uncle Joe made Garcetti his national co-chair. A decent media would have lambasted Biden for such an egg-headed move. Garcetti is more responsible than any other Angeleno for LA’s descent to “third world nation” level with typhus not only in the streets but in City Hall. Since “Straighter Eric” (thanks Daniel Guss) has been LA’s longest serving politico and his Manhattanization mania is the driving force behind LA’s demise, the media should have been reporting about this vast corruption for over decades. Instead, LA’s mainstream media has been one of the Garcetti’s biggest supporters.
Angelenos don’t even care that the LA media is taking a page from 1930s Germany where certain segments of the population were once stigmatized for the benefit of the ruling elite. Mental illness has not caused our homelessness crisis. Rather, a corrupt ruling class which has destroyed the housing market for its own financial windfalls has brought this on, contributing to the exorbitant cost of home and the exodus of family millennials.
Perhaps the world’s most “low-information” President has best exemplified the myopic approach to homelessness. For Trump, the problem is we see poor people. For him, all we need to do is shove them out of sight and the problem will be solved. That’s the real impetus behind “shelters” – hide homeless people from public view so real estate developers can continue destroying housing for the average Angeleno. You can expect Trump, Ole Uncle Joe, and the Berniecrats, along with Pravda West, to goose-step over the actual causes of the homeless crisis with all sorts of disinformation designed to keep the dollars flowing upwards to the 1%.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
