OP-ED Tammy Bruce: The dystopian nightmare that is California has been brought to you by... Democrats

Dennis Olson

Chief Curmudgeon
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Tammy Bruce: The dystopian nightmare that is California has been brought to you by... Democrats
Tammy Bruce
6-7 minutes

It takes a lot of resilience to look over one’s shoulder at California. We Americans are a proud people and love our country. We know we’re wildly imperfect, but we also have seen our country overcome difficulties to become a more perfect union.

California, not so much.

One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally. Despite the emergence of louse-borne typhus, Los Angeles can’t seem to get its act together.

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported a week ago on the obscene condition of downtown Los Angeles, “A mountain of rotting, oozing, stinking trash … stretching a good 20 yards along a skid row alley. Rats popped their heads out of the debris like they were in a game of Whac-A-Mole, then scampered for cover as a tractor with a scoop lurched toward them. … The trash problem is not confined to any one street, but this particular location on the 800 block of Ceres Avenue is surrounded by food distribution companies that sell to shoppers, vendors, stores and restaurants. I counted seven within a block, so you have to wonder — given the colonies of football-size rats — about the potential contamination of the food supply chain and the spread of disease.”

What does the city say when confronted about the slow, or nonexistent, pace of cleanup?

A “spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. … ‘If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,’ she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup,” the Times reported.

That’s right. Their concern for the people who are at ground zero for emerging deadly viruses is to follow protocols involving surveys and inventories. So don’t you worry — big government is keeping itself busy, as it behaves as though it’s normal to have more than 2,000 people sleeping on trash heaps, as potential epidemics lurk.

This is the idiotic disaster brought to you by unrestrained liberal leadership as it creates problems, then births a bureaucracy that will never deal with it.

One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally.

In San Francisco alone, as The New York Times reported, one of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire. The state actually has a budget surplus, but as we see, money can’t cure stupid.

Which brings us to Gov. Gavin Newsom and his plan. He’s outraged, just outraged at the “national disgrace” of California’s homelessness.

The Ventura County Star reported, “Gov. Gavin Newsom called growing homelessness in California a national disgrace as he announced Tuesday that he is launching a task force to find solutions amid a housing crisis in the most populous state.”

Like Los Angeles, instead of dealing with the reality of the problem, Newsom announced the creation of a task force, the members of which will travel around the state and make recommendations. There’s only one recommendation, and they won’t like it, that will change the state’s fate: a plea to all California voters to stop electing Democrats.

Yes, there’s nothing finer in a leader than the effort to blame everyone else for the scourge of homelessness your fellow Democrats have created over the years. California’s disaster isn’t a national disgrace, it’s not even California’s disgrace; it’s the disgrace of every liberal politician in the state who has led that state into medieval crisis.

Speaking of medieval crises, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the addiction medicine specialist, told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that a deadly epidemic could emerge in Los Angeles during the summer months.

"I live in the great state of California, the utopia that is California, which is a nightmare,’ Pinsky said. ‘I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.’ He continued, ‘We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re gonna have louse-borne illness. If measles breaks into that population, we have tuberculosis exploding. Literally, our politicians are like Nero. It’s worse than Nero,’ Pinsky said,” Fox News reported.

But it’s different now. Every Nero has a task force.

It’s so bad in California, even The New York Times deigned to allow an opinion piece decrying the growing instability of the state.

In “America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals,” opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote, “The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives … the streets [are] a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a ‘Black Mirror’ hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions.”

And yet most 2020 Democratic candidates for president want you to believe that President Trump is the problem, and the Democratic policies creating the dystopian nightmare in California should be exported throughout the nation. Yeah, no.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tam...lifornia-has-been-brought-to-you-by-democrats
 

GammaRat

Veteran Member
And Springfield, Missouri debated licensing trash pick to specific companies, thereby removing the free market.

Thank God there was a kickback, and people can contract with whoever they like.

This is an example of the "socialist ideal"
 

GammaRat

Veteran Member
Written in 2014... LOL!!!


A Better Way to Take Out the Garbage?

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/a-better-way-to-take-out-the-garbage

Change has never come easily to this city’s dirtiest industry. In the early nineties, a Houston-based waste-management company called Browning-Ferris decided to expand into New York City. The Times reported that the company hosted a press conference on the steps of City Hall and sponsored the 1993 New York City Marathon. It even won a lucrative contract to collect trash from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. But the local garbage industry was still firmly under mafia control. One morning, according to “Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail of Trash,” by Elizabeth Royte, a Browning-Ferris executive’s wife awoke to find the head of a dead German shepherd on her suburban lawn. A note stuffed in the dog’s mouth read, “Welcome to New York.”

New York City has a crowded system for collecting businesses’ garbage. In San Francisco, a single waste hauler has an exclusive contract to collect trash. Seattle is divided into four waste-collection zones, handled by two garbage companies. Los Angeles is transitioning to a system in which eleven districts will be serviced by one hauler each. These cities have government-regulated commercial-waste systems. Philadelphia uses a free-market system, as does New York, in which private haulers negotiate directly with businesses. Still, it has only about fifteen commercial-waste haulers; Chicago and Houston, also free-market cities, have fourteen and a hundred and forty-one, respectively. More than two hundred and fifty licensed commercial-waste haulers operate in New York.

When I recently walked down a four-block stretch of Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I identified about forty businesses—restaurants, clothing shops, bodegas, banks. Licenses in windows listed the commercial-waste haulers they use—at least fourteen in all, by my count, for a stretch that covers only a fifth of a mile. If there was a pattern, I couldn’t grasp it: the Starbucks at Ninety-third and Broadway uses a different commercial-waste company from the Starbucks at Ninety-fifth and Broadway.

Benjamin Miller, a former director of policy planning for the Department of Sanitation (and the author of “Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last Two Hundred Years”), told me this is rooted in the New York garbage world’s mafia past. The commercial-waste industry was traditionally lucrative and not very transparent, so it was an attractive venue for organized crime. In 2001, the city created the Organized Crime Control Commission, which was later renamed the Business Integrity Commission (BIC), to promote competition and discourage criminal control of the commercial-waste industry. The commission set maximum garbage-collection rates to prevent extortion, and launched other anti-corruption initiatives. It worked, more or less: the mafia no longer dominates commercial waste, and the booming number of haulers kept options plentiful—and trash-collection fees low—for businesses around town.

But those efforts had an unintended consequence: in an already congested city, unrestricted competition has coaxed a whole lot of garbage trucks onto the streets—more than four thousand. Trucks crisscross each other, often several times a night, as they drive overlapping routes around town. Besides adding to traffic, this can be bad for the environment and public health. Diesel pollution poses a cancer risk, and is associated with asthma and chronic bronchitis. The black carbon in diesel exhaust contributes to climate change. Garbage trucks can be a hazard for pedestrians and cyclists, and a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that the fatal injury rate among waste workers was more than eight times the average for all professions.

In October, the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), a union-backed, non-profit advocacy group, proposed that the local government organize the city into a to-be-determined number of commercial-waste zones, and that it invite trash collectors to bid for all the businesses in each zone. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration “is reviewing the proposal,” a spokesman told me. The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a non-profit that studies local-government finances, is developing a second franchise proposal, which CBC’s consulting research director, Charles Brecher, told me will likely be released this spring.

Environmentalists and labor activists say that a franchise system, similar to models in Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere, would lower the number of garbage trucks on the road, minimize mileage, and eliminate route overlaps. ALIGN’s report claims that New York City’s residential-waste system—which is publicly run, by the Department of Sanitation—is five times more efficient than the private commercial-waste providers. A franchise system could also force waste haulers to meet increased environmental and labor standards in order to participate, like recycling more and lowering their trucks’ emissions.

“Today, New York’s commercial-waste industry is the Wild West,” Matt Ryan, the executive director of ALIGN, said. “We have all these different companies competing for business on the same blocks. It obviously keeps costs low, but it drives down wages and safety standards for workers.”
 

Breeta

Veteran Member
and when you think that .5% of the sales tax in LA County is geared toward helping the homeless, it’s even more disgusting. That $$ is lining the pockets of somebody, and it’s not the homeless!! Sales tax is 10.25% where I live. It’s insane!
 

marymonde

Veteran Member
....we have tuberculosis exploding.


I’ve been reading about the drug resistant strains of tuberculosis coming up from Latin America, with Brazil, Peru, and Mexico consisting of the highest incidences of the disease. This is scary stuff because nothing responds to it. At this point the drug resistant strains compromise about 10% of the cases, but the mortality rate is MUCH higher than treatable TB cases. Factor in TB has a high co-morbidity rate of contracting other diseases, especially diabetes, with it. It seems to help in the spread secondary infections as well. I believe this could really turn into a huge nightmare out in CA. That’s one place I’d stay away from, especially this summer.
 

Texican

Live Free & Die Free.... God Freedom Country....
A “spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. … ‘If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,’ she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup,” the Times reported.

The democraps learn how to pass the blame early in their government careers....

Texican....
 

GammaRat

Veteran Member
So now they're inventorying TRASH. They need to know if its actually trash or a homeless person's "property".
 

kittyluvr

Veteran Member
So a demonrat mayor(NYC) can order mandatory MMR vaccinations because of a measles outbreak, but the LA mayor cannot order a department under his control to pick up the trash when there is a typhus outbreak... Just insane.
 
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