"Helping" The Homeless For Fun And Profit
Today, class, we're having a pop quiz, consisting of a single essay question. Oops! I forgot -- thanks to advances in education, we no longer have "quizzes," "tests" or "essay questions!"
Let me start over:
Today, class we'll be having a "formal assessment." You will write a "constructed response" to the following question:
"Suppose you are in charge of spending $800,000 of taxpayers' hard-earned money to prevent the mentally ill, drunks and drug addicts from living on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. How would you spend it?"
According to the L.A. Daily News, the County's answer is to spend the $800,000 on an "outreach campaign to deal with 'anticipated adverse community reaction' to proposed homeless shelters and plans to locate centers throughout the county."
Great concept! I wish I had thought of that! Let's spend nearly a million dollars to try to convince people to embrace our plan to spend an additional $80 million building "regional stabilization centers" in their neighborhoods!
Have you ever noticed how the solution to every problem in L.A. is to spend tax dollars on public relations and construction? Why do you suppose that is?
How about we instead have some state legislators pass some laws so we can put the mentally ill in mental institutions regardless of whether they consent to it -- especially since the idea of a mentally ill person having the capacity to consent to anything is dubious at best. And how about we simply enforce the laws against public intoxication for those who are not mentally ill, but are instead drunk or high?
No, we won't do that. Proposals like that would not transfer enough of your money to developers and the "homeless industry."
Rather, what we need are lots of choreographed "fact finding" and "outreach" meetings, lots of concerned employees from "nonprofits," some "educational" campaigns, a number of disturbing photos, three or four tragic stories, a good soundtrack, and, of course, many many grants, low-interest loans and other programs to distribute your money to developers. That, my friend, is how you solve a problem in L.A. in 2006: give taxpayers' money to developers to build structures.
What if you dare speak out against this insanity? Well, then you're a heartless, selfish bastard. After all, as long as anyone claims he is acting on behalf of the homeless, it doesn't really matter whether his proposal makes any sense. The simple act of saying you are helping the hopeless, in and of itself, establishes the validity of your proposal. After all, any animal with four legs and wool must be a sheep.
Read it and weep: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_4383374.
Posted by Walter Moore @ 9/23/2006 10:14:00 AM
19 Comments:
Thank you for the sanity...let's vote these bastards out and put in some people who understand these mentally ill homeless people need help and cannot fend for themselves. Their families, who should be responsible for them probably don't even know where they are and if they are dead or alive. We work hard for our money and members of this board have always lived on our backs.
There is no way that building more structures with our tax money will help the homeless. Put them in a box and hide them for the benefit of the developers who fill the pockets of the politicians to give them our money? If anything could help the homeless it would be rehabilitation, not placing them in a box. Our tax dollars could be better used - like for the needs of those who pay the taxes.
I am very tired of 50% of my tax dollars going to charities that I don't approve of. If you can't afford children, you should get birth control or an abortion. I don't mind paying for that but free babies contribute to our prisons, mental institutions, and homeless because they had Mom's that gave birth for a check, not out of love but out of laziness, that doesn't make for a good Mom so the child will find a real family in a gang.
I can just pray they don't kill someone I love for an initiation.
Our tax dollars at work.
Oh, Walter, what are we going to do with you? You lament against developers in the most loquacious manner - forgetting all the while that you support developers on this blogspot all the time.
Who the Hell do you think Home Depot is?
Talk to the folks in Kagel Canyon about a location in the Angeles National Forest recently purchased by the Rescue Mission to move homeless families from downtown Los Angeles to the wilderness in the foothills of Los Angeles County.
You know, crack moms, their undisciplined children, and several packs of matches.
WhooYahh!!
They ought to take that $800,000 and buy one of them new-fangled, water-carrying helicopters right away, or do you think delinquent teenagers don't cook Meth?
meth and crack are both stimulants that keep you awake all nite. thats probably why they're so rampant in skid row. i'd wanna be awake all night, watching out for my life, and sleep during the day.
so the hours on that agreement are wrong, let skid row have no tents at nite, but provide empty lots they can sleep in at daytime, no tents, and under daylight supervision. that at least keeps the downtown business community happy, cause they don't really care who's walking around at night, they want these people gone in the daytime, so lets find a place for daytime sleeping, with erected shade...I think thats what it takes. at least until everyone agrees where to put them permanently.
Find their families and make them responsible for them. I am tired of paying for drug addicts and criminals. The mentally ill can't help themselves, and we may need to give them assistance. Every time I am taxed it's money for food out of my families mouth... I for one am tired of elected officials spending money like it's water for programs that don't work. Non profit organizations do a lot better job helping those in need. Because they want to truly be apart of the solution and give assistance to those in need. They're not looking for votes in their next election...
Look at King Drew, it's never worked and only drains us. Spending millions of dollars to analyize what's wrong instead of just fixing the problems. My dog could have already fix the problems. This is a perfect example of "gift of public funds" to companies who just donate to these loser supervisors campaign coffers. And we should check into how much of our tax dollars are given out to PR firms, law firms, builders, etc. and rolled over in campaign donations...The community calls it "KILLER KING." THEY BEG THE PARAMEDICS TO TAKE THEM SOMEWHERE -ANYWHERE ELSE. Even they know it can't be fixed and never worked.
Can we discuss how the county is trying to pass a provision to change there employment applications to omit the question "Have you ever been arrested?"
11:47
Only if we can include a discussion about how a convicted felon allegedly turned up as a city hall trollup. With accesss to employees identites even thought he or she was convicted of credit card fraud.
It's a good question. Were you arrested? If yes, were you convicted and of what? If you were arrested go work for the private sector. I don't want you in my government. And the city hall trollup is about to become the poster child for this. And the city hall trollup is a convicted felon who has guns. So let's have a conversation about that, too.
12:07
Under federal gun laws, a convicted felon possessing guns is itself a crime, so be careful what accusations you throw around so matter-of-factly. Maybe you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
In Los Angeles, when the Mayor wants police and the people don't, the Mayor takes your money from other accounts. When the Mayor can't manage DWP, Harbor, or Airports, he takes money from the Los Angeles Unified School District. When the Mayor wants to take care of developers and builders, he gets blind Building and Safety Inspectors, reposesses community property, and congregates the homeless where everyone can see them. Sort of setting up the City to fall (fail) to the direction of his constituent oligarchy you might say. Would that be too far off the mark?
The mayor was given temporary control by the state to oversee some of the schools in LAUSD. He was not given control to choose the superintendent of all the schools. The school board members who were elected to represent us has that privilege. The mayor has little man syndrome.
As for all the developers who donate to school board races, well the little man is trying to get some of that money too.
Any business doing business with the government should not be able to donate to their campaigns. Nor their family members or anyone connected.
7:34 AM
You wish
Hahahahahahahahahahah!!!
I agree with you 7:34. A conviction for petty theft or credit card forgery or WHATEVER is NO reason to deny a good citizen the right to bear arms. It is in the constitution, yes? That stupid law must be changed. For guns, licenses, government employees heck anything. Some people just don't know what the hell they are talking about with felony or misdemeanor convictions. Be careful about what you are saying. Good people get convicted too.
Does anyone know how to find the voting records of Neighborhood Council members?
are they posted on-line?
also, can the guy who is always posting about how few people vote in Neighborhood Council elections please let us know where to get that information?
also does anyone know if there is an analysis of the demographic make-up of various neighborhood councils and how it reflects or does not reflect the neighborhoods that the council represents?
Thank you!!!
Probably the best thing you can do is go to lacityneighborhoods.com and just search around until you find the information.
They posted my voting figures wrong.
I had a very successful meeting with nearly 100 people there tonight.
The first time we saw homeless in the last half of the last century was in the 80's when Ronald Reagan closed the mental hospitals. This happened just as the burnt-out addicts began hitting the streets.
Now look at the mess we have.
The first solution is to re-open the mental hospitals. Then we need to re-open the health clinics that the county closed a few years ago.
Next, get rehabs with realistic programs and long-term therapy up and running including shelters for mothers and their children - abused or not - and education and training enacted.
At the same time the Clouncil should change the ridiculous list of rules and mechanations that have been strung out by them making it Hell to handle the homeless.
But even if we had the money and these were honest politicians would this ever happen? Not likely.
So what's left? Don't know. What I do know is that the City Clowncilmembers, had better keep in mind that bringing the homeless to the suburbs is going to be the last straw that is going to get a lot of you thrown out of office - incubents or not!
The reason the "mentally ill" are wandering the streets is hat a court decision some 30 years ago (brougt by the ACLU) ruled that they could not be held against their will. If they do not want to be in an institution, they cannot be forced to be in one. Most of the "bums" are mentally ill or addicts ( you cannot tell the difference as most are a combination of the two) choose to be there and reject the programs (Los Angeles Mission) that will help them. Santa Monica and San Fran have both shown that if you have a City that encourages them you will attract them. See any in Beverly Hills, Culver City or Glendale? No. Those cities do not encourage them, nor tolerate them.
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