California has a huge homeless population fostered by a greedy, sneaky, dirty creature, the Caviar Progressive sipping Chardonnais to look intelligent. Right, some of that homelessness is caused by California’s balmy climate: whereas a winter in Chicago will freeze the homeless, this is not the case in the San Francisco bay. Many of these homeless persons are dangerously deranged and yet, they are left without treatment. Simply defecating in the street with thirty drug holes in the arms while threatening passersby with death and punishment is not enough cause for dispatching the insane to a psychiatric asylum (the black mayor of San Francisco, born and raised there, in the poorest part of the city, wants to change this, and send the crazies behind lock and key… But she has been opposed by the Caviar Progressives who live in the wealthiest neighborhoods…)
Other homeless persons are the exact opposite: employed people… who can’t afford housing, because in the Silicon Valley it cost more than the average salary to rent. I have lived in the SF Bay Area for decades, between Stanford and Berkeley. Initially there was not a single homeless person in sight.
But things changed in the last 15 years. I contemplated for years the growth of a huge homeless encampment on a small wooded peninsula in the Bay. I called it “Obamaville”, as it appeared after a few years of Obama’s ambiguous reign… and consequence thereof. Obamaville was evacuated at the same time as its namesake and the area is now a nature park popular with families. Prior to evacuation, I talked many times with the residents, who often lived with fierce, large dogs… for obvious reasons. But many other camps appeared, mostly below freeways. A source of income is stealing stuff and reselling it cheap.
Meanwhile I also rubbed elbows and engaged in conversation with whom I call “CAVIAR PROGRESSIVES”. Caviar Progressives believe first of all in progressing in society, and hide this by claiming to care about progress of society. Caviar progressives typically have at least two expensive electric cars, one for him, one for her, plus a fossil fuel SUV to go to their Lake Tahoe mansion, up in the Sierra Nevada.
I have known plenty of these people… as friends.Their politics consists only in speaking about Trump as if he were Hitler, whom they courageously resist. One, who I have known for more than 40 years, a doctor, now a sumtuously paid, globe trotting VP at a major Biotech company, assuming I had lived overseas, told me: “You were not here, you don’t know how it was under Trump!” I am sure it was tough for her, flying first class around the planet, earning million dollars a year (and she owns shares).
Once Caviar Progressives find out that you live in an apartment not located in the priciest neighbohood, they never talk to you again: if one lives in a good home in the SF Bay, it’s worth millions of dollars, and those not worth millions are just mot worthy: they can’t plausibly help Caviar Progressives to progress in the sense which progress really matters to them.
So one gets cancelled, and neither mail, email, or phone calls get answered.
Homelessness is not a problem with Caviar Progressives: they don’t live anywhere near where the homeless are (their local police evacuate the homeless immediately, as if they were dangerous terrorists… I know such neighborhoods, such as Atherton, a city contiguous to Palo Alto; Atherton is the most expensive city in the US if not the world with average home prices well above 6 million dollars, 100 times the average US family income). Yes I know of at least three families living there (we are not tight anymore…)
The pretend-politics of Caviar Progressives is not just a matter of gossip about Caviar Progressives being hypocrites, shallow and pretentious persons who can’t be trusted. Caviar Progressives steer California. Those people party with, meet with, socialize with, finance, organize and direct the local politicians who do exactly what they are told by their sponsors (I have been at some of these meetings).
Main message: hate Trump, and attribute him all evils… affecting California. Now California is pretty much a partly direct self-administered state. No Trump policy directly affected it, ever. And the massive homelessness affecting California exploded under Obama… Just like the crazies in the street started under Obama’s inspiration, Ronald Reagan, who cut Federal spending on psychiatric care.
I have traveled on the freeways represented in the picture above, several times a week, for decades. The camps are fully visible. The disgusting camp of Wood Street has recently been replaced by dozens of prefabricated ultra tiny identical cabins obviously installed by the government.
Homelessness is a vast problem with several dimensions. Lack of housing and laws preventing the forced hospitalization of the mentally deranged are major problems. London Breed, born and raised in a poor part of San Francisco and its present “black” mayor, has been trying to change that. But caviar progressives have opposed her fiercely.
Caviar progressive live far from the homeless and use them for renown or power . Indeed, caviar progressives suffer from Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a psychological disorder marked by attention-seeking behavior by pseudo-caregivers through those who are in their care. So caviar progressives typically bemoan homelessness, while preventing the construction of homes, and in particular residential towers with many apartments. This prevention of affordable housing keeps up the values of the multi million dollar individual houses caviar progressives live in. This hypocrisy and conflict of interest has been driving the problem for decades.
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Now some may say: wait a minute, California is an enormous success, with a bigger GDP than Germany and less than half of the population. High tech companies such as Nvidia, Space X, Intel, Apple, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, Facebook are based there… But this is mostly from inertia. The direct democracy system of California is a century old. The SF Bay Area built more than 4,000 “Liberty Ships” during World War Two, much of the US aircraft industry was born in LA, and California has produced so much fossil fuels that it enabled the Japanese imperial army to invade China, 92 years ago…. So California is an enormous success, right, and it was to some extent propelled by a number of horrendous policies: cutting the world’s tallest trees, cutting down the Natives, exploiting Chinese workers… So the homelessness crisis is pretty much in a grand old tradition… So why should I care?
Simple: California is increasingly leading the world mentally, especially as Western Europe is sort of fading away, from a will to self-oblivion. So if the present California Caviar Progressives’ way of festering while feasting in a monster inequality world succeed to impose itself as the new normal, it will only reinforce the global plutocratic order… at the (rotten) core of which one could find the Kremlin before Putin suffered a severe technical malfunction…
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And the solution? Build. As the French dicton has it:”Quand the batiment va, tout va!” (When building does well, so does everything else).
The non-building program of California has been excused by NIMBYism (Not In My BackYardism)… but the root is worse: by not building the pseudo-Democrats have got wealthier from extravagant home appreciation. It’s sheer greed, led by Caviar Progressives, which propels homelessness in California. Now even plutocrat governor Newsom (who I have crticized heavily in the past for his quadi genetic connection with the Getty plutocratic family) has been trying to change that for the best, and even Berkeley is now building massively…. So there are forces for change: laws were passed forcing cities to build (building in Atherton should happen according to those laws….)
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When the Western economies boomed, 1945-1975, they were building a lot. Nowadays, one should build more than ever, to foster the new ecology that is needed.
To progress in the correct direction, for the betterment of all, build. No more caviar.
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 