Officials begin clearing
out homeless encampment in Anaheim, California
By Kevin Martinez
23 January 2018
Authorities in Anaheim, California have begun clearing out
homeless encampments along the Santa Ana river where as many as 1,000 people
live in tents and makeshift shelters. The largest encampment, a three-mile long
tent city, is located near Angel Stadium, the home field of the Los Angeles
Angels major league baseball team. The camp has attracted many for whom rent is
too high in Orange and Los Angeles Counties.
Officials began posting formal notices in early January notifying
residents that they must start moving out within two weeks. Shipping containers
have been pre-placed throughout the embankment to store tons of trash and
personal belongings once the evictions begin.
The city’s plan is a “slow and methodical” drive to get the
homeless to leave, with Orange County Sheriff’s deputies and county workers
descending at 9 a.m. on Monday morning along the flood control channel, which
stretches from Anaheim to the City of Orange. County officials say this plan
could take from several days to a few weeks without giving a firm deadline.
After the first week, once the local media leaves, the city will
employ a tougher approach. Teams of police and health officials will request
“voluntary compliance” for homeless individuals to leave, and if they don’t,
they will begin writing citations and making arrests. The teams will also ask
people if they want to store or throw away their tents and belongings and have
offered to kennel pets and keep items for up to 90 days. Officials have also
offered to refer people to pickup locations where vans will take them to
homeless shelters.
Beyond that, there is no official plan for where hundreds of
people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness, and other
life-threatening issues, will stay. As of this year, Orange County has only 250
shelter beds available. More than three-fourths of those beds are in armory
shelters, which do not allow residents to stay in the day time, and limit the
belongings people can bring.
Of the 623 tent city residents the county has officially reached out
to since July in Anaheim and Orange, only a quarter have been given shelter,
another quarter are still waiting for housing and half refused services.
Many residents of the tent city worry just how “voluntary” the
compliance will be to leave the Santa Ana embankment.
Conrad Alcaraz, a 40-year-old man who
has not been able to find work since being injured in a car accident several
years ago told the Orange County Register, “They’re gonna
come over and intimidate us,” adding, “To me, this is home. How are they gonna
kick us out? What shelter is open?”
Another homeless man, Nick Trullench, a
former IT worker who lost his job due to health problems, told the Register that
he is still waiting for a Section 8 housing voucher but will most likely end up
on the streets of Anaheim or Orange. “Where else am I going to go?” he
lamented, “They just don’t want to see us. This is an issue of aesthetics for
the county.”
As part of an effort to ensure that the homeless do not congregate
in other parts of the city, the Orange Police Department has put up notices in
local neighborhoods asking residents to report illegal encampments and
suspicious behavior. City officials have also hired private security to patrol
public parks after hours.
Advocates for the homeless have rightly pointed out that eviction
will just shuffle the poor and destitute into sleeping on sidewalks and other
inhospitable parts of the city. Officials will close down the trail along the
river for up to three months and afterwards will begin regular patrols to
prevent any camping.
The growth of a tent city in Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, and
its eviction, is just the most visible sign of the homeless crisis in
California, the most extreme in the nation. The immediate cause is unaffordable
rent and wages that have not kept up with the increasing cost of living.
In 2017, homelessness grew by 1 percent across the United States,
and in Orange County it increased by nearly 7 percent in the last two years. On
any given night there were at least 4,792 people living on the streets or in
emergency shelter last year. The number of people sleeping outside, without
shelter, has gone up by 50 percent in the last four years.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Orange County is one
of the least affordable places to live in the United States with the general
cost of living 43 percent above the national average. A single parent with two
children working two minimum wage jobs would have to pay 59.5 percent of their
income toward housing to pay for a two-bedroom apartment.
Such conditions are widespread
throughout the United States. The UN special rapporteur on adequate housing,
Leilani Farha, recently visited San Francisco, where she spoke to homeless
people living in squalid conditions on the streets, including a man who was
heating tortillas in a crockpot with burning paper. She told The Guardian,
“The last time I saw cooking on a sidewalk was in Mumbai.”
In San Francisco alone, more than 7,500 homeless individuals were
counted last year with two-thirds suffering from health conditions, including
brain injury and HIV/AIDS. The waitlist to get into a city shelter is over
1,000 names long.
In the face of this growing crisis the Trump administration’s 2018
budget calls for $6.2 billion in cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), as well as deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. The head
of HUD, Ben Carson, infamously declared last year that poverty was merely a
“state of mind.”
Oxfam: Bottom
half of world’s population received none of the wealth created in 2017
By Niles
Niemuth
23 January 2018
With the world’s elite and their political representatives
converging on Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum this week, Oxfam
released its annual report on global inequality, exposing the historic growth
of social inequality over the last year.
Nearly all global wealth growth in 2017, 82 percent, went to the
top one percent, while the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8
billion people, saw nothing at all. Last year saw the largest increase in the
number of billionaire’s worldwide in history. The number of dollar billionaires
currently stands at 2,043, with a new billionaire created every two days.
Every year, the Oxfam report reveals an increasingly irrational
and untenable political and economic setup, in which a handful of elites engorge
themselves on the wealth created by the labor of billions.
“All over the world our economy of the 1% is built on the backs of
low paid workers, often women, who are paid poverty wages and denied basic
rights,” the report notes. Women provided $10 trillion in unpaid care work last
year in support of the global economy, according to data cited by Oxfam.
A recent survey by the International Labour Organization (ILO)
found that nearly one in three workers in emerging and developing countries
live in poverty, and that this figure is only increasing. Even more exploited
are the 40 million who were enslaved in 2016, forced to work for nothing as
modern slaves in a host of industries including harvesting shrimp, sewing
garments and cleaning buildings. The ILO estimates that 25 million of the
enslaved worldwide are forced labor.
Over the course of the past year, the world’s billionaires saw
their wealth increased by $762 billion, enough to eliminate extreme poverty
from the face of the planet seven times over. From 2006 to 2015, the typical
worker saw their average income rise by just two percent a year. This was
dwarfed by a 13 percent annual increase in billionaire wealth.
Rather than being the result of hard work on the part of the
world’s billionaires, the report found that two-thirds of billionaire wealth is
the product to inheritance, monopoly, and cronyism. The 500 richest people in
the world are expected to hand down $2.4 trillion to their heirs over the next
two decades, an amount larger than the GDP of India.
Oxfam notes that the world’s billionaires utilize their extreme
wealth and connections to manipulate public policy, take advantage of
privatization deals, procure natural resource giveaways, and benefit from tax
exemptions and loopholes to further enrich themselves at the public expense.
The super-rich can dodge taxes by hiding their money in an
international network of offshore tax havens. Accord to data contained in the
leaked Panama and Paradise Papers, some $7.6 trillion is being shielded from
taxation. An analysis of the data by economist Gabriel Zucman found that the
super-rich are avoiding $200 billion in taxes through the use of tax havens.
Nearly every country can lay claim to a handful of rich elites who
control enough wealth to eliminate hunger, poverty and all other social ills.
The report found that the richest man in Nigeria, Aliko Dangote,
earns enough just in interest on his $13 billion in wealth to pull two million
out of extreme poverty. At the same time that Dangote has become one of the
richest people in history, poverty has risen in Nigeria.
The four richest men in Indonesia owned more wealth in 2017 than
the bottom 100 million people in the world’s largest island country. Nearly
half of the country’s population, approximately 133 million people, continues
to languish in poverty.
Meanwhile, in Brazil a worker earning the minimum wage must work
19 years to make the same amount that someone in that country’s top 0.1 percent
makes in a single month.
When it comes to social inequality within so-called developed
countries, the United States is in a league of its own. In little more than a
day, a typical CEO in the US earns as much as the average worker will make in a
year. The three richest people in the US owned as much wealth as the bottom
half of the population, approximately 160 million people.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Seattle-based Amazon, recently became the
richest person in world history with a net worth of $105.1 billion, which he
acquired off the backs of a highly exploited international workforce of some
300,000 employees. Amazon workers in India make as little as $233 per month,
while workers in the US average less than $13 an hour.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates follows closely behind Bezos with
$92.3 billion, while Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, claims a net
worth of $87 billion. The implementation of tax cuts signed into law by
President Donald Trump late last year will only accelerate the growth of the
gap between the top and the bottom.
The ever-increasing concentration of so much wealth into so few
hands to the detriment of the billions who toil every day just to meet their
basic needs makes the case for the expropriation and redistribution of the
global plutocracy’s ill-gotten gains.
In just one instance cited by Oxfam, it would cost only $2.2
billion to raise all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage.
This is just one third of the amount that was paid to the shareholders in the
country’s top five garment sector corporations last year.
THE INVADING
CRIMINALS:
A county by county
chart:
According to the nonpartisan Center for
Immigration Studies, the deportations occurred between October 2008 and
February 2015. The three counties with the most deportations during this period were Los
Angeles County, Calif.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; and Harris County, Texas.
*
Heather Mac Donald of the
Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in
2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for
illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were
illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the
18th Street gang, were illegal aliens.
*
ILLEGALS CLIMBING CALIFORNIA’S BORDERS FOR JOBS AND WELFARE:
SAN DIEGO … Mexicans (registered democrat anchor baby
breeders (1,877).
In just the month of October 2017 CBP Border Patrol San Diego
border sector reported apprehension of individuals
from Bangladesh (12), Brazil (1), Camaroon (3), Chad (1), China (16), El
Salvador (76), Eritrea (7), Gambia (4), Guatemala (178), Honduras (54), India
(101), Iran (1), Mexico (1,877), Nepal (31), Nicaragua (1), Pakistan (13), Peru (1), Somalia
(1), and “Unknown” (1) — a total of 2,379 individuals. These numbers
are similar to volumes seen in
this sector for October since 2012. MICHELLE MOONS
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