California

Rising homelessness is tearing California cities apart

Democrats are under pressure to fix the state's most pervasive problem — or at least move it out of sight.



SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A crew of state workers arrived early one hot summer day to clear dozens of people camped under a dusty overpass near California’s Capitol. The camp’s residents gathered their tents, coolers and furniture and shifted less than 100 feet across the street to city-owned land, where they’ve been ever since.

But maybe not for much longer.

The city of Sacramento is taking a harder line on homeless encampments, and is expected to start enforcing a new ban on public camping by the end of the month — if the courts allow.

As the pandemic recedes, elected officials across deep-blue California are reacting to intense public pressure to erase the most visible signs of homelessness. Democratic leaders who once would have been loath to forcibly remove people from sidewalks, parks and alongside highways are increasingly imposing camping bans, often while framing the policies as compassionate.

“Enforcement has its place,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who has spent much of the past year trying to soothe public anger in a city that has seen its unsheltered homeless population surpass that of San Francisco — 5,000 in the most recent count compared with San Francisco’s 4,400. “I think it’s right for cities to say, ‘You know, there are certain places where it’s just not appropriate to camp.’”


Steinberg is one of many California Democrats who have long focused their efforts to curb homelessness on services and shelter, but now find themselves backing more punitive measures as the problem encroaches on public feelings of peace and safety. It’s a striking shift for a state where 113,000 people sleep outdoors on any given night, per the latest statewide analysis released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2020. California’s relatively mild climate makes it possible to live outdoors year-round, and more than half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless people live here.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced the state had cleared 1,200 encampments in the past year, attempting to soften the message with a series of visits to social service programs. But without enough beds to shelter unhoused people, advocates say efforts to clear encampments are nothing more than cosmetic political stunts that essentially shuffle the problem from street corner to another.

Steinberg, a liberal Democrat who resisted forcibly removing people until more shelters can come online, has for more than 20 years championed mental health and substance abuse programs as ways to get people off the street. But such programs have been largely unable to keep up with the rising number of homeless people in cities like Sacramento, where local leaders are now besieged by angry citizens demanding a change.

www.politico.com/news/2022/09/21/california-authorities-uproot-homeless-people-00057868

Move thousands of homeless American citizens against their will…not providing them shelter, just moving them out of sight? No problem according to the left.

Move 50 people who came here illegally? Inhumane

This isn't a HUAMITARIAN CRISES though. Its really only a HUMANITARIAN CRISES if the wrong kind of people go to an area in the NE that's really rich and really white and really doesn't want to deal with people who aren't.

"The issue presented here is whether the bumble bee, a terrestrial invertebrate, falls within the definition of fish," the judges of the Third District Court of Appeal said in their summation. Under the state's endangered species act, "endangered species" can be birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, or fish. Insects like bees do not make the cut, under this definition.”

If we are going to be changing the definitions of everything, why not this?

You're more obsessed with California than the Red Hit Chili Peppers.

Rookie mistake.

California both intentionally and unintentionally has both an outsized and dangerous effect on the rest of the nation.

For the most recent example (I can't believe this escaped you)-
The 17 states that follow California's emission standards and might now BAN gas cars

Seventeen states with vehicle emission standards tied to rules established in California face weighty decisions on whether to follow that state's strictest-in-the nation new rules that require all new cars, pickups and SUVs to be electric or hydrogen powered by 2035.

Under the Clean Air Act, states must abide by the federal government's standard vehicle emissions standards unless they at least partially opt to follow California's stricter requirements.

States including Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Vermont are expected to adopt California´s ban on new gasoline-fueled vehicles.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-17-states-that-follow-california-s-emission-standards-and-might-now-ban-gas-cars/ar-AA11rFo2

More immediate devastation is on deck from team Biden- California AB5-

This new Biden proposal would throttle the 'gig economy'
The proposal would restrict how Uber, Instacart and other gig economy companies classify independent contractors, increasing costs for consumers.

With only four weeks to go before the midterms, the Department of Labor on Tuesday proposed new guidelines that happen to align with what union labor activists have long demanded. Proponents of the new rule, which would impose on businesses stricter definitions of what constitutes an employee, would extend needed benefits and protections to contract labor. Critics insist that the practical effect will be to throttle the sharing economy into submission. They’re both right, but, on balance, the losers from this rule will far outnumber its winners. The Biden administration is surely betting that new enthusiasm among Democratic activists will overcome the irritation this rule will inspire in everyone else.

The Labor Department’s new policy, should it go into effect, applies a test to determine whether firms’ contract laborers are, in fact, employees. The test would replace a Trump-era rule that evaluated a worker’s “core factors” and restore an Obama-era “totality-of-the-circumstances analysis” to gauge whether a laborer is economically dependent upon the firm they’re contracting with. It would stop comparing workers’ investments in their livelihoods in real terms with their employers. Instead, it would determine whether the costs a worker sinks into their craft are capital investments or entrepreneurial. It will gauge how much direct oversight an individual contractor has over their own schedule and pricing. Most crucially, employment status will again be a function of how “integral” a contractor’s contribution is.

The New York Times reports, “many employers and regulators in other jurisdictions are likely to consider the department’s interpretation when making decisions about worker classification, and many judges are likely to use it as a guide.”

As the Times's Noam Scheiber observes, that’s no accident: The rules are a direct threat to “gig companies and other service providers” who rely on contract labor. The Labor Department’s new rule is akin to what the Biden administration and its allies in Congress tried (and failed) to pass into law with the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Where Congress fails to act, it seems, an activist executive and judiciary will do in a pinch.

But that connection to the PRO Act should make the White House and labor activists nervous. After all, the new rules are likely to impose new costs on companies that depend upon contract labor — costs that will be passed on to you, the consumer. The “PRO Act” was modeled after a 2019 California law, AB5, which was supposed to remedy the supposed indignities endured by participants in the so-called “gig economy.” It was hailed as a “victory for workers,” but the workers themselves didn’t seem to appreciate the reform much.

The law’s practical effect was to make freelance labor impractical. Overnight, independent writers, graphic designers, photographers, journalists and content producers found themselves unemployable. Local papers had to contract out of state to get the scoop on what was happening just next door. Music festivals ceased operations and performing arts groups went on hiatus. But it was the law’s attack on the popular ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft that proved a bridge too far. In 2020, a ballot measure defining “app-based transportation” drivers as independent contractors passed by nearly 3 million votes. California lawmakers repealed AB5 not long thereafter.

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/new-biden-labor-department-rule-would-throttle-gig-economy-n1299788

You can laugh at California and mock their failures all you want, but awareness of the disaster it can inflict on America should always garner the most attention.

You need to make up your mind. You condemn tweets from paid political hacks when others post them, and then turn around and post tweets from paid political hacks. So what is it? Are those types of tweets ok or not?

As the Colorado River dries up, states can’t agree on saving water

The river’s biggest water user, California, didn’t join six states in a proposal to cut some 2 million acre feet of usage

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/31/colorado-river-states-water-cuts-agreement/