Today I watched Biden speak in Poland then watched the L.A. City Council meeting where homeless people were calling in begging BEGGING the council to do something to get them into empty motels and unused retail space because People Are Dying on the streets, several every week, in L.A. Then the council responded saying they would "expedite" policy but did not mention any specific thing they would do- I am stunned. More storms are blowing into L.A. now so more unhoused American citizens there are going to die this week. WTF is Biden doing in Ukraine right now? Makes No Sense At All to me.
HUD is an executive agency, so a President could just lay down a mandate to build housing, like Kennedy's 1962 declaration that we would reach the moon in ten years as head of NASA. Biden could mandate housing construction in every American city where people are now unhoused in shocking numbers. Biden Could Do Something about homelessness. Instead he's making "inspiring" speeches in Poland. I want to puke.
Per Anne Applebaum on Rachel Maddow last night, we've been wrong in every assumption about how war in Ukraine will go. Somehow that means we should send them more weapons. I think we are stumbling into another "forever war" and people living on sidewvillas across Europe and condos in London. So to me that means Russians always intended to forcealks of L.A. will never get housed. Interesting, when Russia first spent money on Ukraine war last year, per Applebaum, Putin did not invest in weapons. Russian oligarchs instead bought USA to deplete more of our resources fighting them in Ukraine, but somehow Maddow et al think their buying Condos with defense dollars means Ukraine needs another half billion dollars of weapons from USA.
(Maddow Feb 20: )
I feel like the Lone Ranger accidentally landed in a Native American theme park. I don't want USA to send weapons to Ukraine because I think we have spent enough decades providing weapons to wars of the world, Biden should declare a "moon mandate" saying "We will make sure no American is without a roof over their heads by the end of the decade." Instead we are making sure no weapons manufacturer experiences a dollar of lost profit si nce we are no longer in Afghanistan. I'm not supporting Russia but by not supporting our entry into this war I am thrown into a category with the weird mixture that demonstrated in D.C. last weekend. I wish I did not care so much
Perhaps if my own daughter was not living in an RV on an LA street right now I would feel better about sending a billion dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine. But she is so I don't. Meanwhile Thom Hartmann calls people like me "tankers" like people who would not support US entry into WW2 until tanks were pulling into London.
Why is it either or?
Why can't USA take care of its own before saving the world? How can we claim to be spreading democracy when our own inner cities are such a mess?
*
An unhoused resident at today's L.A. City Council meeting called in to say: "Five people in my neighborhood have died outside in the last month that I know of. Including one that I knew. She froze to death. The night that she died, there was a frost advisory and some rain. It's gonna happen again. In a few days."
***
Blogged by Kay Ebeling
Producer of City of Angels Blog since Jan 2007
Not just L.A., the city of angels is everywhere
No comments:
Post a Comment