LA’s Economic Devastation Continues in the Time of Covid-19

The same news programs that promote the saccharin propaganda that “we are all in this together” are reporting the disproportionate impact Covid-19 is having on the black community. The virus has nothing against blacks, but the poor always bear the brunt of any social problem and blacks have a higher rate of poverty. With poverty comes poor healthcare and with that comes a community with more hypertension, diabetes, obesity, strokes all resulting in more Covid-19 deaths. (CDC statistics.)  Comparing the Covid-19 death rate of poor whites with that of wealthy blacks is political blasphemy.  

The Covid-19 Virus is an Economic Disaster for Everyone Except the 1% 

For decades, all Americans below the top 1% have been living in increasing economic peril. Even those who drove fancy cars and could afford homes were experiencing extreme economic vulnerability. As reported for years, the fraudulent hype over home prices in Los Angeles drove home prices far above market value, forcing buyers to carry absurdly high mortgages. The more house prices escalated the more rents rose since they were based on the price of houses. House prices and rents are not set by supply and demand but rather by the falsehoods about price and demand which are constantly fed to us. 

A basic rule of family economic planning is that a family should have two years of liquid assets so that it can pay bills for two years if their income stops. Any place that is gouging new home buyers like Los Angeles has been intentionally doing since 2001, and especially after the Crash of 2008, will have a significant percentage of homeowners who have been unable to accumulate two years of savings. Their inflated mortgages have funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street. Renters tend to be poorer and their fraudulently inflated rents has left them living paycheck to paycheck while experiencing a declining standard of living. 

The Role of the “Deplorables” in Economic Disaster 

For most of America, the “Deplorables” busted into national consciousness when Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called the whites in the Rust Belt, e.g. Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, parts of Pennsylvania, “Deplorables.” It was bad enough that she ignored their plight, but writing off their suffering, which the Obama administration had largely caused, was arrogant myopia. Queen Hillary was on the way to her coronation and she wasn’t going to waste her time on poor white people. In retaliation, they voted for the Orange Buffoon who at least claimed to care about them. 

Hillary’s decision is not that mystifying when one realizes that she adhered to the Democrats’ Identity Politics which adopted the White Entitlement philosophy. All whites by virtue of their skin color benefitted from slavery and hence a redistribution of wealth from the whites to persons of color was due. The so-called Deplorables watched as Obama gave trillions of dollars to the Wall Street felons who had crashed the economy and shipped their jobs overseas, leaving Main Street to suffer job loss, foreclosures, bankruptcy and the Opioid epidemic of Big Pharma. 

The Dems overlooked the fact that while blacks had it much worse than whites, white people who lost jobs, homes and life savings to Wall Street suffered mightily; blaming them for the sins of Wall Street would not win votes. To this day, the Dems overlook the suffering of whites by concentrating on how much worse it is for minorities. This is a classic Divide and Conquer strategy. 

It’s hard to have sympathy for the Los Feliz lawyer who is carrying a mortgage that is $500,000 too high for him, while the Manhattanization of Los Angeles has created the nation’s worst homeless crisis with its own pandemic-like death rate. No one cared as long as it was only the poor that were dying. In Los Angeles, homeless became the new black – the group to be labeled shiftless, lazy, drug addicted, mentally ill and causing their own misery. The media was silent about the mass destruction of rent-controlled housing which underlay LA’s densification mania and in turn was used to justify hundreds of billions of tax dollars to construct subways and fixed rail mass transit. New York is not that much different from LA. Even Trump and his son in law understand that when a $500 a month rent-controlled apartment is destroyed, the poor person on a fixed income of $900 a month cannot afford a new apartment for $1,100 a month. 

Rather than focusing on the Manhattanization of Los Angeles as the cause of the homeless crisis, LA’s media took a page from Goebbels’ playbook and launched a vilification campaign against the homeless, portraying them as a threat to all decent Angelenos while encampments spread out along the underbrush of the freeway system. The homeless brought fire, rats, fleas, feces wherever they went, but the media was silent about the lack of available hygiene facilities for them. Meanwhile, the Manhattanization-Gentrification moved southward, and more blacks joined the ranks of the homeless.  

There Has Been Zero Accountability for the Destruction of Los Angeles 

The judicial system has been the prime culprit in a lack of accountability. In Los Angeles, its abusive nature has been particularly vile staking out positions that even far right-wing GOP states shun. While Donald Trump has yet to get any federal court to rule that he is above the law, Judge Richard Fruin of the Los Angeles Superior Court blew past that mark in December 2016 when he ruled that the LA City Council’s actions were “non-justiciable” -- legalese for “above the law.” According to Judge Fruin, LA City Council does not have to follow state law or even its own rules. In essence, whatever the council does is OK. After this perfidious ruling, mass destruction of poor people’s homes continued, and the homeless crisis skyrocketed. 

Rest assured that when this pandemic abates, there will be zero accountability. Instead, the 1% will own more and you will have less. We will quickly forget that nature creates viruses and mankind creates pandemics.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.