| To Live and Die in LA
by Great Orion Voyager � 2009 freyakorps Los Angeles began as an agricultural city that grew into a manufacturing city. Most residents worked in factories. The Hollywood film industry employed only a tiny percentage of Angelinos. But in the Reagan Era, LA factories closed as jobs were outsourced to China, leaving behind a desolate moonscape of Urban Blight. Crack Wars between Crips, Bloods and the Mexican Mafia filled the void as crack became the cash crop. They burned down South Central in the 1992 Rodney King Verdict Riots, leaving much of the southside a scorched Crack War No Man's Land. Mexican and Central American Desesperados continued to pour into LA in search of the American Dream. They found their own peasant version of the American Dream, as minimum wage leafblowers, landscapers, janitors, maids, nannies and toilet cleaners. Ten million mostly Latino minimum wage workers appeared content with this strange false economy in which the only ones enjoying obvious wealth were cracklords. The LA economy is a sick joke built on nonsense, a house of cards waiting to collapse. LA produces and exports nothing of real value. All those uneducated obese Mexicans were living on credit, taking out huge home loans, borrowing against the value of their absurdly overpriced dirt-patch barrio bungalow, which cost half a million dollars they don't have. How did these batos secure overpriced mortgages for dirt-patch barrio bungalows? They signed papers handed to them by grinning predatory criminal bank loan officers, without asking about Adjustable Rate Mortgages or things they didn�t understand. They used home loans to pay for other things they couldn't afford, like $50,000 gas-guzzling monster SUV's that got 10 mpg. LA became a city of ten million high school drop-out Latinos and Blacks, driving $50,000 Escalade SUV's, living in $500,000 dirt-patch barrio bungalows the size of closets, living off loans and credit cards, since they couldn't possibly afford anything they were buying. Housing prices continued to skyrocket far above the prevailing wage of these crappy deadend brainrot jobs. Skyrocketing real estate prices were caused entirely by real estate speculators from across the planet, Foreign Carpetbaggers who don't even speak English, who bought houses and apartment buildings not to live in or rent, but solely to flip for quick profit. Many Chinese, Japanese and Korean real estate speculators never even bothered to visit LA to see the houses they were buying. In this 2000-2008 Real Estate Speculator Bubble, LA real estate served as raw meat in an international feeding frenzy, attracting real estate sharks from across the planet, driving up housing prices in an absurd unsustainable bubble. When the bubble burst, banks failed, oil speculators drove gasoline up to $4 per gallon, SUV's sat in driveways with empty gas tanks and unpaid car loans waiting to be repossessed, as obese Mexicans pushed onto overpacked buses to commute to their leafblower jobs. Homeowners were soon faced with something they could not even imagine, the nightmare scenario of having to pay for their $500,000 bungalow and $50,000 SUV using their own $9 per hour paychecks. LA is now a Latin American Banana Republic: LA produces nothing of value. Hollywood film and music industries are in deep recession, studios and labels are collapsing, but they never did employ more than a tiny percentage of the workforce. LA has no Silicon Valley like the Bay Area, or Biotech complex like Seattle, or Investor Class like New York City. LA is not a university town like New York City, Boston, Berkeley or Seattle. UCLA and USC are decent schools but they are not highly respected research institutions like UC Berkeley, Stanford, UW Seattle, Yale or Harvard. LA economy is pathetic: $9 per hour security guards are the only growth industry. Security guards stand outside every building, lifeless zombies staring at nothing with eyes half closed, suffering brainrot atrophy. A dozen private technical colleges that do not deserve accreditation flood daytime TV and AM radio with pathetic ads for worthless Associates Degrees in Criminal Justice (security guards) and Healthcare (medical assistants). Technical colleges insist healthcare is the hot job market. But you cannot have a city of ten million medical assistants. Thousands of graduates have their Associates Degree in Healthcare, yet they are unemployed, applying at nursing homes, or underemployed as nannies, maids and toilet cleaners. The local economy can support only a finite number of medical assistants and security guards�not the infinite number claimed by these fraudulent colleges. In LA, the Clever do no work but get rich by exploiting the Clueless, especially the Immigrant Clueless who barely speak English. Profitable professions in LA are the worst forms of Predatory Capitalism, to quote Karl Marx: �the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker.� Landlords, global bank home loan officers, payday loan lenders, used car salesmen and other hawkers of fraud comprise the bulk of those who claim to make a decent living. Minimum wage workers are forced to hand over entire paychecks to pay $1,500 per month for crappy studio apartments owned by greedy Asian real estate speculators who do not care about your community or your quality of life. LA Social Services are overwhelmed and bankrupt: Shelters are full. Emergency rooms are shutting down. MLK Medical Center serving the entire south side declared bankruptcy and shut down due to scandals and incompetence. LA County USC Medical Center is managed by some outsourcing firm in Texas. The city and county are bankrupt and laying off hundreds of workers. Every bus is packed to overcapacity every hour every day, full of Latinos too poor to own cars. Prisons are overflowing. Tens of thousands of Latino and Negro gangbangers and drug dealers overwhelmed police and prisons. LAPD must dedicate gang units to analyze gang symbols spraypainted on every wall just to keep up with the gang epidemic. Every day brings more drive-by shootings carried out by rival gangs of every race. Public schools are bankrupt and laying off hundreds of teachers. LA suffers a high school dropout rate of 50%: Half of teens drop out of high school because they don't speak English, cannot master basic intellectual skills, or miss too many school days because they are sent to prison repeatedly as gangbangers, car thieves, burglars and drug dealers. Half of LA teens will wind up in prison or the military, or homeless on the streets, or all three, as single moms overpopulate an army of bastards to ensure future generations of gangbangers, drug addicts, parolee desesperados and illiterate trash who cannot even name the Vice President or find Iraq on a map. A tidal wave of immigrants lowers wages, raises rent, flood ecosystems and decreases your quality of life. NAFTA is forcing Mexico to buy American corn at dumping prices without tariffs, destroying Mexican family farmers and forcing an ocean of penniless uneducated peasants to flood America. What are ten million uneducated migrants doing in LA County? Can LA accommodate ten million toilet cleaners, janitors and landscapers? Can you base an economy on toilet cleaning? It is time to overturn NAFTA and CAFTA and WTO. It is time for Mexican Socialism to replace Failed Capitalism. Stay in Mexico, overthrow corrupt neoliberal government, improve education, establish worker rights, stronger unions, a living wage, quality of life laws. Socialist Revolution sweeping Venezuela, Bolivia and South America must sweep northward through Mexico and America: Montezuma�s Revenge must end. Many Americans dismiss LA as an unflushed toilet, but refuse to admit the fact that LA�s problems are seen in every city: Factories in every city moved to China. The high school dropout rate hovers near 50% in every American city. Every American city is suffering a gangbanger epidemic, a meth epidemic, and an epidemic of high school dropout teen single moms breeding an army of hopeless bastards. When you dismiss ugly sprawl, urban blight, traffic gridlock, gang wars, drug epidemics and collapsing quality of life in LA, remember: Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. We be comin fer yall pendejo muthafukas. Su Casa Mi Casa. Noam Chomsky, THE PROSPEROUS FEW AND THE RESTLESS MANY, 1994 "There are two important consequences of Globalization: First, it extends the Third World Model to Industrialized Nations. In the Third World there is a two-tiered society: a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people.... South Central Los Angeles once had factories. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, Indonesia.... As you'd expect, this whole structure of decision-making answers to transnational corporations and international banks and raises decision-making to the executive level, leaving a 'democratic deficit,' parliaments and populations with less influence. Not only that, but the public doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." |