While hardly conservative, California punk band the Dead Kennedys have proved oddly prescient over the years in ways slightly different than they might have expected.
No, Jerry Brown didn’t become “führer one day” as the band predicted in the song “California Über Alles.” He does still reign over the People’s Republic of California, however, and — much like their song “Moon Over Marin” — the state’s looking a bit dystopian.
Again, it wasn’t the way the DK’s planned. The 1982 song predicted California becoming an environmentalist disaster area (“Another tanker’s hit the rocks / Abandoned to spill out its guts / The sand is laced with sticky glops … I squish dead fish between my toes / Try not to step on any bones / I turn around and I go home”), a popular motif in the 1980s.
The environment seems to have done all right for itself in the interim, although not particularly with any help from Gov. Moonbeam or the Dead Kennedys. However, it is seeming pretty darn dystopian, as James Woods documented with a video right outside of Oprah Winfrey’s headquarters in Hollywood:
This is the sidewalk next to Oprah Winfrey’s studio in West Hollywood. She has done extensive, and truly beautiful renovations to The Lot. Brand new apartments were built across the street. The new resident families cannot walk their children on the sidewalk to the local school. pic.twitter.com/xEsdTiRpUB
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) May 26, 2018
As you may have heard, California has a bit of a homelessness problem. Even Politifact — a site which, in spite of its name, isn’t known for giving particularly accurate facts on politics if those facts skew conservative — backed up one of California’s GOP gubernatorial candidates when he said “(h)omelessness has skyrocketed across California. We have the nation’s highest homelessness rate and the nation’s highest homeless population.”
They tried to prove him wrong by focusing on the word “skyrocketed” — and failed.
“The report shows California’s homeless population jumped nearly 14 percent from 2016 to 2017 — to a total of more than 134,00 people. It rose nearly 9 percent over the previous seven years,” they noted.
Do you think California has reached the point of disaster?
“That’s much different than the national picture. While the national homeless population ticked up about 1 percent in 2017, it remained 13 percent lower than in 2010, according to an NPR analysis following the report’s release.
“Notably, the rise statewide and nationally in 2017 was attributed to a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities, at least in part due to a shortage of affordable housing.”
Oh, and you know why California’s that way in the first place? State subsidies that have incentivized the wrong kind of building.
“According to a new study, the state will spend $929 per homeowner household in fiscal year 2018-19. As for renters? They’ll receive just $71 in expenditures from the state,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in March.
“The inequities are the result of many different factors. Homeowners can take advantage of a variety of state subsidies including the state’s deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes. These deductions, which can be thousands of dollars for homeowners, leave California’s annual $60-$120 renter’s credit in the dust.”
And while girls may run the world, according to Beyoncé, who run the Golden State? Uh, that’d be Democrats. Aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eight-year RINO safari in Sacramento, Democrats have mostly controlled the governor’s mansion, the state legislature and pretty much every major city government outside of San Diego. Given the safety-net programs that are in place, it’s practically a semi-socialist paradise.
This is in marked contrast to the rest of the United States, where Republicans control the majority of the governorships and state legislatures.
And somehow, despite how we’re told Republicans are harbingers of poverty and homelessness and despair, we’ve somehow managed to avoid scenes like this in states run by the GOP:
This video is incredible. It’s shows a 10 min bike ride through Orange County, CA, and almost the entire path is lined with homeless tent cities. https://t.co/X6i5M85IZm
— Jim Dalrymple II (@Dalrymple) January 17, 2018
Woods is far from the only one documenting the genuine horror that is California’s homelessness problem. And, for all of that homelessness, they still have a crushing state debt and no solution in sight — even though Gov. Moonbeam is a relative fiscal conservative compared to the rest of his Democrat peeps.
Sadly, the state will likely fall into the hands of Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco. Under his policies, you’re still going to see homelessness everywhere — including outside of Oprah’s studios.
No wonder people are leaving the state at a record clip. I’d leave, too, given that the state is going to continue its slide into a “Moon Over Marin”-esque nightmare.
It’s a good thing James Woods is staying, if just to chronicle what California is becoming.
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