Intolerable Cruelty

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On my first extended visit to San Diego, in 2001 the week before 9/11, I was riding down Garnet Avenue with two scumbags I used to call friends, and I felt like I’d stepped into paradise. The beautiful landscape, so many beautiful girls with friendly smiles, the Spring Break party atmosphere. I decided right then that this was the city I wanted to make my home. 

I now look back at moving to San Diego as one of the worst decisions of my life.  I simply didn’t think it through and there are days now that I tell myself I deserve everything I’ve gotten because of that. I’m a Black man, generally liberally-oriented, and in some cases a full-on hippie. Yet, without considering or researching the local political environment, I moved to what is, unbeknownst to most, one of the deepest red big cities in America. 

Everybody knows San Diego is more conservative than LA or San Francisco, but I don’t think many understand that in practical terms, I’m not sure San Diego isn’t THE most conservative major metropolis in the nation, perhaps second only to Dallas and I’m not sure about that. I haven’t spent time in Dallas in over twenty years. Phoenix is probably right there in the conversation. It doesn’t show in national voting totals because San Diego has a lot of liberal young people and a lot of college students that vote in national elections, but the local political and economic powerbase in this city is ultra right-wing. 

It starts with the city’s three large military bases, plus the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, and a host of large defense contracting companies. I would think San Diego has to be at or near the top of the list in its population of active-duty military residents and veterans. I have nothing against soldiers or veterans. Most of them are good people, but the city has a culture of absolute worship of the military, and strangely and irrationally, this translates from respect for the troops to uncritical support for the right-wing politicians that love to send them off to die for stupid reasons and then abandon them to homelessness and poverty when they return physically and emotionally scarred. This culture of militarism alone is something that probably would have stopped me from moving here if I had stopped to contemplate it, given that back in 2003, I was practically a full-blown pacifist. 

San Diego has something else that correlates strongly with civic conservatism: a corporate gorilla. Most big cities have a lot of large corporations, but San Diego is relatively unique amongst big metropolises in that Qualcomm is by far the largest private sector employer and largest corporation in the city. I’m not taking a position on Qualcomm as a company. I don’t know anything about their corporate governance. But when you have a single large corporation that carries so much weight in a community, it almost always skews civic government right-ward. 

And San Diego has a very dark red side as well. The wealthy San Diego suburb Fallbrook is home to the Metzger family, leaders in the modern Ku Klux Klan, and a small army of their acolytes. And after living ten years in San Diego blissfully unaware of it, I learned in jail that the semi-rural largely working class White East San Diego county suburbs of Santee and Lakeside are epicenters of White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi street gang activity. I mentioned to a guy in jail from that area that I used to drive around in the mountain roads out there all the time and he said, “You’re lucky you made it back.”. He was joking but the fact he would tell that joke to me says something about the culture of those communities. 

Today, I love San Diego and I hate San Diego. I was beginning to feel this way even before I was sent to prison, prosecuted by the office of a demonstrably corrupt district attorney (more on that in a moment). San Diego is a city of contradictions, and one that, while it is always a topic of discussion for its beautiful beaches and great weather, has been off the radar of the national political discourse when it should be in the spotlight of it. And the results have been devastating for many of the city’s citizens.

San Diego’s civic environment escapes scrutiny because of a peculiar quirk of our nation’s partisan polarization. When Republicans control the federal government, they do everything they can to make things difficult for liberal cities and states. But as the only conservative big city in California, federal Republicans coddle San Diego. When Democrats control the Federal government, they go after conservative communities, but since San Diego is in Democratic stronghold California, they leave it alone. And while the California state government is relatively liberal, San Diego is still California, so the state government doesn’t meddle too much. It is the same quirk that allows Austin to get away with being a relatively liberal city in deep red Texas. If San Diego was in a conservative state, the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments would have been all over this city the same way the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations have mounted a constant assault on San Francisco. But unlike San Francisco, which generally has good government, and the Republicans could never find any substantial corruption to latch on to, if liberal Justice Departments had done some digging in San Diego local government, they would have found that swamp Trump was talking about. I believe that history will reflect that over the last twenty years, San Diego has been one of the most corrupt municipal governments in the history of this country. To wit...

The City of San Diego is chronically broke despite having a very wealthy citizenry. In San Diego County, you’ll find three of the richest zip codes in America in La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe and Del Mar. And Coronado Island can’t be far down that list. But even outside of those communities, San Diego suburbs have vast tracts of mansions. The downtown skyline has more luxury residential high-rises than office buildings. Local taxes are sky-high and the city is constantly asking voters to approve new tax measures. So where does all the money go?

A few decades ago, San Diego’s civic leaders passed a pension plan for city employees that many contend, and I agree, constitutes an outright fraud. It resulted in many former city employees receiving absurdly high six-figure pensions that could not be rescinded. The pension plan became underfunded, leading to a collapse of the city’s bond rating. The city officials who tried to call attention to this were systematically run out of town. The ensuing scandal resulted in a lot of investigations and resignations, but as far as I know, no prosecutions.  The absurd pensions are still being paid and the city still has billions in shortfalls. 

Another example of San Diego civic corruption can been seen in what I’ll call The Library Fraud. Several years ago, a wealthy San Diego philanthropist bequeathed to the city a multi-story building at the heart of San Diego’s downtown Gaslamp District with the proceeds from its sale to go to benefit the city’s public library system. The city sold the building to a developer for something like $1.5 million when its value was easily several times that. 

My financial position was reasonably decent at that time and I remember reading this and thinking, “Well, hell, I almost could have afforded it at that price.”.  I was so shocked that I called my father, since he owned a construction and real estate company and asked him, “How could this happen?”. His response was to tell me that what happened was obvious. A few months down the road, in an airport in Miami or somewhere far away, a representative of that developer would meet a representative of the city official who approved the sale, and a large bag of cash would change hands. 

Today, that building has been converted to lofts where the MONTHLY rent payments probably exceed the purchase price of the building. San Diego has a glossy new downtown public library, but at a greater expense to tax payers than would have been necessary had that building been properly sold on the open market. 

And finally we get to former San Diego district attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who I believe to be a more central figure in San Diego’s civic corruption than has yet been discussed. Dumanis left office amidst scandal in 2017 in the wake of a federal investigation of her acceptance of illegal campaign donations to her failed mayoral campaign from a Mexican billionaire “businessman” and now convicted felon who looks on paper an awful lot like a drug lord. The wheels of federal justice move slowly because unlike local yokels, when the Feds indict you, they don’t just have some officer claiming he “smelled a strong odor of marijuana emanating from the vehicle”. They’ve got wiretaps, they’ve got videotape, they’ve got documents with your signature. About half of FBI agents are lawyers. They know how to build an airtight case. It’s possible they are still working on one against Bonnie Dumanis. So what did she do?

The particular Mexican businessman in question was donating money to San Diego mayoral candidates under the auspices of wanting to promote development of the downtown Embarcadero District harbor area with the goal of turning San Diego into a “Miami West”.  The eventual mayoral winner, Bob Filner, who was quickly ousted from office after a scandal involving his conduct toward women (more on that another time), also accepted illegal donations, but this is of somewhat less concern because he was not a SITTING city official at the time he was accepting them. 

What is more disturbing than the fact that Dumanis accepted these illegal donations is the manner in which those donations were funneled to her. Dumanis used a former San Diego police detective who ran a security firm as a go-between and the donations were laundered through the co-owner with the Mexican businessman of a La Jolla exotic car dealership, and his son-in-law. All of these people, the cop, the Mexican businessman, Bob Filner, the car dealership owner and his son-in-law, are now convicted felons like me. Everyone except Bonnie Dumanis.  But for trying to subvert the government of a city with two million residents, all of them COMBINED did less incarceration time than I did. 

But let’s step back and look at this. A Mexican businessman who is co-owner of an exotic car dealership in a border city and employs a former police detective of that city as a security consultant who makes illegal donations to that drug-ridden border city’s DISTRICT ATTORNEY in an effort to turn San Diego into Miami. What does that sound like to you?  Sounds like the drug trafficking business to me.  Bonnie Dumanis is supposedly a Democrat, but this sounds like the kind of corruption you would expect from a Republican, unless you’re talking about a segregation-era Southern Democrat. 

What’s more interesting is that Dumanis is a Jewish lesbian. I love Jewish girls, but this is Exhibit A that they aren’t ALL awesome. And I like lesbians, but this is Exhibit A that they aren’t ALL cool. People like Bonnie Dumanis are extraordinarily useful to the bad guys. How does a Jewish lesbian Democrat remain district attorney of a bright-red city for almost fifteen years? Simple answer: by being corrupt. 

Dumanis claimed to have never met her illegal donor...until she was proven to have met him at least twice. She claimed to barely know him, until the eve of her last reelection when the newspaper uncovered that she had written a college recommendation letter for his son. Later, during the federal investigation, she got caught illegally communicating with then-US Attorney Laura Duffy about the federal trial of the Mexican businessman, when Dumanis was a witness in the case.

When I spent more than twenty months in San Diego county jail in 2013 and 2014, about half of that time before the Dumanis campaign donation scandal broke, I noticed something interesting. Dumanis developed a reputation for her aggressive prosecution of sex crimes, though that aggression never seemed to apply to San Diego’s cadre of sexual predator police officers, nor to many others whose cases I can identify for you because I was in jail with them. 

But what I noticed was that Dumanis’ office was extremely lenient on drug crimes. Now, if you are a liberal, you might say, “good”, but what I can tell you after spending seven years in the system, the idea of jails and prisons being filled with non-violent drug offenders is a MYTH.  There are a lot of people that have only been CAUGHT for non-violent drug offenses, but the majority of people I met in jail and prison who were convicted of drug crimes were people from the criminal underworld who lived an underworld lifestyle and had committed all types of crimes. The drug offenders that Bonnie Dumanis allowed to walk in and out of jail like it was a hotel weren’t hippies caught with a joint or ordinary people with substance abuse problems. They were street gang members with violent priors that repeatedly got probation and sentences measured in months rather than years despite getting caught with drugs and weapons again and again. I also noticed that Dumanis’ office had the routine procedure of attempting to prevent inmates represented by public defenders from seeing their discovery documents, an illegal procedure in which San Diego’s public defenders, the majority of them pathetically incompetent, were obviously complicit. 

So a district attorney in a border city who is taking illegal donations from a businessman across the border who employs a former police detective as a security consultant and owns a type of business in that city, a luxury car dealership, that is often used for money-laundering and that DA, known for prosecuting other crimes aggressively, has a peculiar leniency in prosecuting drug crimes. That’s Bonnie Dumanis. 

But Republicans weren’t going to come after her because San Diego is a conservative city. Democrats weren’t going to come after her because she was supposedly a Democrat. And nobody was going to come after her because she’s a gay Jewish woman. Attack her, and you’re automatically a homophobic, antisemitic misogynist. So she can get away with anything. The Obama Justice Department might have still been looking into her in 2016, but I doubt the Trump Justice Department is. Trump would love Bonnie Dumanis’ style. 

When I got out of prison in 2018 and returned to San Diego, I noticed something else interesting. The Mexican businessman who made the illegal campaign donations to San Diego politicians did so with the stated goal of promoting development of San Diego’s Embarcadero District. I returned to downtown San Diego after five years to see several new high-rises along the Embarcadero. And as we speak, a giant multi-block hotel and entertainment complex with luxury residences is under construction. Despite having been indicted and sent to federal prison (for three years, again, less time than me), it appears that Jose Susumo Azano Matsura got everything he wanted in the end. 

These are just a few examples of San Diego’s recent civic history to connect us to the issue of the moment. San Diego has one of the worst homelessness problems in the nation. Perhaps the worst. And befitting a city with Republican leadership, San Diego leaders HATE the homeless. The city has been prosecuting an on-going war against its homeless citizens, one that has intensified under current mayor Kevin Faulconer. This war has taken the form of ordinances to try to make it illegal to sleep in a car, ordinances to prevent people from sleeping in parked RVs, continued failure to comply with state and federal affordable housing mandates, and the creation of a police intimidation squad euphemistically named the “Homeless Outreach Team”. They don’t bring food or blankets, but they do ask you for your name and date of birth and write it down. And they offer you a free bus ticket out of town in their also euphemistically named “Family Reunification Program”. They are not in uniform...so they don’t have body cameras on. 

Civic leaders will try to tell you that San Diego’s homelessness problem is because the weather is nice, so bums flocks here. It’s a lie. While there are some transplants, most of San Diego’s homeless are local. San Diego’s unique homelessness problem is a result of the economic realities of the city. San Diego has a lot of wealthy residents but they are mostly retirees or wealthy people who have moved here for the resort environment. San Diego has housing prices almost as high as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, but not nearly as many good paying professional jobs as those cities. As a resort city, San Diego’s economy is highly service industry based. There are lots of restaurant and hotel jobs, lots of retail jobs, low-wage military jobs, but not enough jobs that pay the rent in a city that millionaires are constantly moving to. And if you’re on a fixed income, forget about it!  Most of San Diego’s homeless are people who have simply been priced out of the housing market, a great many of them elderly and/or disabled. 

Civic leaders will point to this program or that aimed at addressing the issue, but all these programs are window-dressing as most involve providing housing for hundreds of people when San Diego’s homeless population is in the thousands. 

I feel a great deal of trepidation in writing this, because I still live in San Diego, and during a time when their is a martial law atmosphere in the city. I am criticizing civic leaders and local law enforcement when I am still technically a fugitive from justice despite my two unsuccessful attempts to turn myself in. I have a legitimate concern about retaliation if this article should get any attention. I have no home, no job, no money, no friends, and while I have lots of relatives, my 82 year old mother is my only family. I am in an extremely vulnerable position right now. I never wanted to come back to San Diego after I got out of prison. The city has too many bad memories for me now, and while there are a lot of great people here, the political environment is toxic and I must find a way to escape it. But I’ve learned that to do the right thing, you must be fearless. It’s alright to still feel the fear, but you must do the right thing anyway. I believe I am doing the right thing, so let’s get down to the heart of the matter. 

On February 26, I found myself homeless, carless and hotel-less for the first time in my life. I’m sure I’ll write in detail about the experience (the most difficult of my life) in the future. Homelessness is a much more complex problem than I understood it to be before I experienced it. I have a lot to say about it, but for now an abbreviated account that connects to San Diego’s treatment of the homeless will have to suffice. 

For the first three weeks, I spent my nights in Balboa Park, apart from five nights scattered through that time where I was able to get money for a hotel from my mother so that I could clean up and rest. Homelessness, as I will explain, is exhausting physically as well as emotionally. 

Balboa Park is not a park in the traditional sense. It is more like a university campus, except rather than classrooms and research labs, it contains dozens of museums and exhibitions, theaters, gardens, restaurants, the world’s largest outdoor organ and the San Diego Zoo, amongst other things. It is truly one of the most wonderful places you’ll find in the country and in my homed days, I enjoyed spending time there because its Spanish-style architecture reminds me of Stanford’s campus. 

The main buildings in Balboa Park have breezeways with benches and alcoves that offer protection from the weather and hence it has become a place of residence for many of the city’s homeless. San Diego is in some respects a relatively sleepy burg   In a bigger city, a place like Balboa Park would remain active late into the night, but by about 8pm most nights, you’ll find mostly just the homeless still there. 

Just over two weeks ago, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer ordered the closure of the city’s parks, beaches and boardwalks, including Balboa Park and all its museums and exhibits, as well as the San Diego Zoo. This is happening nationwide, worldwide, but here in San Diego the order was issued without the consideration of San Diego’s unique homelessness problem and the fact that the parks, beaches and boardwalks are the only place many of them have to go. Or perhaps it WAS made in consideration of that fact...

The enforcement of this order took on a peculiar form, one all too familiar in American society.  The enforcement parameters were crafted in such a way as to target the homeless. The order stated that the parks were open to “foot, bike and horse traffic” but that you couldn’t sit still. It also said that you should only go to parks within walking distance of your home, by implication excluding the homeless from any consideration. So while rich people were still walking and running through the parks, police and park rangers were going around telling all the obviously homeless people that they had to leave. But it was worse than that...

I took great care to avoid looking homeless. On the nights I was able to get a hotel, I washed my clothes and shaved. I carried only one small duffel bag. My clothes were new and expensive. Cops and park rangers would walk right by me sitting on a bench and go tell a more obviously homeless person that they had to leave. In the initial days of the “closures”, If you didn’t look homeless, they didn’t say anything to you. 

A trusted mantra for corrupt politicians is “never waste a crisis”. San Diego leaders have used the COVID-19 crisis to ramp up their war against the homeless to a full-on blitzkrieg. After being banished from Balboa Park and the beach, I began to notice the effect of this enforcement policy. In the environment created by the COVID-19 shutdown, it made being homeless nearly impossible. The only place besides parks and beaches where the homeless could find even a momentary respite—malls, restaurants, stores—all these places were closed. The only public bathrooms were in parks, at beaches and in malls and all these were closed. 

The homeless were left with only two options. They could retreat to the area known as the River Bottoms, the usually dry bed of the San Diego River where hundreds, perhaps thousands of homeless live in tents and sleeping bags. This is a seedy, dangerous place infested with drugs and crime. A drug dealer I met in jail told me, “Even I don’t go in there without three or four armed guys.”. With the recent torrent of rains, the San Diego river would be flowing now, so even those people would have been forced to retreat to the only other option: wandering the streets. 

And that is exactly what I’ve seen in San Diego these last few weeks. Hordes of homeless, me amongst them, wandering the streets with nowhere to go, sleeping in building doorways and on bus stop benches, in alleys and under bridges, some just laying down in the middle of sidewalks as if in an act of protest. 

The mayor’s disingenuous solution has been the city’s provision of a few hundred motel rooms and a few hundred beds in a hall in the convention center. Now, consider this: at a time when public health officials are advising people to avoid public gatherings of ANY size, Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s solution is to pack homeless people by the hundreds into one big room, all breathing the same air and using the same bathrooms.  Oh, but the beds are six feet apart. Mayor Faulconer was recently on Twitter patting himself on the back: “We now have hundreds of homeless individuals safely inside the convention center...”. LOL. Kevin, you’re the mayor of Homeless City. You need THOUSANDS of beds, not hundreds! And regardless of my opinion about COVID-19, I don’t think public health officials would agree that hundreds of people crowded into a convention center constitutes safety in this instance. 

After I was run out of Balboa Park, I was able to get help from my mother to keep myself in motel rooms for several days, though she was only able to send me enough for a night or two at a time, so I would find myself with three or four hours between check-out time and check-in time, with nowhere to go, carrying a twenty-pound duffel bag. Can’t go to the mall. It’s closed. Can't go sit in a restaurant, can’t go to the beach or the park. On those days, I would often end up walking ten miles or more. The last place of retreat for the homeless was the Embarcadero boardwalk as the Harbor Police who have jurisdiction there had apparently not yet been told to enforce the closures. This was where I spent these intermittent hours until finally, a night came when I was not able to get a hotel. 

The last open public bathroom was in the park at the far end of the Embarcadero. It was about half a mile from that bathroom to any bench where I could sit unmolested, and a mile or more to any place to get food. That first day I spent homeless in the Embarcadero, between 11:30am on Monday when I checked out of my hotel, and 3:30pm on Tuesday when I was able to check into another, I walked more than a marathon, 26.3 miles according to my iPhone. This was going back and forth between the only open bathroom and the bench by the harbor where I spent the frigid night, only occasionally able to briefly nod off to sleep. 

I was walking back from the bathroom to my bench at about 9:30pm on Monday night when I looked up at the Hilton Bayfront Tower and I noticed something. I counted approximately 615 windows on the west-facing side of the building. Only nine of them were lit, and six adjacent ones on the top floor appeared to be a single suite. The hotel was empty. 

I turned and looked around the San Diego skyline. The two massive towers of the Hyatt Manchester Grand Hotel, empty, only a few scattered lights on. The two towers of the Sheraton Marina, empty. During a humanitarian crisis, with the streets of San Diego clogged with homeless people with nowhere to go, these massive hotel towers with thousands of rooms between them were sitting empty. I don’t know any Hyatts or Sheratons, but Paris, Nicky, what the fuck?

I know what they would say: “We don’t have anything to do with the management of the hotels.”. But it begs the question, should a person be able to enjoy the privilege of wealth derived from an enterprise without having any accountability for what the enterprise does?

This goes to the core problem of corporate power in our society: nobody is accountable for what corporations do. Upper management and the boards of directors play a shell game of passing the buck to each other, and then they both hide behind market theories and “fiduciary responsibility to stockholders”, and these days the stockholders in corporations are largely other corporations. The founders of these corporations and their families, made rich by them, have distanced themselves from corporate operations. Corporations are zombies, the real rogue AIs of our scifi nightmares. Nobody is driving the bus. 

This is why I am pushing my proposal that every corporation should have to appoint a matriarch, someone personally accountable and liable for the actions of the corporation, but with authority that supersedes the board and management in matters of corporate integrity. I say a matriarch because of my position that we need to transition to a female-led society, but if you want it to be another old White dude, fine. But someone has to actually be answerable for what corporations do. And while limited liability is necessary to allow small businesses to form and grow, I believe that once a company reaches a certain size, individual stockholders should be liable for the company’s debts and crimes, and corporations that are stockholders should ALWAYS be. 

If this article were to go viral, the hotel companies would most likely open their doors to the homeless and either issue a fake apology or claim that they had been working on doing it already but “these things take time to arrange”. We have to stop falling for that bullshit. There is a question we never ask that we need to start asking all the time: “Why didn’t you do the right thing BEFORE we caught you?”. And we should be prepared, as Adlai Stevenson said, to wait for our answer until hell freezes over. 

As I sat there on my bench freezing through the night, next to a line of multi-million dollar yachts moored in the marina, I thought about the fact that I’ve spent thousands of dollars with each of those hotel chains, Hyatt, Hilton and Sheraton. And given the corporate consolidation of the hotel industry like every other, I’ve probably spent more than I think with them as they probably own other hotel chains I’ve stayed at. But yet, when I’ve fallen on hard times and I’m homeless, they wouldn’t give me a room in their empty hotel. 

It occurred to me sitting there that they might give me a room had I walked in there, asked to see the manager, pulled him aside, my jacket unzipped to show my Stanford t-shirt and said, “How would it sound if the news started talking about your hotel being empty while all the homeless people are on the street, and a Black guy who went to college with the president’s daughter and has spent $10,000 at Hilton hotels asked you for a room and you didn’t help him?  You know, Rachel Maddow went to Stanford. She’d probably LOVE that story...”. But that’s basically blackmail, and not how I want to live, on top of the fact that it could have just as easily gotten me in a lot of trouble as gotten me a room. 

The role I envision for a corporate matriarch would be someone whose office I could call, explain that I’m a long-time Hilton customer, this is my situation and I need a room, and if their hotel is EMPTY, they would give me one. I will be able to afford to stay in nice hotels again one day, and in such a circumstance, I’d be much more likely to stay in, and pay a little more for a Hilton if they had given me that accommodation. 

These types of business relationships used to be common, but now they are rare.  When corporations were smaller, they knew their loyal customers and gave real perks to them, and the businesses you had relationships with could help you weather hard times because they viewed their customers as partners. But today, corporations are too big to notice an individual customer unless you owe them money. 

This very moment, there are thousands of empty hotel rooms in San Diego. But I’ve noticed that during this time, some hotels have RAISED their prices. Now why would they do that? Obviously, to keep the “riff raff” out during this crisis. And hey, I get it. When you’ve lived amongst them, the poor, the homeless and the incarcerated can become very difficult groups to advocate for. At the cheap hotel where I’m staying now, just in the last day there have been several loud ghetto arguments outside. I think I heard a woman tell another woman, “If you leave, you gettin’ shot!”. The few people paying for those few rooms in those nice hotels don’t want to be around that. But there are solutions to prevent that kind of behavior. A simple solution would be to offer the few people staying at the Hilton rooms in an even nicer empty hotel, and let it be the Homeless Hilton for a few weeks until this thing blows over. If you’re so worried about how people would act, give a few rooms to some of the cops that were busy running people out of parks so they can keep order. 

One of the signatures of corrupt government is that, while it loves to flex muscle, it never uses its power in ways that actually help people. Why didn’t Mayor Faulconer use a state of emergency order to requisition empty rooms in these expensive hotels rather than using the police to chase the homeless out of parks and into the streets where they are more likely to catch or spread COVID-19?  Because he’s a right-wing corporate lackey, that’s why. But beyond that, even if this was a liberal city and he was a liberal mayor, if he’d tried that, corporate power would have come down on him like an Acme anvil on Wile E. Coyote. 

But this problem extends beyond simply the hotel industry. I looked around downtown San Diego and noticed that the majority of the windows in the city’s dozens of downtown luxury high-rises were also dark. The buildings were mostly empty, probably vacation rentals or second homes, or simply unsold units as most of these buildings have signs out saying they have units for rent or sale. I don’t know who is calculating the statistics or how that claim these housing occupancies rates over 90%, but they are obviously bullshit.  San Diego has a vast housing SURPLUS and I suspect every city does. The issue isn’t the amount of housing. The issue is the PRICE of it. 

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 which I reference often, the illicit manuscript that the protagonist Winston Smith is given talks about war as a means for governments to waste the vast surpluses that technological advancement has produced—and this was in 1949 before the electronics age, the computer age, the internet age, the biotech age. There have been no shooting wars between major powers since Orwell penned his masterpiece. Instead, new means of wasting surpluses have been devised: inventory and assets. 

For thousands of years of human history, scarcity was an everyday reality. Only kings had the ability to stockpile resources, and even them only occasionally. During this time, humans developed an instinct to hoard during times of plenty, because those reserves were sure to be soon needed during the next harsh winter, or drought or famine. Beyond this, we had no refrigeration, no canning, and if you go back far enough, no structures within which to warehouse things. The ability to store and hold surpluses simply didn’t exist. 

But times have changed. We have an infinite number of ways to store and preserve foodstuffs and other perishable commodities for a virtually infinite length of time. We have insulated buildings and central heating that has turned winter from a deadly foe into a mild inconvenience, and air conditioning that has transformed one of the world’s harshest deserts into a playground. But our instinct to hoard has not abated. We have not caught up psychologically to the reality of the modern world, and our constant fears of social collapse and our chronic paranoia about danger are actually our lingering biological programming from a pre-modern world that was never safe and stable. 

I would argue that rising inequality does not represent a malevolent intention on the part of the upper class, but rather reflects the fact that the rapid acceleration of technological advancement has created surpluses so massive that they have overwhelmed our socioeconomic system. But what the rich and powerful are is too arrogant to admit they don’t know how to solve the problem. So they create red ink on paper to make people think there is an actual shortage of resources in the world. There are shortages of some resources: clean water, human resources like doctors and teachers, but when it comes to manufactured goods, we’ve got way more than we need of most things—cars, housing, clothes, TVs, cellphones, etc. 

Growing inequality reflects the fact that people at the top will naturally have more ability to hoard than those at the bottom. In a functioning market economy, if you have a product that isn’t selling, you don’t hold on to it, you drop the price until it sells. But that was because in the past, you HAD to move inventory. But today, the surpluses are so great that corporations and the rich can afford to hold on to stuff they don’t need FOREVER. Hence, we now have Godfather Pricing—they don’t sell until they get an offer they can’t refuse. 

Real estate is a prime example. San Diego supposedly has a housing crisis, right?  Well, I’ve been constantly shopping for apartments for the last two years. In that time, there were always hundreds if not thousands of listings, “for rent” and “for sale” signs all over town, and I saw many apartments that remained vacant for more than six months. Where I was living, my crooked landlord had two apartments empty for more than three months. 

Now let’s do a little math here. In San Diego, a typical one-bedroom apartment goes for around $1,500 per month. That’s $18,000 per year. If that apartment sits unrented for six months, that is $9,000 in lost rental income. If you drop the rent to $1,000 per month and rent it immediately, you’ve made $3,000 more than if you let it sit six months. So why don’t landlords to this?  Because they are waiting to find the tenant they WANT because they can afford to. The housing crisis isn’t that there isn’t enough physical housing. There’s plenty. But housing is sitting empty because there are no tenants who can meet the landlord’s demands for good credit, pristine rental histories and incomes three times the monthly rent. And the surplus state of our economy is such that owners can afford to let a building or apartment sit empty for months rather than rent it to an undesirable. 

We have to address this and I will be writing more in the future about the desperate need to regulate the rental market. And no, rent control is not my proposed solution. At the very least, there should be some kind of licensing for landlords, like for real estate agents or stock brokers, with rules and regulations for their conduct. Hell, even bartenders and hair stylists are more regulated than landlords! I’m toying with the idea that we need to ban renting outright. We also must reform the credit scoring and reporting system. More on that later. 

The ever-inflating real estate market reflects a broader truth in our economy. People say it makes sense that real estate prices should keep going up because “they aren’t making any more land”, but that is categorically false. We have been making more land for over a century...by building UP!  It would be interesting for someone to add up all the square footage in the world on floors above say three or four which was about the limit for most buildings until a century or so ago. The basic theory of the real estate market is a false premise of scarcity. 

The “market” doesn’t function if sellers have effectively infinite resources relative to buyers.  Sellers then have no real incentive to sell except at the most inflated price. Most economic transactions in America are between corporations and individuals, and more and more these are multi-billion dollar transnational corporations that have infinite resources relative to the average individual. In a functioning market, sometimes the seller has an advantage; sometimes the buyer has an advantage. But in our corporate environment, the buyer NEVER has an advantage because most corporations now are too big to fail. 

Whenever there is a constant large inventory, that means the price of a product is too high. It has become the norm in America for cars, new and used, to sit unsold on lots for months, sometimes years. Houses sit unsold for months, sometimes years. Apartments sit unrented for months. Retail spaces sit empty. Clothing stores have endless racks of clothes that go from “Newly Arrived” to “Sale” to “Clearance” then to outlet stores then to Marshalls and Ross, and I don’t know where from there. While certain grocery store items like eggs, bread, milk, produce and the like are coming in and out constantly, many non-perishable, less common packaged food items stay on shelves for months. This is true during economic booms as well as recessions. For a great many commodities, sitting inventory has become the norm. Why?

Most of the economic theories that our society still functions on today were conceived over a century ago. Many of them go back to the 17th century and Adam Smith, or even further to 14th century Arab economist Ibn Khaldun. There have been some new ideas that came out of the so-called Chicago School economists like Milton Friedman but even that has been nearly a century. The simple fact is that our corporate systems, our political systems, our economic systems, and our social systems were not designed to function in the technological world that has emerged in the last fifty years, and particularly the last twenty. To put it more simply, we just don’t know what to do with everything we’ve created. 

Money used to correlate to value, and prices to fluctuations in value. In the era of surplus, the only function of price, the only function of money, is to enforce social class boundaries. The “market” as it was originally conceptualized has absolutely ceased to function. 

Some people will have a knee-jerk reaction that I’m out of my mind talking about surpluses when we have massive government and private debt, and huge budget deficits. We’re supposed to all be broke, right?  That’s just on paper. Open your eyes and look around. Yours and the government’s bank accounts might show negative balances, but there are resources sitting around everywhere, languishing unused. They are all OWNED by somebody and that is why they show up on paper as having been consumed, but in fact they are being wasted. 

We need a brand new economic system for this brand new world.  The solutions themselves will not be simple. The world is an extremely complex place. It will take a lot of smart people working very hard to construct the actual details of a solution. But the BASIS for the solution is simple: we need to figure out a system to efficiently and effectively share the resources that AREN’T being used. That’s not socialism or communism. It’s good old American common sense. 

But essential to this is the fact that we must stop looking to governments to solve everything. And no, I’m not talking about the Republican “small government” propaganda. It’s a provable fact that recent Republican administrations have spent more than Democratic ones. Republicans and Democrats both believe in big government—they just disagree about where it should be big. But we all have to start taking more responsibility for our own actions. 

Someone said something to me at least twenty years ago and I regret that I can’t remember who said it, because it has become one of the core principles I live by: Everything you do is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in. 

We all vote for a world that has homeless people when we have extra space in our home, and we drive past people on the street and do nothing. We all vote for a world that has inequality when we have something we aren’t using that we know someone else needs, and we hoard it. We all vote for a world that is dishonest when we lie. We vote for a world that is unfair when we treat others unfairly.  We all vote for intolerable cruelty. 

This piece may concern the activities of corporate America and some—I stress SOME—of the super-rich, but this hoarding instinct and general selfishness permeates every level of American society. Millions of middle class Americans have months worth of packaged and canned foods in their pantries while people starve to death in the third world. Some years ago, I read an article about how Europeans tend to go to the grocery store more often, and only buy a few days worth of food at a time. After reading it, I adopted that practice, but before that, I kept my cabinets and refrigerator full of food, often throwing things out because they expired before I could eat them. We must change our ways. We can blame the government, or the party we don’t like, or the people we don’t like, but this is the society most of us are voting for with our actions. 

This is why I have maintained for the last decade that for all our talk about being a Christian nation, we are in fact a society of nihilistic atheists. True spirituality is living by the idea that if you do the right thing, in the end you’ll be taken care of, by God, by the universe, by nature, by karma, by other human beings who know what’s right. But nearly none of us have faith in that. Instead we trust nothing and live the way of the world, the truth of our society revealed by our everyday sayings: “dog eat dog”, “every man for himself”, “all’s fair in love and war”, “the ends justify the means”, “the early bird gets the worm”, “nice guys finish last”...

I’m watching television in my hotel room, mainly channel-surfing to find programming featuring the cute girls discussed on this blog (Rose McGowan’s on right now!), and I can barely stand it with all these commercials from corporate giants telling us all how much they care about us because now they’ll sell us their products without human contact. This is accompanied by disturbingly similar messaging with all the commercials using the same phraseology like they were all written by the same person. Looks, sounds and smells like propaganda. Whether you think COVID-19 is that serious or not, this should bother you. 

All these empty slogans, “We’re in this together”. It’s all bullshit. Total fucking bullshit, the same kind of propaganda as “Big Brother loves you”. I can tell you one group of people that are apparently not included in the “we’re in this together”: the homeless. 

It’s one thing to have homelessness and massive inequality as an everyday reality, but if during a time of crisis like this, when we are seeing an unprecedented global shutdown of society and the government is ordering people to shelter in isolation, and we have empty homes, empty apartments, empty hotel rooms and empty commercial buildings all over the place, if we can’t get ALL of our fellow citizens into safe shelter, we are a failure as a society. 

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