Los Angeles — home to the glamour and wealth of Hollywood movie stars — was once regarded as the place where dreams were made. But today, as the city’s infrastructure crumbles as a result of the economic woes brought on by California’s socialist government policies, that dream has become a nightmare.
The June 2 Los Angeles Times ran an article headlined “Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control.” While gathering facts and pictures to illustrate that article, Times columnist Steve Lopez roamed the streets of greater Los Angeles and reported on what he saw. He stated:
We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move.
On May 30, Lopez saw a county health inspector on rat patrol carrying a clipboard who told him he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents. Lopez asked him where. “Everywhere,” the inspector replied.
In an opinion piece run by Fox News, Washington Times writer Tammy Bruce observed, “The dystopian nightmare that is California has been brought to you by… Democrats.”
Commenting on Steve Lopez’s reports of mountainous trash heaps overrun by rats in downtown Los Angeles, Bruce wrote, “This is the idiotic disaster brought to you by unrestrained liberal leadership as it creates problems, then births a bureaucracy that will never deal with it.”
Bruce cited a statement made to Fox News by Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction medicine specialist, who predicted that a deadly epidemic could emerge in Los Angeles during the summer months.
And yet, noted Bruce, “most 2020 Democratic candidates for president want you to believe that President Trump is the problem, and the Democratic policies creating the dystopian nightmare in California should be exported throughout the nation. Yeah, no.”
The New American posted an article in February exploring the reasons for the many woes plaguing California. We noted the connection between the state’s many woes and the overwhelming onslaught of illegal aliens who have overtaxed California’s social services and infrastructure:
A Republican governor, Pete Wilson, who served from 1991-1999, issued a warning during his term that the flood of illegal immigrants into the state was going to create huge problems. He spearheaded Proposition 187, which would have prevented illegal aliens from using social services. It passed a popular vote in the state, but was predictably declared unconstitutional by a federal court and his successor, Democrat Gray Davis, refused to appeal….
Wilson’s predictions have now come to pass, and the state has lurched further and further to the Left with each passing year, enacting laws crippling to the business environment, and favoring progressive social policy. While California sinks deeper into the sinkhole of liberalism, it should be taken as a warning to the rest of the country.
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