The homelessness problem in San Francisco
has been one of the most well documented and written-about problems in
the United States of late, likely due to the paradoxical nature of how
much the state spends to help get these people off the street and how it
doesn't seem to have any impact.
According to Bloomberg,
the city approved a measure last year to raise an additional $300
million to tackle the issue by taxing local companies. By estimates,
there’s about 7500 homeless people in the city that are a result of
higher rent, substance-abuse and other health concerns, including mental
illness.
Now, one company is betting that streamlining this information could be the answer to the issue.
Officials in the city have spent a couple of years building a digital
program called ONE System that can track and monitor every homeless
person in San Francisco. The goal is to collect and sort information
about these people more effectively in order to determine who is in need
and assess risk factors. So far, after five months of the system being
in place, it has helped get 70 people off the streets.
One of the main reasons it hasn’t worked better? It’s difficult to persuade the homeless to sign into a program that, to them, feels like big brother.
The program was designed by BitFocus to collect data from state and city
agencies. Homeless participants are asked 17 questions in order to help
evaluate their time spent on the street, health and vulnerability. That
information is then used to create a database, which acts as a digital
profile; in may ways it is similar to China's recently unveiled app which warns users if they are walking near someone in debt.
Jeff Kositsky, the director of the city’s department of homelessness and supportive housing, told Bloomberg:
"We’re trying to build what I think of as an air traffic control system", only instead of airplanes, the system tracks homeless people.
The program kicked off in August and the 50 employee, $5 million
effort was trying to assess more than 2000 people over 90 days. The
company has already spoken to double the amount of people it
anticipated, which gave them "a pretty good baseline of who’s the most
vulnerable in order to determine housing,” according to Chris Block, the
director of coordinated entry for Episcopal Community Services of San
Francisco.
But the obstacles continue to pile up.
City employees must gain the trust of the homeless person, learn
their information and persuade them to join the monitoring system, which
many don’t want to. For permanent housing, some members need to pass a
background check, which can take 45 days and requires an ID - which many
people on the street don’t have.
And the fact of the matter is that there isn't only one
answer for homelessness, due to the fact that people wind up on the
street for a multitude of reasons. Other questions have also been
raised: what happens if authorities find drug users or violent crime in
the tracking system? While now nobody claims that they want to use the
system for law-enforcement purposes, privacy concerns continue to grow. Block said:
"There’s a lot of privacy concerns. So far those issues
haven’t been significant, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come up in
the future."
The system will be fully rolled out over the next few months and
already almost half of the city's homeless are part of it. As of
January, 20 people have been placed in permanent housing and 50 more
have been helped off the streets. The task in front of the city and the
ONE System, despite the small wins, is still massive. The goal is to try
and halve the city's homeless population by 2022.
And they say there's no such thing as poetic justice.
Los Angeles legalized homelessness and then subsidized it and spread it
around. The trash and waste bred rats, fleas and diseases.
And now, for the first time, it's coming home. Not to the homeowners and
business owners who have been living with this nightmare. But to Los
Angeles City Hall, which has its own homeless encampments.
A veteran Los Angeles City Hall official is one of the latest victims
of an epidemic of the infectious disease typhus that continues to
worsen across LA County.
For months, LA County public health officials have said typhus is mainly hitting the homeless population.
But Deputy City Attorney Liz Greenwood, a veteran prosecutor, tells
NBC4 she was diagnosed with typhus in November, after experiencing high
fevers and excruciating headaches.
"It felt like somebody
was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my
neck," Greenwood told the I-Team. "Who gets typhus? It's a medieval
disease that's caused by trash."
To stop medieval diseases, use medieval technology. Like walls.
Or you could just institutionalize and treat crazy people instead of
setting them loose to assault random city residents and spread disease.
Greenwood believes she contracted typhus from fleas
in her office at City Hall East. Fleas often live on rats, which
congregate in the many heaps of trash that are visible across the city
of LA, and are a breeding ground for typhus.
"There are rats
in City Hall and City Hall East," Greenwood added. "There are enormous
rats and their tails are as long as their bodies."
Last year
set a new record for the number of typhus cases — 124 in LA County for
the year, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Last October, Mayor Garcetti vowed to clean up piles of garbage throughout the city to combat the typhus epidemic.
The Mayor allocated millions of dollars to increase clean-ups of
streets in the Skid Row area, known lately as "the typhus zone."
You can't clean up trash unless you stop people from generating it. It's what liberals like to call, the "Root Cause".
But four months later, the I-Team documented huge piles of garbage just outside the "typhus zone."
"You can't solve it (the typhus epidemic) until you hit the cause,"
says Estela Lopez of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement
District, "and the cause of it is that you still have these mountains of
trash."
Added Greenwood: "This is a terrible illness and I
wouldn't wish this on anybody. But it's not just homeless folks getting
it."
Homeless "folks" get it and then spread it.
She believes the city should fumigate City Hall and City Hall East to
protect the thousands of workers and visitors who could be at risk from
getting typhus.
Responding to complaints from other city
workers fearful of getting typhus, LA has already fumigated LAPD’s
Central Division office and parts of the LAPD’s main headquarters.
Garcetti's office did not respond to NBC4's questions about why the city hasn't fully fumigated City Hall buildings as well.
Because no matter how often you fumigate, the progressives still keep coming back.
California has escalating crime, cities teaming with homeless people, clogged and crumbling roads, massive unpaid bills, some of America’s highest taxes, and some of its worst public school systems.
So what’s the plan by Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor, to improve the situation? On Tuesday he suggested giving free health care to illegal immigrants.
Speaking on a left-wing podcast, the former mayor of San Francisco said: “I did universal health care when I was mayor, fully implemented, regardless of pre-existing condition, ability to pay, and regardless of your immigration status. I’d like to see that extended to the rest of the state. San Francisco is the only universal health-care plan for all undocumented residents in America.”
Thus continues California progressives’ war on the state’s law-abiding and productive residents, especially its middle class. If Newsom becomes governor, they may get to pay for health care for people who don’t even belong in the country and can’t or won’t pull their own weight.
It’s unclear if Newsom and his progressive allies understand that dispensing a growing list of government benefits to groups of people creates an unwanted magnet effect. In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved a bond initiative throwing an extra $1.2 billion at the spiraling homeless problem – on top of existing programs. The result: more homeless people and more crime.
They have a problem they created by subsidizing it. So they're going to penalize the people who Aren't the problem in order to subsidize creating More of the problem.
The voters of San Francisco will decide on a ballot initiative in November to tax businesses more in order to increase spending on a homelessness program.
The initiative, if passed, would tax companies’ revenue above $50 million each year about a half a percent. The tax would hit the tech-heavy industry in Silicon Valley the most, with more than 1,000 businesses earning more than $50 million a year.
The tax would raise about $300 million a year — doubling the amount of money the city already spends on homelessness, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
“I think the city is really ready for this,” said a San Francisco small business owner and one of three petitioners on the measure, Christin Evans. “We have a lot of momentum behind us, and more than a majority of the voting population is renters. We’re polling very well.”
San Francisco is apparently drowning in human feces, San Francisco Democratic Mayor London Breed told KNTV in an interview Friday.
The city of Seattle once planned a similar tax on businesses that made $20 million or more in annual sales, but after Amazon paused construction of a new building, the city ended up voting against the legislation, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Seattle’s proposal was to add a “head tax” — a tax of 26 cents per employee, per hour for Seattle-based companies. Amazon’s stand against that tax caused an uproar from big labor unions, culminating in protests outside Amazon headquarters. Nevertheless, the city decided not to add the tax.
San Francisco Spends $30 Million Cleaning Feces, Drug Needles
Until the problem is fixed, Mohammed Nuru, the Director of the Public Works Department, is charged with the towering task of cleaning the streets, over and over again. “Yes, we can clean, he said, “and then go back a few hours later, and it looks as if it was never cleaned. So is that how you want to spend your money?”
The 2016-2017 budget for San Francisco Public Works includes $60.1 million for “Street Environmental Services.” The budget has nearly doubled over the past five years. Originally, that money, was intended to clean streets, not sidewalks. According to city ordinances, sidewalks are the responsibility of property owners. However, due to the severity of the contamination in San Francisco, Public Works has inherited the problem of washing sidewalks. Nuru estimates that half of his street cleaning budget – about $30 million – goes towards cleaning up feces and needles from homeless encampments and sidewalks. Thank You NBC. This is only a short excerpt. Read the whole thing. Watch the SF Behaviorists Verbally Pussyfoot through the piles of, . . . well, it ain't Tulips that they Behaviorally engineered. Chalk up another expensive and pungent conquest for the Mental Illness Merchants.
Watch the entire series of this NBC Bay Area investigation:
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in her first one-on-one interview since taking office, said homeless advocacy groups that receive funding from the city need to better educate the homeless to “clean up after themselves.”
“I work hard to make sure your programs are funded for the purposes of trying to get these individuals help, and what I am asking you to do is work with your clients and ask them to at least have respect for the community — at least, clean up after themselves and show respect to one another and people in the neighborhood,” Breed told the Investigative Unit, referencing her conversations with nonprofit groups aimed at serving the homeless.
When pressed about whether her plan calls for harsher penalties against those who litter or defecate on city streets, Breed said “I didn’t express anything about a penalty.” Instead, the mayor said she has encouraged nonprofits “to talk to their clients, who, unfortunately, were mostly responsible for the conditions of our streets.”[…]
“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” Breed said. “That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”
San Francisco is slated to spend nearly $280 million this year on housing and services for the homeless — a roughly 40 percent increase compared to just five years ago. Over that same span, however, the number of homeless in the city has largely remained the same at about 7,500 people, according to city counts.
“About 70 percent of the people estimated to be homeless in San Francisco were actually housed in San Francisco before they became homeless,” Breed said. “We have to make sure people who live here, [and] sadly, people who are homeless here, that they are also held accountable for taking care of our streets. This is our home.”
townhall Timothy Meads Posted: Jul 14, 2018 10:55 AM Augh. Egads. Barf. Gross. Recently elected San Francisco Mayor London Breed says that the city she loves is absolutely covered in fecal matter and "we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans."
Talking about human feces, folks! Particularly, feces from humans experiencing homelessness right now. Apparently, the city is so overrun by poverty that people are using virtually all public spaces as their toilet because they cannot afford proper lavatories. To this extent, Mayor Breed is asking that homelessness advocacy groups and non-profit encourage those they are helping to clean up after themselves.
"I work hard to make sure your programs are funded for the purposes of trying to get these individuals help, and what I am asking you to do is work with your clients and ask them to at least have respect for the community — at least, clean up after themselves and show respect to one another and people in the neighborhood," Breed told the local media.
But, when asked if she would impose any harsher penalties for those who leave the results of their bowel movements in public, the mayor declined to mention any new deterrents aside from asking nicely. She just wants the aforementioned non-profits "to talk to their clients, who, unfortunately, were mostly responsible for the conditions of our streets."
And those conditions are dismal. "I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here," Breed told media.
A recent Bay Area NBC investigative "report centered around a 153-block survey of downtown San Francisco, which revealed trash on every block, 100 needles, and more than 300 piles of feces along the 20-mile stretch of streets and sidewalks."
But, this filth is not for lack of spending money on the problem. The city is slated to spend nearly $280 million this year on housing and services for the homeless — a roughly 40 percent increase compared to just five years ago. Over that same span, however, the number of homeless in the city has largely remained the same at about 7,500 people, according to city counts."
But, it is unclear how the city plans to stop the issue once and for all. In the meantime for San Francisco denizens, just wear some flowers in your hair to mask the fecal odor.
More than 28,000 international gaming professionals recently congregated at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, where they tested the latest VR tech and sampled hundreds of indie games.
But some attendees, many of whom traveled thousands of miles for the annual convention, found the city streets outside the Game Developers Conference (GDC) inhospitable, the sights disturbing.
"My GDC feedback was simple: Stop hosting it in SF," wrote Emre Deniz, director of Melbourne-based game company Opaque Space, in a recent viral tweet that received more than 2,500 likes.
San Francisco, Deniz continued, "is a dangerous city and America is not welcome to non western developers."
"The city hates us being there," he wrote. "We are worried being there, move it."
GDC started in a San Jose living room in 1988 before moving to San Francisco in the early 2000s. This year marked the 32nd iteration of the ever-expanding conference, touted by organizers as "the world's largest and longest-running" professional game industry event. The gathering routinely draws upwards of 20,000 people from across the globe for a week of lectures, network events, discussions and a sprawling expo.
Years ago, Tom Wolfe published a funny piece dealing with the reappearance during the Summer of Love of diseases never seen in the modern epoch. Wolfe's overall term for these disorders was, if I recall correctly, "The Crud." Doctors were unfamiliar with these conditions and in some cases uncertain as to how to treat them. Some of those children of nature ended up with chronic disorders.
This served as a life lesson for the counterculture, most of whom resumed bathing. But now, fifty years later, we – at least those of us in California – are about to receive another such lesson, this one more drastic and widespread.
Over the past year or so, AT readers have derived quite a few laughs over what has come to be called the "s‑‑‑ map," a map of the neighborhoods of San Francisco in which the streets are inundated with human waste left by the homeless. (Some commentators assumed that the map was intended as a warning to tourists. But in fact, its creator has recently added a comment asserting that it is intended to "bring attention to the issue of homelessness." Thanks very much.)
This is a remarkable development. Filth-encrusted streets were a pre-modern phenomenon, an aspect of a medieval world that no longer exists in most of the northern hemisphere. Filthy streets were a standard element of urban existence until late in the 19th century. In the U.S., the original Progressive movement (a reform movement, let's remember, with little relationship with postmodern "progressives") made sewage systems a primary goal of its program.
The result was dramatic upgrading of urban life throughout the industrial world, rendering it more pleasant, healthier, and infinitely less lethal.
It was less lethal because the squalid conditions of pre-modern urban streets acted as a breeding ground for a plethora of diseases. The result of these fetid conditions was chronic low-level disorders of the skin and intestinal tract, broken by occasional full-bore epidemics that could carry off large fractions of a city's population.
The prince of these epidemic diseases was cholera. Currently unknown in the industrialized West (most doctors have never seen a case), cholera was a filth-based disease caused by human and animal waste and nothing else. Originating in the Ganges delta, cholera spread across the planet until, in the 19th century, it was a standard feature of urban life. Cholera epidemics were chronic, breaking out wherever sewage mixed with drinking water. Cholera was an oddity among diseases in that it often progressed with no visible symptoms. An individual showing no symptoms at all could suddenly collapse at noon and be dead by sundown.
Cholera still exists in the Third World. According to the WHO, the most recent pandemic broke out of South Asia in 1961 and reached the Americas by the 1990s. "Cholera is now endemic in many countries."
We will also point out that the city of San Francisco is a sanctuary city, or, in the words of the ordinance itself, "a City and County of Refuge." That is, San Francisco has put out the welcome mat for tens of thousands of third-world illegals. The city has made itself a magnet for refugees from countries with no modern sewage systems and no tradition of personal hygiene – the same countries in which the WHO asserts that cholera has become "endemic."
So put these two factors together – streets engulfed in human s‑‑‑ and immigrants from countries overrun with infectious diseases – and what do we get?
We get a blast from the past. We get a taste of urban life in the 18th and 19th centuries. We get a form of terror unwitnessed by any living American.
We get a cholera epidemic.
This will come. It is, by very the nature of things, unavoidable. It is one of those things described by the novelist Robert Heinlein as "two trains on the same track accelerating toward each other." It may well come with the hot weather next summer.
There's no point in asking whether the state of California will be "prepared." Of course it is. There will be plenty of marches and petitions. Donald Trump is available to be blamed. The unicorns and butterflies are ready to chase all the bad things away.
And beyond that, we have diphtheria, typhus, yellowjack, dengue fever...the possibilities are endless.
Interim San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell is reportedly willing to go to jail to ensure his city always remains a “sanctuary city.”
Farrell assured hundreds of amnesty activists last week who were blocking and protesting in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building that San Francisco will forever be a “sanctuary city.” He also, according to ABC7, “said he is willing to get arrested if that’s what it takes to defend sanctuary city policies,” echoing comments that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf recently made.
The activists gathered to protest after ICE detained more than 200 illegal immigrants, nearly half of whom had criminal records, last week in various Bay Area raids. After Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tipped off illegal immigrants that ICE would be conducting sweeps, Thomas Homan, the agency’s acting director, said on last week that more than 800 illegal immigrants remained at large in the community because of Schaaf’s “irresponsible decision.”
According to KTVU, the “Power, not Panic Emergency Response Committee” organized the emergency rally. The group is composed of entities like: the “ACLU, the Alameda County Immigration Legal and Education Partnership, Full Rights Equality & Empowerment SF, Contra Costa East Bay Interfaith Immigration Coalition, the Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network, Centro Legal de la Raza, the California Immigrant Policy Center.”
The activists had signs that read “ICE, go melt yourself,” “ICE out of CA,” “Stop Racist Deportations,” and “Sanctuary for All.” They also chanted “Shut down ICE.”
ICE said sanctuary cities like “San Francisco and Oakland force” the agency to “focus additional resources to conduct at-large arrests in the community, putting officers, the general public and aliens at greater risk and increasing the incidents of collateral arrests.” In 2015, an illegal immigrant who had been previously deported multiple times told authorities after he murdered Kate Steinle that he came to San Francisco because he knew it was a “sanctuary city.” Steinle’s tragic death allowed Donald Trump to make illegal immigration a national issue, which enabled him to surge to the front of the GOP field and never look back.
Ask any veteran cop who has been involved in a "running gun battle"
about their experience and the first thing they'll inevitably bring up
is how unpredictable these types of shootouts can be. What they won't tell you - at least not right away - is how the
pursuing officers, in many cases, will unload dozens of rounds of
ammunition, inflicting massive amounts of collateral damage, often
without hitting the fleeing suspect.
Sometimes, an officer will get hit. And sometimes, officers or the suspect will tag an innocent bystander, like they did during a shootout on a quiet neighborhood street in Westchester back in September 2015.
Other times, bullets fly in every direction, ripping through windshields and terrifying bystanders, until the suspect gives up - or escapes, according to KQED News.
In one recent incident that unfolded in San Francisco's Design
District about two weeks ago, a shootout erupted when officers cornered a
murder suspect who had eluded them earlier that day. The
suspect, identified as Joel Armstrong, was discovered after officers
discovered a car that had been stolen earlier that day, which they
believed belonged to the suspect in a double shooting where one victim
later succumbed to his wounds. Police had linked the carjacking
and the shootings to the same suspect, and when an officer went to
investigate the stolen car, he discovered Armstrong hiding in a nearby
RV.
An officer “peered into a window of the RV” and saw Armstrong,
according to the Police Department’s description of the incident. One
of seven body-camera videos released by the Police Department shows an
officer rush back to his colleagues after looking in the window. "Hey, we got him! We got him," the officer says. "He’s in there! He’s in there!"
Body camera footage shows seven officers surrounding Armstrong. First, the officers ordered the other occupants of the RV out of the vehicle. Three people and a large dog emerged, and officers ordered them to stand down.
All of a sudden, two shots rang out from inside the RV - and the officers scrambled for cover. One officer fell, another tripped over the officer that fell.
Officers unleashed a ten second burst of handgun and assault rifle fire at the RV. In total, 65 shots were fired. None of them touched Armstrong.
He eventually surrendered after a couple of hours, leaving the RV at 2:15 am ET.
He’s charged with murder, eight counts of attempted murder,
carjacking, being a felon in possession of a firearm, discharge of a
firearm and receiving stolen property, according to the Police Department.
Unsurprisingly, San Francisco homicide and internal affairs teams are
investigating the incident. The local district attorney's office and
the department of police accountability are also investigating.
About a year ago, in January 2017, Leilani Farha visited the city of San Francisco and was appalled at the extent of the substandard housing conditions suffered by San Francisco's homeless population. Leilani works for the United Nations as a special rapporteur on adequate housing. She travels around the world to investigate housing conditions and called the housing conditions of San Francisco's homeless "unacceptable." She concluded that California "is allowing, by international human rights standards," conditions are that "deplorable."
This is particularly disturbing when one considers that California is the most populous and the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world. San Francisco has made some effort to deal with homelessness. The city spent $275 million on homelessness in the fiscal year that ended in June 2017 and is expanding that to $305 million for the year that ends in June 2018.
But that is not enough, since there is a long waiting list for nighttime shelters. Visitors to San Francisco are appalled to see persons on sidewalks committing drug crimes such as injecting themselves with needles. And the city has areas now fouled by the smell of human waste.
One has to wonder what San Francisco, which has some of the wealthiest citizens in the nation, is doing with all their money. After all, the major tenet of liberalism, which San Francisco declares is its guiding public policy, is to help the disadvantaged and poor.
In order to understand the lack of financial commitment to helping the homeless, it may be helpful to review the salaries of San Francisco County "public servants." Their jobs, and their professed mission, is to devote themselves to helping the needy. There is no shortage of money, but there appears to be a shortage of commitment to allocating public taxes to helping the homeless.
The money goes to those who are dedicated to helping the homeless. There are many examples of salary extravagance. For example, according to the website TransparentCalifornia. com, Madonna P. Valencia, the manager of the Dept. of Public Health, had a salary of $275,395.65 in 2016. In addition to that, she received benefits of $65,154.15 in that year for a total compensation package of $340,549.80. Another manager of public health, Theresa A. Dentoni, received $276,109.42 in 2016 and benefits of $64,073.87 for a total of $340,183.73. And this in a city that cannot afford to make portable toilets available to residents.
The assistant medical examiner, Harminder S. Niarula, another person in public health, had a total salary in 2016 of $336,000. Stephen C. Wu, a senior physician specialist, earned $336,000 in 2016. Another supervising physician specialist, Catherine T. James, collected $333,000. And nursing supervisor Patricia Carr got $333,000.
The list of those in public health working for the County of San Francisco goes on and on. It appears that $300,000 is a benchmark for the top officials. There are about 300 persons in San Francisco County's government who received a salary in the $300,000 to $400,000 area. Then there are over 2,300 people working for the County of San Francisco who earn between $200K and $300K a year.
The point is, these people, numbering less than 2,300, took in about $575,000,000 in 2016 just in salary and benefits. If you add those who made from $300K to $400K in 2016, that's an additional $100 million. So in 2016, San Francisco County spent about $675,000,000 on just 2,600 salaried employees. That's over a half-billion dollars taken by less than 3,000 people while in 2017 at least 12,000 persons lived on the streets, and San Francisco couldn't afford to provide portable toilets to them or overnight sleeping facilities.
This kind of economic argument is made all the time by Democrats, who say the top CEOs can afford to pay their employees more. The voters of San Francisco have the right to ask why, if the top officials of San Francisco make this amount of money, some can't be set aside for the homeless of San Francisco, especially since San Francisco likes to boast that it is the most liberal and accommodating city to those in need.
Perhaps someone should sue the City of San Francisco, using the argument that the primary function of government is public safety and health. For once, a federal Judge might make a ruling to force pay cuts for these people and devote more of the county's resources to paying for facilities to meet the health needs of the homeless.
So far, the liberal rhetoric of San Francisco has succeeded only in making public employees wealthy, not safeguarding the public health and safety of the residents. Amid the wealth and luxury of San Francisco, there is a growing population of poor and destitute residents. This argues more for the idea that liberalism is just good old-fashioned government greed: once in power, government employees make themselves wealthy at the expense of everyone else and create the traditional exploitive society where the few live by impoverishing the many.
The facts are clear: in the most liberal and progressive and Democrat-controlled city in the country, one can find the largest homeless population living in the unhealthiest conditions of any city.
The Democrat House Minority, and former Majority, Leader, is so far disconnected from the only thing that's ever mattered to her - the Optics of her own Shenanigans - she doesn't realize she's become a caricature of herself.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who together with her husband owns a vineyard in the Napa Valley, went to the House floor on Wednesday to condemn the Republican majority for working against the interests of a person she called “Joe Sixpack” in order to cut taxes for “wealthy families” swigging champagne.
“Today, the Republicans take their victory lap for successfully pillaging the American middle class to benefit the powerful and the privileged. This holiday they are talking about giving people a Christmas present?” said Pelosi.
“Well, Joe Sixpack, whom the President said he was there to help, and I hope that that is true, Joe Sixpack will be delivering the champagne to their parties,” she said.
“That is how this is,” said Pelosi.
“This isn’t about anything better for working class families. This is about champagne glasses clinking in wealthy families across the country.”
Former DEA special agent David Schiller sat down with “60 Minutes” Sunday, and claimed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was too “intimidated” to prosecute one of the nation’s largest opioid manufactures.
McKesson Corporation is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in San Francisco. They are the fifth-largest public corporation in the United States and took in almost $200 billion in revenue last year, according to CBS. Schiller spent two years investigating the company for distribution violations, and each time he tried to close the case, he was met with resistance from his superiors.
“This is the best case we’ve ever had against a major distributor in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration. How do we not go after the number one organization, in the height of the epidemic,” he said. “Doesn’t someone have to be held accountable? McKesson needs to be held accountable.”
During his investigation, Schiller discovered McKesson was distributing millions of pills to pharmacies nationwide, and turning a blind eye to the suspiciously high quantity of medication being requested.
“They did not maintain any sort of due diligence,” he said. “It was happening in Los Angeles, it was happening in Detroit Michigan, it was happening in New York City. It was a national problem and nobody wanted to deal with it.”
Schiller said Mckesson also lowered the threshold for how many pills pharmacies were allowed to order to avoid the need for any further investigation. “There’s not a bigger problem we have in the United States. And who led to the problem? Mckesson was at the forefront.”
Despite agreeing to pay $13.3 million in fines back in 2008 for distribution violations, McKesson continued supplying opioids to suspicious pharmacies and doctors who were suspected of being fronts from criminal organizations.
“They had hundreds of thousands of suspicious orders they should have reported and they didn’t report anything,” Schiller said. “There’s not a day that goes by in the pharmaceutical world, in the McKesson world, in the distribution world where there isn’t something suspicious. It happens every day.”
Each time Schiller attempted to build a case, his superiors would put up road blocks and discourage him from digging any deeper.
“The problem is when we took the cases and eight boxes of evidence to the attorneys at the highest level in DEA, they would tell us right away, ‘Let’s just settle.’ Settle? How do you settle when you have to go in with a court order and shut down a billion dollar distribution center,” Schiller said. “We’re not going to accept that in the field. So we fought for years and we were unsuccessful, is the bottom line. We had to settle.”
McKesson was fined $150 million by the Department of Justice in January, but Schiller said this was just a slap on the wrist. He had previously been lobbying his bosses for a $1 billion fine, and prison time for certain executives. Schiller claims the DEA and Department of Justice shied away from the fight because they were “intimidated” by Mckesson’s high powered legal.
“There was back room deals being cut that we didn’t know about. I didn’t know about. And I was representing the DEA nationally on the investigation at the highest level,” Schiller said. “How do you settle? How do you say it’s okay? How do you do that? No, put them in jail. You put the people who are responsible for dealing drugs, for breaking the law in jail. Nobody’s in jail. They wrote a check.”
When asked if he thought Mckesson was getting special treatment from the government, Schiller said, “I don’t think, I know they were getting special treatment. They were getting treatment like I’d never seen in my 30 year career.” A member of DEA’s senior leadership team emailed Schiller during the investigation and told him they had no choice but to back off because of political pressure from the top.
“David … I’m totally against settling, but how do we hold their feet to the fire,” the email read. “Our attorney’s have us over a barrel with their refusal to go to court.”
Schiller said he was shocked by how far the government was willing to go to squash the case, and he believes people need to know the truth.
“I saw what’s happening to our country now with this epidemic. I saw the limitations being placed on us by our own people and chief counsel,” he said. “People don’t like to hear the truth. I’m doing it because the truth needs to be told.”
McKesson declined to be interviewed by “60 minutes” but released a brief statement to CBS, calling their settlement the best way to move past a “disagreement” with the DEA and DOJ.
(CNSNews.com) Binh Thai Luc, an illegal alien from Vietnam who had previously been incarcerated at San Quinten prison after committing an armed robbery in San Jose, was convicted on Monday of entering a home in San Francisco and murdering five people with a hammer.
“Prosecutors said Luc used a hammer to commit one of the worst mass homicides in modern San Francisco history, though the weapon was never found,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday.
The multiple murder took place on March 23, 2012. The jury arrived at its verdict yesterday after considering the case for seven days.
In 2014, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R.-Okla.) of Oklahoma introduced the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act," which would have ended the “catch-and-release” policy of letting illegal aliens go free in the United States when other countries will not accept them for deportation. At the time, Inhofe specifically cited Luc’s crime as the kind he was trying to stop.
“A Vietnamese immigrant, Binh Thai Luc, was ordered deported in 2006 after serving time in prison for armed robbery and assault,” said a press release Inhofe put out on June 11, 2014. “Due to the Supreme Court decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, Luc was released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody when Vietnam refused to admit him. He is now facing charges for the murder of 5 people in San Francisco in March of 2012.”
“Before the killings, Luc was convicted in 1998 of committing an armed robbery at a Chinese restaurant in San Jose. After he served eight years in San Quentin State Prison, officials handed him over to federal immigration authorities for deportation back to his home country of Vietnam.
Vietnamese authorities, however, refused to provide Luc with travel documents, and he was released from custody as required by federal law.
“Prosecutors said Luc used a hammer to commit one of the worst mass homicides in modern San Francisco history, though the weapon was never found. The defendant was also found guilty of five counts of attempted robbery and two counts of burglary.”
Luc’s victims, as reported by the Associated Press, included a man and his wife, their daughter and son, and the son’s wife. Their names were Hua Shun Lei and Wan Yi Wu; Ying Xue Lei; Vincent Lei and Chia Huei Chu.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon did not seek the death penalty for Luc, according to the Chronicle. Instead, according to the paper, “he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
“He was released from San Quentin State Prison after serving eight years of his 11-year sentence, and was taken into federal custody for deportation back to his native Vietnam.
“But because Vietnamese authorities declined to take him back, he was released under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that undocumented immigrants must be freed within six months in such cases.”
khn Chad Terhune November 17, 2017 Sutter Health intentionally destroyed 192 boxes of documents that employers and labor unions were seeking in a lawsuit that accuses the giant Northern California health system of abusing its market power and charging inflated prices, according to a state judge.
In a ruling this week, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Curtis E.A. Karnow said Sutter destroyed documents “knowing that the evidence was relevant to antitrust issues. … There is no good explanation for the specific and unusual destruction here.”
Karnow cited an internal email by a Sutter employee who said she was “running and hiding” after ordering the records destroyed in 2015. “The most generous interpretation to Sutter is that it was grossly reckless,” the judge wrote in his 12-page ruling.
Sutter, which has 24 hospitals and nearly $12 billion in annual revenue, said the destruction was a regrettable mistake.
Employers and policymakers across the country are closely watching this legal fight amid growing concern about the financial implications of industry consolidation. Large health systems are gaining market clout and the ability to raise prices by acquiring more hospitals, outpatient surgery centers and physician offices.
“It’s stunning what Sutter did to cover up incriminating documents in this case,” said Richard Grossman, the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer representing a class of more than 1,500 employer-funded health plans.
In April 2014, a grocery workers’ health plan sued Sutter and alleged it was violating antitrust and unfair competition laws. The plaintiffs began requesting documents related to contracting practices, such as “gag clauses” that prevent patients from seeing negotiated rates and choosing a cheaper provider and “all-or-nothing” terms that require every facility in a health system to be included in insurance networks.
Sutter disputes the broader allegations in the lawsuit over its market conduct and said its charges are in line with its competitors’.
The judge said that in 2015 Melissa Brendt, Sutter’s chief contracting officer in the managed-care department, and an assistant general counsel, Daniela Almeida, authorized Brendt’s executive assistant to destroy 10 years’ worth of managed-care documents going back to 1995. The company earlier had scheduled the documents to be destroyed in 2035 — 20 years later.
The executive assistant, Sina Santagata, testified in a deposition she wasn’t aware of any other time in her 17 years at Sutter when the managed-care department destroyed records held in storage.
In his Nov. 13 ruling against Sutter, the judge singled out an email by Santagata as “particularly noteworthy.”The executive assistant emailed Brendt, the chief contracting officer, on July 30, 2015, after sending the order to destroy the records. She wrote, “I’ve pushed the button … if someone is in need of a box between 3/15/95 & 11/23/05 … I’m running and hiding. … ‘Fingers crossed’ that I haven’t authorized something the FTC will hunt me down for.”
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces antitrust laws in health care to prevent hospitals, drugmakers and other industry players from engaging in anti-competitive behavior that could harm consumers.
Santagata testified that she was being “sarcastic” in her email, and Sutter told the judge that the FTC reference was just a “joke.”
Karnow saw no humor in it. “There are infinite topics for jokes, and the choice of this one is strong evidence” in the plaintiffs’ favor, he wrote in his order Monday.
As part of his sanctions against Sutter, the judge ordered the health system to examine email backup tapes covering 2002 through 2005 to search for documents on some of the same topics as the destroyed records. Also, Karnow said he will consider a plaintiffs’ motion for issuing jury instructions that are adverse to Sutter in light of the document destruction. The trial is scheduled for June 2019.
“The record shows that Sutter’s conduct was more than just an inadvertent error,” Karnow wrote.
Sutter spokeswoman Karen Garner said the incident was a “mistake made as part of a routine destruction of old paper records” and the Sacramento-based health system disclosed the error as soon as it was discovered.
“We regret that as part of a routine archiving process we failed to preserve some boxes of decades-old hard-copy documents,” Garner said.
The United Food and Commercial Workers and its Employers Benefit Trust initially filed the case against Sutter in 2014. The joint employer-union health plan represents more than 60,000 employees, dependents and retirees. The court certified the case as a class action in August, allowing hundreds of other employers and self-funded health plans to potentially benefit from the litigation.
In addition to its 24 hospitals, Sutter’s nonprofit health system has 35 surgery centers and more than 5,000 physicians in its network. It reported $11.9 billion in revenue last year and income of $554 million.
Grossman, the plaintiffs’ counsel, said he welcomed the judge’s ruling. But he said much of the evidence is irreplaceable, particularly handwritten notes from negotiating sessions and meetings involving key Sutter executives.
He said those records covered a critical period in the early 2000s when there was a “sea change in Sutter’s contracting strategy” and it implemented provisions that insulated the health system from price competition.
“This was groundbreaking in the industry,” Grossman said. “Until we address the anti-competitive behavior of entities like Sutter, we will not solve the problem of high costs in health care.”
The plaintiffs are seeking to recover hundreds of millions of dollars from Sutter from what it claims are illegally inflated prices. The lawsuit alleges that an overnight hospital stay at Sutter hospitals in San Francisco or Sacramento costs at least 38 percent more than a comparable stay in the more competitive Los Angeles market.
A study published last year found that hospital prices at Sutter and Dignity Health, the two biggest hospital chains in California, were 25 percent higher than at other hospitals around the state. Researchers at the University of Southern California said the giant health systems used their market power to drive up prices — making the average patient admission at both chains nearly $4,000 more expensive.
“Sutter is a pretty extreme case of market power, but health care consolidation has become a really important issue across the country,” said Kathy Hempstead, a health care researcher at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “It’s been on the back burner somewhat because of the debate over the Affordable Care Act, but there is bipartisan interest in tackling this.”
Self-harm (such as cutting or burning) is one of the known predictors of suicide risk. The medical community has long been interested in potential psychological interventions that could target this behavior as a way of preventing future self-harm and/or suicide. A new study just published in The Lancet Psychiatry examines one such intervention: a brief worksheet for self-harm prevention. Unfortunately, the researchers found that their worksheet was ineffective at preventing future re-hospitalizations.
There is some evidence that psychological interventions can reduce self-harm or suicidal behaviors. Most of this evidence centers around longer-term psychological interventions such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT). However, even this evidence has been rated as “low quality” in a recent (2016) meta-analysis by the well-regarded Cochrane Group. Other interventions did not merit even this distinction, instead, they were rated as “inconclusive.”
The authors of the current study attempted to improve this inconclusive research by using a large randomized, controlled trial design to study the effectiveness of their brief worksheet-based intervention. The researchers studied 518 patients, randomly assigned to either a brief psychological intervention or to a control group that received treatment as usual (no additional treatment). All patients had been admitted to a single hospital in the UK after a suicide attempt.
The researchers termed their worksheet a “volitional help sheet (VHS).” It contained a number of “if… then…” statements which the researchers believed could enable participants to identify alternative coping strategies when feeling the urge to self-harm or attempt suicide.
The researchers measured three primary outcomes: 1) the percentage of participants who were hospitalized again for self-harm; 2) the number of times individual participants were re-hospitalized for self-harm; and 3) the estimated cost-effectiveness of the worksheet.
The results were striking: there was no difference in the percentage of participants re-hospitalized, nor was there a difference in the number of times individuals were re-hospitalized. That is, the researchers determined that their intervention was completely ineffective for preventing self-harm.
After the failure of their primary outcomes, the researchers conducted secondary analyses to determine if their intervention might be helpful for any subgroup. In this posthoc analysis, the researchers found that people who had previously been admitted to hospitals for self-harm behaviors appeared slightly more likely to improve after the VHS intervention. The researchers state that because this was not part of their original study design, the finding needs to be replicated in future studies before it can inform policy or treatment decisions.
According to the authors: “For those with no history of self-harm hospital admission, the VHS might increase self-harm (i.e., do harm).”
The study was also limited in that it only examined re-hospitalizations. Most self-harm behaviors do not result in hospitalization, which means that it is likely that a large number of participants continued self-harming and simply were not identified during the follow-up period of the study.
In a commentary on the study also published in The Lancet Psychiatry, Katrina Witt writes that researchers hope to find “brief psychological interventions that require minimal expertise to deliver” since many people who admit to hospitals with self-harm and suicidality will not go on to receive mental health services. However, Witt also questions whether brief interventions will do more harm than good:
“These interventions also have the potential to increase rumination and negative affect, and potentially self-harm repetition, by serving as unhelpful reminders of negative experiences in the lead-up to the index self-harm event or during hospital treatment.”
As it stands now, these interventions may do more harm than good. According to the researchers, further study is needed to determine the efficacy of any of these interventions for reducing self-harm and suicidal behavior.
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O’Connor, R., Ferguson, E., Scott, F., Smyth, R., McDaid, D., Park, A. . . . Armitage, C. J. (2017). A brief psychological intervention to reduce repetition of self-harm in patients admitted to hospital following a suicide attempt: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 4(6), 451-460. (Link)
Thank You Mr Simons and MIA.
Most
of this evidence centers around longer-term psychological interventions
such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and cognitive-behavior
therapy (CBT). However, even this evidence has been rated as “low
quality” in a recent (2016) meta-analysis by the well-regarded Cochrane Group.
frontpagemag Janet Napolitano’s politburo is corrupt and incompetent as the UC president herself. May 30, 2017 Lloyd Billingsley
University of California president Janet Napolitano stashed away $175 million in a secret slush fund while publicly beating the drum for tuition and fee increases. Napolitano interfered with state auditors, prompting UC students and workers to call for her arrest and Democratic legislators to demand her resignation. For their part, the UC regents publicly defended Napolitano, and it has now emerged how the regents responded to students and worker protests.
The night of the protest, May 17, CBS News reported, “the regents threw a $15,199 party at San Francisco’s elegant Palace Hotel for 59 people – a $258-a-head event also billed to the university.” Back in January, the night before they voted to raise tuition, the regents hosted a $17,600 banquet, one of many such events in recent years.
While planning to jack up tuition 28 percent in 2014, the regents threw an $8,000 party, and the year before, during a financial crisis, they blew $15,600 on a feast. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Napolitano’s office has reimbursed the regents for more than $225,000 in dinner parties since 2012. What the regents have to celebrate remains unclear to many observers.
State auditor Elaine Howle not only uncovered the president’s $175 million slush fund, she also questioned the performance of the regents in their oversight of Napolitano’s office. The state auditor recommended that the legislature could increase accountability by taking over the regents’ job. True to form, the regents found no fault whatsoever with president Napolitano.
“There has been no criminal activity and no slush funds,” according to regent Sherry Lansing, a former movie executive. She blasted “distortions” in the media, hailed Napolitano’s “wisdom and integrity,” and proclaimed, “her leadership has been incredible.”
Regent Norm Pattiz was “delighted when I found out we had a chance to have Janet Napolitano as our president and was “still delighted” after the audit. Last year during a commercial, Pattiz asked television writer Heather McDonald, “Wait a minute — can I hold your breasts?” and referred to his hands as “memory foam.”
It has not emerged whether Pattiz exhibited similar behavior at any of the lavish regents’ parties.
The former Department of Homeland Security boss disputes the $175 million slush fund and is sticking to her guns on the tuition and fee increases. Part of the campus assessment fee, she told the Daily Bruin, goes toward paying off UCPath, an upgrade for the UC payroll system. UCPath was supposed to cost $156 million but after spending $327 million over four years, UC bosses now estimate a final cost of $504 million.
As Rachel Alexander showed in “Napolitano Leaving DHS Under Cloud of Suspicion,” Janet Napolitano was “known in Arizona for her backroom deals and ruthless targeting of conservatives, a pattern she continued as DHS chief.” Napolitano released reports singling out conservatives as dangerous extremists, in her view the sort of person citizens should report to the government.
As DHS chief, Napolitano failed to secure the borders and enforce immigration law. As Alexander notes, “Napolitano also enacted a Dream Act-style policy giving young illegal immigrants a reprieve.” She continued that type of policy as president of the University of California, founding and funding the UC Center for Undocumented Student Legal Services, barring campus police from cooperating with federal authorities, and granting illegals in the UC system a $25.2 million aid package running through 2019.
The UC regents were delighted to hire Janet Napolitano and pay her $750,000 a year, more than the President of the United States, and more than three times the $200,000 she bagged as DHS boss. Like porn connoisseur Pattiz, they are still delighted with Napolitano’s “incredible leadership” even after revelations of her $175 million slush fund and as Democrats call for her to resign.
After approving steep tuition and fee hikes, the regents celebrate by throwing a $15,000 bash in San Francisco. Embattled UC students take note: your once-great university is now a big-time party school and the regents are on permanent spring break.
