30% INCREASE In Homelessness Since 2023 While Economy Grows!?!
The number of homeless in the United States has grown by a third during the Biden years despite steady economic growth since the end of the pandemic. So how did this happen? Why did a rising tide not only fail to lift all boats, but now threatens to drown an even greater number of Americans living on the margins -- and under bridges, on sidewalks and in their cars? Jimmy speaks with Food Not Bombs founder Keith McHenry about the history of homelessness, why the problem remains so entrenched in the U.S. and why purported attempts to solve it have failed so spectacularly. Jimmy and McHenry then discuss where the tens of billions of dollars that have been allocated to solve the homelessness crisis really went since they’re obviously not being used as intended by the voting public.
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Jimmy Dore Show.
Homelessness is up 18%.
That's on top of the 13% the year before.
But you got to love that.
They still have pride in their city.
Look at that.
The tent has LA.
Isn't that nice?
I mean, I know this looks bad, but the more we look like Calcutta, the more we can compete globally with India.
That's what Vivek tells me.
Am I right?
Just imagine all the desperate future STEM geniuses being produced right now.
They can't watch Save by the Bell because they don't have streaming.
They're going to be great.
That's according to Vivek.
So here, Arnad Bertrand, he says this is undoubtedly the single most incriminating statistic in the United States system, alongside the 13% poverty rate in the United States.
Skyrocketing homelessness when the economy grows means that something is fundamentally broken.
The U.S. saw an 18-1% increase in homelessness this year with more than 770,000 people counted as homeless.
So, and of course, that's an undercount.
It is an incriminating statistic, but we all have eyes.
We could see also.
We don't need this statistic to tell us what the hell is going on in America.
Let me just, but let me just real quickly.
The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by the lack of affordable housing.
So it's not just, I thought it was all just young drug addicts, but it's driven by the lack of affordable housing as well as a devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials say.
Nonsense.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said federally required tally is taken, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The increase comes on top of the 12% increase in 2023.
So I'm not a math genius, but I think that's, I think that's close to 30% increase over the last two years in homelessness in the richest country in the world, as we send hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars overseas for wars and bombs.
The 2023 increase also was driven by people experiencing homelessness for the first time.
The numbers overall represent 23 of every 10,000 people in the United States, with black people being way overrepresented among the homeless population.
No American should face homelessness, and the Biden-Harris administration is committed to ensuring every family has access.
It's funny.
That's the head of the housing and urban development said, Adrianne Todman said in a statement, adding the focus should remain on evidence-based efforts to prevent and end homelessness.
I like the evidence.
No one should ever have to face homelessness.
It should sneak up from you from behind.
Among the most concerning trends was nearly 40% rise in families being homeless.
I thought it was just, they always say it's just drug addicts.
That's what Elon Musk says.
Families' homelessness more than doubled.
Nearly 150,000 children.
So it's families, it's children, it's veterans.
But they want you to think it's just drug addicts.
We just need more prisons.
Disasters also played a part in the rise.
The Maui wildfire.
More than 5,200 people were staying in emergency shelters in Hawaii.
Boy, I need some cough syrup.
Increased homelessness is tragic.
Yeah.
Okay.
Robert Marbo Jr., the former executive director for the U.S. Intra-Agency Council on Homelessness, called nearly a 30%, 33%.
See, I'm not good at math.
33% increase in homelessness over the past four years disgraceful.
I can think of a few other words.
And said the federal government needs to abandon efforts to prioritize permanent housing.
We need to focus on, let me bring in our guests.
We have a guest who specializes.
Keith McHenry helped found the first Food Not Bombs group in Boston in 1980 with seven of his friends.
He has recovered surplus food and shared meals with the homeless as a volunteer with Food Not Bombs for 45 years.
He spent 500 days in jail in San Francisco for sharing meals with homeless people.
And he faced 25 to life in prison.
He is the author of Hungry for Peace and the anarchist cookbook.
Food Not Bombs is active today in at least 1,000 cities in over 65 countries.
Please welcome to the show, Keith McHenry.
How are you doing, Keith?
Oh, thank you so much, Jimmy, for having me.
And Robert Morbot has an agenda and his agenda as mega shelters that have been a total failure.
And the most famous one was that they took the prison, the jail, county jail in St. Petersburg, Florida, and built a new jail next to it and then opened the old jail as the homeless shelter.
And the sheriff department ran it.
It was started by Robert Morbut.
And it turned out that people basically just cycled through it.
You know, within 30 days, 90% roughly of the people that went into that shelter moved back out on the streets because they preferred to be out on the streets rather than in a minimum security jail, basically.
So this guy has his own agenda, and he says we need to focus on treatment of substance use and mental illness and bring back program requirements like job training.
And he also is, he potentially will be back in this position as he was under Trump.
He was the head of homelessness for the Trump administration in his first term.
And it should be pointed out that some of the Trump, you know, the kind of the Palantir individuals that are supporting Trump that are associated with, you know, Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance is a person by the name of Joe Lansdale.
He was one of the founders of the CIA contractor Palantir.
I think Whitney Webb speaks a lot about their relationships.
And he and the thing that was under Palin under him, he started a program called Cicero Institute.
And one of its pillars is making it a crime to be homeless in the United States.
And he, here's a billionaire connected to the CIA who is running this program.
And he's helped promote the idea of taking Grants Pass versus Johnson, which was a law that said a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruling that said if you didn't have places for people to be, you couldn't make it illegal to be homeless.
So that got overturned in April by the U.S. Supreme Court making it possible to make homelessness illegal in the United States.
And immediately after that, we might recall that Gavin Newsom signed an executive order making encampments illegal in the state of California.
And immediately after that, cities started to clamp down very hard on the homeless.
And I know here in Santa Cruz where I feed people every week and was feeding people every day for the three years of the lockdown.
The panic in the homeless community was outrageous.
And then we're referring to families.
Yes, Saturday, I arrived with tents and sleeping bags and tarps to the meal every week.
We spend maybe about $1,000 to $2,000 a month on tarps, tents, and sleeping bags to replace the ones taken by the police in these what are called encampment abatement sweeps.
And in our city, we've got something like Santa Cruz was just given $4 million to get rid of the homeless around the homeless shelter.
And we intercepted emails between the city and the director of the homeless shelter cheering on the elimination of the homeless outside the homeless shelter in what's supposed to be a several year campaign to make sure homeless people don't congregate in the neighborhood where the shelter is.
So when the cops come in and do one of the so I mean, you understand, I think it's everybody understands that it's an untenable situation to have people living in tents on streets in the city.
But so when they come in and they get rid of them, do they provide them with a place to go?
No, absolutely not.
So in fact, so what happens is that they take your belongings and often, you know, they'll take everything.
So one of the worst, so this, so what often happens is, first of all, when you're homeless and families are homeless, they frequently move into their vehicle, right?
That's the first logical thing to do.
And it's not long, cities will often, if they perceive you to be living in your vehicle, will start aggressively ticking you.
We have an entire department, a group of people in the Santa Cruz Police Department whose entire job is to ticket and tow homeless people's vehicles.
So once you then lose your vehicle, and a huge percentage of these people that I run into are families or elderly women, which is really a horrible thing.
And then they come to our meal at the town clock and ask us where the homeless shelter is.
So we have all the phone numbers for both of the shelters, and there is never any room in these shelters.
So it's not uncommon for me to hand, as I did on Saturday to this young mother and her children, sleeping bags so they don't freeze in their car or in the case of the women or other people that lose their cars that are junked by the city.
Then I hand them the sleeping bag, the tent, and we find a experienced homeless person, homeless man, particularly who we trust, who then guides them to the best place along the river or levee to safely sleep until they can potentially get into a shelter, which often can take weeks.
So when they spend $4 million in taking away homeless people's tents and sleeping bags and what have you, you think they would spend $4 million, like, I don't know, providing some kind of shelter for those people, right?
Wouldn't that, wouldn't that be, but they don't do that.
So they're not.
Yeah, they don't do that.
So, you know, the state of California under Newsom spent since 2019 to now $24 billion on homelessness.
And we don't really see any evidence of the, so our city was given $16 million and then was given another $4 million and keeps getting millions.
Jeff Bezos gave the shelter $2 million like two years ago and so on.
And yet there's no more shelter beds in the whole town, in fact, with less.
And there's no more housing.
So what it appears to be happening is they're taking the homeless money and other money from other pockets probably, and they're putting it through housing authority for allegedly affordable housing.
And then that is seed money to build what becomes luxury housing, luxury condominiums.
yeah, and then what they do is then they pay a fine for not having affordable housing in the luxury condo development that goes into a trust somewhere.
We never know where that money is, but you don't end up with any affordable housing.
Hold on, we're going to get to that.
So, Dallas actually worked to overhaul its homeless system, and it saw a 16% drop in its numbers between 2022 and 2024.
Do you know anything about what they're doing in Dallas to do that?
I don't know what that program is.
And they also, sometimes they'll say they do the same thing in Houston.
But our people that are feeding people in Dallas are not seeing any kind of drop.
And the people in Houston are not seeing any kind of drop.
So my suspicion is that it's an actual what they did here in Santa Cruz, where our mayor, who is incredibly anti-homeless, Fred Keeley, he goes around saying, oh, well, homelessness dropped in Santa Cruz County by 32%.
And it turns out it didn't really drop by, obviously didn't drop by 32%.
It went up.
But the way they cooked the numbers in the point in time count made it possible for them to say this through some analyst type study of the point in time count, which then they kind of will spin that way.
So like, for instance, the number that they're saying, 770,000 homeless Americans, an interesting thing, there used to be a time where you could Google 750,000 homeless Americans, and it would show that that number stayed the same from a little before like about 1989 right up until the housing foreclosure crisis.
And the odd thing is when 5,500,000 families lost their homes in the housing foreclosure crisis, the number of homeless people went down, according to the federal government, by 250,000.
So the numbers thing, it's very hard to count homeless people.
And they choose the winter to do point in time counts because they assume most people will be in a shelter and they could go to the door of the shelter and say, how many people are in your shelter today?
And then the management would go, oh, we got 100 people in here.
And they go, oh, there's 100 homeless people here.
And so that's, and it's kind of logical to do the count that way.
But the reality is most homeless people are not in shelters and it's impossible to find them.
And when we did it last time, I did it here in Santa Cruz.
It was one of the atmospheric rivers and we couldn't hardly find it.
That's why, really, the number went down to 32% drop in homelessness is the weather was so bad that day you couldn't find any homeless people.
It didn't mean that there wasn't any homeless people.
It's just impossible to find them.
So in 2024, the wealth of the world's 10 richest millionaires increased by 85%, while homelessness in the United States also rose by 18%.
That's a stark reflection.
So we have the largest income inequality since the time of the Pharaohs.
And here's the richest man in the world.
He says, in most cases, the word homeless is a lie.
It's usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental health.
It's usually.
So I just approximately 20 to 30% of the homeless population are children.
So there's that.
And then there's 35,000 veterans also.
And then 53% of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of the unsheltered homeless had formal earnings, meaning they worked.
So they had.
So they actually worked.
They have jobs.
So one of my best friends, she, Crystal, she works doing sampling at Costco in the day, and she goes around the corner and unloads UPS trucks all night long.
And she doesn't qualify for housing in Santa Cruz County because she has a bad FICA score because she had tickets for living outside, which then destroyed her, you know, her FICA score and her credit.
And so she, even though she has the money, she can't get into a place.
So she sleeps in the woods across from UPS warehouse.
And I can tell there's, you know, it's a cheap.
And then another thing that I think people in America should realize, it is a full-time job to be homeless because you have to pack up all your stuff, move down the corner, pack up all your stuff again.
You have to have somebody watch your stuff when you go to the bathroom so you don't lose your stuff.
You have to, it's a, it, it is a difficult job to be a homeless person.
So when the richest guy in the world who's worth almost half a trillion dollars now, you think, and he's supposed to be super smarty pants, you think he could figure out how to fix the homeless problem, at least in his home state.
You think it could take, you know, whatever.
Well, HUD says they could end homelessness in the United States for 20 billion.
Yeah, 20 billion, but I'd say maybe even 40 billion.
And so what do you think?
What do you think he gets out of this kind of attitude, propagating this kind of attitude?
Is that because he's insulated and the only homeless?
Because most people don't see the homeless.
They're invisible.
But the ones they see are the drug addicts on the street who are harassing people.
And by the way, most of those people are mentally ill.
And so we don't, we did a thing called deinstitutionalization.
And a lot of people think that started with Reagan talking about that, but we had mental hospitals in the 50s, and they just started a thing called deinstitutionalization.
So now we used to have over a half a million people being housed in mental facilities in the United States.
Now we got rid of all of them.
And now we have close to the same number in prisons that are mentally ill.
So what do you think is more expensive, a mental hospital or a prison?
In California, it's $120,000 a year to imprison one person per year.
So don't you think we can find a way to house those people for less than $120,000 a year?
Of course we could.
So why do you think, what is in it for guys like Elon Musk?
See, I always say chaos favors the establishment.
And George Carlin says, you know, the homeless are there to make the poor people work harder.
Which I think is true.
But, you know, the thing, one of it is, is, yeah, homelessness, the existence of homelessness helps suppress the wages to stay at $7.25 an hour because the last thing you want to do is become homeless.
So you'll take any kind of job and take any kind of abuse.
The other thing that is tragic is that, you know, when we see this United Healthcare person getting shot down in Manhattan, a huge percentage of the homeless population are actually people who are either injured on jobs or like the times I've been homeless.
Once I was homeless a couple of times just from illness and losing, you know, not able to go to work because I was ill and then losing my apartment and then living on the streets.
I also run into a ton of homeless people who are injured on the job.
Their disability runs out.
And a lot of people that are hooked on heroin, or you can't get heroin anymore, but back in the days when you could, now only fentanyl, you would, it was because you couldn't get off your meds from your back injury or whatever other injury because you were cut off at a certain point.
And then you just keep doing street drugs and then you end up in this mess like that.
But I think Elon Musk's point of view is partially ignorance, but it could be because of his relationship with people like Joe Lansdale, who have also investing in prisons and so on themselves, their hedge funds, and that they are intending really to just, as that saying goes, first they came for the homeless, but I was not homeless.
And I'm very concerned that a lot of what's being discussed is essentially moving the homeless into large camps.
In our county, the discussion was to send people to Camp Roberts, which is Monterey County and maybe Santa Barbara County.
It's on the cusp there, San Miguel off of 101, and put everybody in that military base.
And then that's your solution.
You just remove everybody from the cities, put them in these giant military bases, and maybe somebody, a friend of Elon Musk, is going to get the contract to run those facilities and to, you know, just another money-making scam for them.
I'm also concerned when they add that, you know, we can see like, I don't know how many thousands of people became homeless after Helena, right?
In North Carolina and Tennessee.
But this guy, Joe Lansdell, from Palantir, he was able to encourage a law to be passed in Kentucky where you're allowed to use a stand-your ground.
You know, part of the law against living outside, making it live outside in Kentucky, is if the person doesn't move quickly enough, you have you're protected from liability if you feel you need to shoot the homeless person to get them to cooperate.
In Tennessee, they may, that same person was able to get a law passed that if you're homeless in Tennessee, it's a felony.
And then, so all across America, they're creating these insane laws.
So you end up with Helena.
I get calls from people seeking food in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, all the time, because they've been displaced and they've been forced into homelessness by the homeless people.
What's amazing is I did a tour earlier this year in Europe, and you don't see homeless people in Denmark, Copenhagen, Norway, Oslo.
I saw one or two in Amsterdam, Rotterdam.
No, you don't, you don't, Berlin.
I didn't, I didn't see homeless people.
Did we see London?
We saw homeless people, but Stockholm, Sweden didn't see homeless people.
It's like, so human beings have figured this out.
They figured out how to create a society that isn't riddled with a 30% increase in homeless people in two years while the economy is booming and billionaires are now he's worth a half a trillion dollars.
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So let me get back to this.
So you mentioned this before that the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated back in 2010, I think it was, that you could end homelessness in the United States if you spent $20 billion in the correct way.
That was their estimate, right?
So that's going back a few years now.
That's 14 years ago.
But so in California, we found out that we have spent $24 billion on homelessness over the last five years, but they didn't track it.
They didn't track anything.
And so nearly half of Los Angeles's record homeless budget went unspent, the city controller fines.
Really?
Because they just passed another law.
We just voted.
So whenever they ask the citizens to vote, hey, do you want to spend more of your tax money to help homelessness and cure homeless?
We always vote yes.
So they just passed, just this last time, they passed another law saying we're going to spend another half cent of every tax dollar to go to homelessness.
And I'm going to guarantee, I bet it's not going to help because there's a homelessness industrial complex.
And the more we spend on homelessness, the worse it's getting.
And that's a fact.
Yeah.
And it's because, well, watch this interview.
This is our friend James Lee.
He's going to figure this out.
I mean, public administrator, how much do you make?
$242,000.
So a public administrator makes a quarter million dollars a year.
Yeah.
Okay.
And what does she do?
Can you describe what you do in one sentence?
I oversee homeless programs for a very large nonprofit in the city of Los Angeles.
Wow.
She makes a quarter million dollars a year overseeing a homeless program for a nonprofit.
Sounds like someone's making profits.
Yeah, well, that's what's going on.
Say, for instance, Santa Cruz, we had a civil grand jury to investigate where the money went in Santa Cruz.
This is before COVID.
And they said that it was not possible to audit the homeless program.
So our director of our homeless program, you know, he makes roughly the same amount of money.
And he has like several million dollar mansion in the foothills and so on.
But they couldn't get showers for homeless people, even though they didn't have the money for it.
I mean, that's crazy.
So it took them, you know, there's no showers for like three years, except for in a trailer.
But the problem was if you were disabled, you couldn't get into one of the two stalls.
I mean, those are people that are making massive amounts of money.
There's another agency here called Housing for Health, and the director of that also makes like nearly $300,000 a year.
And all of these institutions also have, you know, people make, you know, like we have a huge battalion of people that are paid over $150,000 to $200,000 a year just in city government in Santa Cruz to deal with homelessness.
But the reality is it's private citizens that are providing the tents and the sleeping bags and just like us.
And so, I mean, I joke with Ratner, the head of housing for health.
I go like, I'm the housing authority and the food program in this town because I house more people than the city does, but I house them in pup tents that I get from big five and tarps I get from Costco.
You know, it's insanity that, and the public really is compassionate for the homeless, but they're, but you know, but um, James also has another video.
So let me play, let me play this all the way through.
Let's make $242,000 a year.
Can you describe what you do in one sentence?
I oversee homeless programs for a very large nonprofit in the city of Los Angeles.
That's a big role.
And what's your biggest struggle in that job?
Not enough housing, not enough housing, not enough housing.
All right, today we're going to expose this entire grift.
First, I dug around a little bit and the nonprofit that she worked for is called LA Family Housing.
And according to their IRS Form 990, they received $65 million in government grants last year.
And you know how she talked about housing, housing, housing being so important.
Well, this is what they're talking about.
LA Family Housing is transforming a 1950s motel into apartments for supportive housing.
But then you look at the price tag, $60 million for 41 apartments.
$60 million.
LA has a homeless population of over $75,000.
And that's how they think $60 million of taxpayer money should be spent.
That's either incompetence or gross negligence.
And I'm thinking the latter.
Because here's what I think the scheme is with all these affordable housing units that are popping up all over Los Angeles.
It's a complete bait and switch scam.
Because here's what's going on.
The construction of affordable housing developments is subsidized by public funds.
In exchange, rents are regulated by covenants, but these covenants carry an expiration date.
And once a covenant expires, a building's owner is not required to pay back any public funds.
Rather, he is freed from all regulations which kept rents down, able to extract and hoard all future profits.
And in the city of Los Angeles alone, there is an estimated 11,000 affordable housing units, which will convert to market rate within the next five years.
So these massive public housing projects are nothing but a huge money laundering scheme between these real estate developers, these nonprofit administrators who are making monster salaries, and also politicians who I assume are getting kickbacks, allegedly.
I mean, how else would you explain this insane statistic that LA is spending $837,000 to house a single homeless person?
So I give these people two options.
Either A, actually end homelessness, or B, we should demand to defund this whole boondoggle.
Wow.
Okay, I have to do a follow-up on this lady who makes a quarter mil a year combating homelessness because this story is so much more juicy and corrupt than I had even realized.
Let's get into it.
Okay, so remember when I said she worked for a nonprofit called LA Family Housing?
Well, it turns out she was actually fired from LA Family Housing according to this lawsuit.
Allegedly, she was getting in a little bit of hot water with her boss for starting a consulting business on the side.
I checked on LinkedIn.
It looks like she's not running one consulting business.
She's actually running two consulting businesses that have to do with housing.
Now, of course, she's disputing that's why she was fired.
She's claiming that these are the real reasons why she was fired from LA Family Housing.
You can pause to read, and this is why she's filing a lawsuit now.
Obviously, I'm not privy to exactly what went down, but you can search this lawsuit and read all the details and decide for yourself.
But regardless, I wouldn't lose too much sleep worrying about her because she's now failed upward and is the new chief executive strategist for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
That's right.
She is now an official government employee.
There she is.
Funny enough, the face of this new article from the LA Times reporting that a county audit has found lax accounting at the LA Homeless Services Authority.
And just for context, the LAHSA annual budget stands at $875 million.
About $348 million comes from the county's coffers.
It is a massive government agency.
And here's what the audit found.
Quote, LAHSA, a city-county joint powers agency, failed to establish formal agreements on how and when advances should be repaid, did not always maintain records for capital advances, and could not provide an accurate list of all the contracts and their execution dates.
They've apparently also failed to reclaim millions of dollars in cash advances to contractors.
And you guys ready for this next part?
Remember these consulting businesses that she runs.
Well, LAHSA's newly hired chief executive strategist, her, that's what we've been talking about.
She, according to state business filings owns a consulting business, which we knew about, but what we didn't know about is that she owns the consulting business with the leader of one of LAHSA's largest contractors.
Come on.
This number is starting to make a whole lot of sense now.
Why we have to spend $837,000 to house a single homeless person.
It's because developers, contractors, nonprofits, and city administrators like her are all in cahoots with one another.
I mean, if we just look statewide, $24 billion have been spent on homelessness with homelessness going up.
California, according to the latest statistics, has about 180,000 people who are experiencing homelessness.
If we just took the $24 billion and gave it to each homeless person, they would be getting $130,000 each.
I'm not saying that I would propose this or if this would be my preferred option, but it is starting to sound like this would be a hell of a lot better idea than what we're doing right now, which I think is just people embezzling hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars each year, allegedly.
And I would say he is absolutely correct.
And homeless people and their supporters have been asking this question for years because there are all these headlines about money for the homeless, and we never see anything for the homeless.
It's heartbreaking.
So we have 28 luxury condo projects in Santa Cruz, which has a population of 63,000 people.
And what they do with their affordable housing money is you're able to not have to ruin your project by having low-income people live in an affordable unit.
An affordable unit here means that you make $93,000 or greater.
The money goes into some bank account and is held there, but no one is clear where this bank account is or who owns it or what's going on.
So if you're supposed to have by law, like five units of affordable housing in your luxury condo project, then you can get out of doing that by paying money into this trust fund somewhere that no one is clear about what's happening.
And I think what James is saying, he also has a great report on what happened with money going to the Cayman Islands through Mayor Todd Gloria in San Diego used through the Housing Authority.
So these scams are happening systematically.
There's probably at this California League of Cities, they actually discuss how to divert this money into their own bank accounts.
Because, you know, it's amazing.
But the thing that's also heartbreaking is the suffering.
I mean, the suffering of these people on the streets is incredible.
And we have one friend that was trying to get into drug rehab.
She's a 22-year-old young woman.
And we are working trying to help her get off drugs.
She so wanted to get off drugs.
And then she just died this week in her tent outside the homeless shelter.
And so, again, every time it's put to the citizens, do you want to pay more for your taxes?
Do you want to put an extra penny tax on the sales tax?
And that'll go towards homelessness.
They always say yes.
So now we're spending close to a billion dollars a year in the city of the county of Los Angeles on homelessness.
And homelessness is still going up everywhere you look.
So what is the answer to this?
So to me, it looks like, so what the it's the, it's these public-private partnerships.
So you take taxpayer money and you give it to contractors, private companies, and there's no accountability and nothing ever happens to it.
Why can't we just have a government agency hire people instead of having to farm it out to private contractors?
Why can't we just hire people?
You know, like when FDR was president, he hired, he created the CCC, right?
They went out and they fixed parks and recreation and all kinds of stuff.
And they worked for the government, right?
So why can't we create a force?
We could employ people and we could get rid of these quarter million dollar salaries of people who don't do anything except figure out ways to grift even more money from the system.
So what do you think is the answer?
I mean, we got the money.
The problem is not the money.
We just spent $24 billion in California in five years.
We have the money.
So what would you do if you were the czar of homelessness?
Well, first of all, I would start making wages a living wage.
That would cut out a lot of problems of people going into the streets.
The other one that I think is universal health care.
That would have made a huge difference.
There's so many homeless people who refuse to go to the emergency room because if they go to the emergency room, they're going to lose all their belongings.
That is a guarantee.
So you will own nothing when you leave the emergency room.
You've lost your sleeping bag.
You'll lost your probably like anything that you had when, you know, only what's on your clothing is all you're going to leave that place and they're going to send you to a bus stop out in front of the hospital where you're going to sit.
And then you've got to go figure out how to make, you know, get all your stuff back again.
So the reality is that if they had universal health care, because a huge percentage of people living on the streets are there because of healthcare debt and crises, another is a living wage.
So you could, and that the, and that the price of renting a facility was something you could afford.
So that is really where the solution is.
Now, and in our town, they try to play with that.
So what Robert Morbutt is complaining about is this housing first model, which is a scam, but he doesn't care that it's a scam aspect of it.
He just wants money diverted to these mega shelters that he would then operate or his company would operate.
So the thing is that the homeless industrial complex does not want to solve this problem because they make a huge amount of money.
Frances Fox Pivin, and I forget her co-author now, she wrote a book regulating the poor back in the 70s.
And it talks about the history of the Formation of the homeless industrial complex.
And it was rich people, of course, set it up.
And particularly by the time it gets to Bill Clinton, where he starts taking Heritage Foundation ideas, you know, like welfare to work and so on, and starting and putting people like even in a bigger bond because they can't pay for child care, but they've got to go to a minimum wage job and so on.
And it just kept escalating.
But the other thing that's similar to the FDR and doing, you know, that, you know, they were able to get the New Deal and get public housing because they promised the landowners that it would expire and that they would go to market rate.
Now they just have escalated that.
So instead of it being 40 years like it was under FDR, it's now like five years as it is now.
And a lot of it is fake.
But they, so all, so they, the other thing is that there's this huge amount of empty units.
So for instance, there's an estimate that there's 10 to 20 empty units in the Bay Area for every unhoused person.
So there's no system to, so those units could have been rented.
The other thing is that it is the drug addiction issue and alcoholism and mental health issues.
You're going to be mentally ill if you live outside because you're going to have post-traumatic stress disorder no matter what.
They're going to guard him from being robbed, from the cops waking you up all the time.
You never get a good night's sleep and anything like that.
So essentially, if they actually, instead of building luxury condos and here in our town, they mobilized housing matters and all the nonprofits and the food bank and everything to support, to defeat a measure that would have allowed the local people in Santa Cruz to determine if the housing was in fact low income.
And we would vote on making real housing that was for poor people.
But they mobilized the homeless industrial complex to defeat the actual solution because they were then pretending, like, as you can see in LA, that if you build these, you know, they're trying to use this idea that we're going to build all this housing, but of course, none of the people can afford to get into it.
So the basic thing is, you know, when I started Food Not Bombs in 1980, we did a soup line outside the Federal Reserve Bank during the stockholders meeting of the Bank of Boston.
And Reagan had been in office for 30 days.
And so we're like, man, if Reagan's policies and the policies of these banks continue, there's going to be homeless people standing in line eating at a soup kitchen.
So we were going to dress up like hobos and do that.
But we didn't organize well enough.
So we went, I went to the only shelter in town at the time called the Pine Street Inn, which had about 30 guys sitting there and on tile benches and stuff.
And I gave a speech about this protest I was going to do the next day outside the bank.
And they came and they said, there's no food for homeless people in Boston.
You should stop what you're doing.
You know, you should just do Fu Not Bombs every day.
So what that shows is that there was very few homeless people in 1980 on the streets of America, which is not an issue.
By 1988, when we first started getting arrested for feeding the homeless at Golden Gate Park, now it's a crisis, right?
That's eight years of Reagan being in office and cutting funding for human services and education and health care.
And then you end up with this crisis.
It's not like for some reason at the end of eight years of Reagan, everybody said, oh, urban camping, it's the greatest thing.
I think I'll go out and do some heroin and sleep in the streets.
No, it's a system that is completely broken.
And it's intentional and it's heartbreaking because the suffering, like a homeless person's life expectancy is dramatically reduced.
So that's by the difficulty of living outside.
You know, I think people like you see this a lot.
We did a segment on a Fox News host who was talking about the people who are homeless, they like it.
They like they want to live like that.
And then, you know, you have to say, no, well, actually, 35,000 of them are veterans.
40% of them are families who work.
30% are children.
They don't like it.
And just the ones you see, you only see the ones that you come in contact with are the ones who are mentally ill and on drugs.
And why, hey, why don't we build drug rehabilitation facilities, right?
You get the construction jobs, you get the jobs of the people who would work at those facilities, and you get those people off the street.
That never comes up.
We tried it in Santa Cruz, but there's a group here called, and every city has it.
Our group is called Take Back Santa Cruz.
The head of it is the husband of the chief attorney of Google.
And anyway, so they like blocked, we had a very enlightened head of Department of Health here, Dr. Love, and he organized this whole thing where we could have a safe injection site and immediately put into a drug rehab place in a center where you would live there until you were clean and sober and you had adequate support.
But you couldn't get the people like Take Back Santa Cruz, they organized with the city council and the county supervisors to make sure there would not be drug rehab, saying it's enabling the drug users.
It's just like when they, we had another facility that's in the county that is to have, it's supposed to be for families and veterans.
And the neighbors all like, we don't want homeless people living next to us.
This is horrible.
And the point is, though, when they're living in their apartment, they are no longer homeless people.
Your neighbors are now other people living in an apartment near you.
It's not like the, you know, so that's insane.
So even the shelter, the one little measly shelter we have at the armory, the people that were like half a mile away from that place and would never really end up with any interaction with people living there, they stopped that from being a possible place for people to sleep for years because they didn't want homeless people walking by their property.
So they've had to make a rule that you have to catch a bus in town and go out to the shelter because you don't, it's insane.
So it's like there's been this massive campaign of demonizing the homeless and saying they're all drug addicts, mentally ill and a danger to you.
And that's magnified in the legacy media and by city governments that talk that way.
they dehumanize the homeless in the same way the same language on nextdoor.com to attack the homeless is the same language that the leadership of israel used to human animals of the Palestinians, making it okay to kill a Palestinian because they're not human.
It's a similar ideology and energy for homeless people.
Well, they're not real people.
They're like drug addicts and mentally ill.
So they shouldn't have any rights.
And it is really, it's just sad, but because the reality is many, many Americans have family members that are homeless or have been homeless.
And we find that the support, when we go out and do the stop the sweeps protests, we get honking like crazy, even from people in Teslas and stuff.
But we also have people that live in Teslas that eat with us.
You know, this is like, you know, Santa Cruz.
So, you know, I mean, we, so again, the two biggest things, you want to, you want to combat homelessness.
I would, I would have three, I would have a three-pronged, I would, I would raise the wages, minimum wages.
I would give people health care, give people a basic form of health care where they don't go bankrupt if they get sick.
And the third thing is I would create drug rehab facilities and build new ones and staff them.
And that's a, you know, we're going to spend $24 billion on homelessness anyway.
Why don't we spend it on actually doing something?
And so that's my, that's, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like that, it takes a genius to figure out what we need to do.
And we, but in California, almost, you know, all the Democratic, it's a Democratic majority legislature and it's a Democratic governor.
And they all ran, they all ran on Medicare for all.
And then they get in power and they never bring it up again.
And they never do it.
Oh, we can't do it.
So they never do it.
So here we are.
If you want, California, the fifth largest economy in the world, still can't give its own people health care.
Just think about that.
And they can't take care of their own homeless.
Think about that.
They can't take care of their drug addicts who live on the street, but they can put them in prison for $120,000 a sell a year because there's someone lobbying them to do that.
It's called the president industrial complex.
And Joe Biden was a dupe to them.
So was governor.
Everybody is.
They all are.
And that's why it's broken.
We have a broken system.
And so I don't know what it's going to take.
But we have 100.
Just if you want to see what a country would look like if it was all run by Democrats, come to the to California.
It's the fifth largest economy in the world.
And this is what it looks like.
So if you think voting Democrat is going to fix things, you are incorrect.
Voting Democrat is just, look at California.
Nobody has health care.
Biggest population in the country, homeless population in the country, drug addicts everywhere on the streets, mentally ill people not getting services.
And nobody has an idea on how to fix that.
Well, I do.
If you're going to spend 24, Jimmy, it's so sad.
So in Santa, this happens everywhere too.
So, well, first of all, I point out that Fu Not Bombs has been arrested only in the most liberal of Democratic controlled cities like Tampa, Florida, or Orlando, Florida, or San Francisco or Santa Monica, so on.
We never get arrested for feeding the homeless in Republican-controlled states or cities.
But then the other thing is that they're just every year, they'll have like these series of major police sweeps to get rid of the homeless in Santa Cruz.
And then they will go, okay, we had to get rid of all these homeless people and they had no place to go.
So why don't we have a study session and figure out how to have a solution for homelessness?
And they call them Smart Solutions, but it's run by the homeless industrial complex.
So you all meet three or four times a year to come up with solutions.
And they put like pieces of paper all around on the walls and you write down all your solutions.
And then they even, our mayor, who he wasn't a mayor at the time, they even, after they kicked out everybody from this one giant camp, which was saving people's lives.
And then people died when, you know, they were in the streets afterwards.
But anyway, so they had a study and they met every Tuesday for two years and they ended up not doing anything.
And they do it year after year.
And when they were announcing that they were going to do this study, I said, like, just white out the date on the top and put a new date on it because you already had the 2000 study and the information from that study ended up being exactly the same as the 2004 study,
which ended up being exactly the same as the 2009 study, which, you know, it's because the study, it's always the same, but they don't do any of the things that are written on those sheets of paper because how are they going to make a lot of money doing the solutions that actually would resolve the crisis?
There's too much money in the homeless industrial complex to give it up.
So, well.
We paid, this is an amazing thing.
So in Santa Cruz, the housing matters, the big shelter, they spend between $50,000 and $75,000 a year on a parade to end homelessness where they walk five blocks and then the mayor gives a little speech at the end.
And it's probably closer to $75,000.
Why?
If I had $75,000, I could keep people in tents for weeks.
I mean, that's crazy.
That amount of money, you know.
But the other thing is that they hire the case managers to help you find housing and to help you get into rug rehab and so on.
These are usually a person's first job.
It doesn't pay a living wage and the people quit right away.
So you see, homeless people will have a case manager and they think they're on their way to housing and that case manager resigns and goes and does something where they can make money.
And then they get a new one, a new one, a new one.
And it goes on for years that you never get into housing.
So my girlfriend is a medical social worker, you know, the medical social worker.
That's her job is putting people into housing.
One of our relatives was homeless.
It took her 18 months of focusing only on our one relative to get him into housing.
And during that 18 months, he was like crashing with us and everything, you know, and that's with a licensed medical social worker focusing on one person.
And it took them 18 months to get that person housing.
The system is intentionally broken so that what James is saying is true.
And every city and every state in the whole country, they're just basically robbing the taxpayers to fund a homeless industrial complex with no intention of solving homelessness.
Keith McHenry, the founder of Food Not Bombs.
Do you have a website people can go to?
Yeah, foodnotbombs.net.
And that's where at foodnotbomb.net, you could find how to start a local food not bombs group.
We're like all over the world.
And you can also find where to volunteer with your local chapter.
And if you need food, you can contact us and we'll try to help you.
We're getting overwhelming number of phone calls because of when United Health provided this incentive to get extra insurance in the whatever that is, Part B or whatever, advantage.
They gave all their clients a $100 gift card if they signed up.
Well, people would thought that $100 was going to be, these are all seniors in rural America, mostly in the South.
And they thought that $100 was going to come in every week.
So after the end of the first month, they called the number on the back.
Then the United Health Care person gives them my phone number.
And, you know, the last phone call I had from them was a person who said he hadn't eaten in five days.
I mean, I have these stories.
Sometimes I have 20 of these calls a day.
These are just, and I can't even help them.
I try to, you know, if they're close to a Food Not Bombs group, I, you know, can we try to help.
But we have to send everybody to 211 or to their county offices.
And you can't imagine.
And many of these people complain that why are we sending money to Ukraine or to Israel when I worked my whole life and paid taxes and now I have only cat food to eat in my house.
I mean, how many cat food stories can you get in a year and not believe you're living in a failed state where Americans who are veterans or who do have housing are eating cat food or their last box of check, you know, check cereal and stuff.
It's insane.
And they're having a crime.
And people are propagandized into believing that universal health care is some kind of communist plot.
And you don't want to have the same people running COVID running your health care.
Well, no, the same people who ran COVID are actually running your healthcare.
Because the people who, if you think the politicians ran COVID, you're a sucker.
It was run by big pharma and the health insurance companies who all make billions of dollars off it.
And those are the same people who are.
So the problem, my idea is to get those people out of it.
You get the capitalists out from in between your doctor and your patient.
But we got to go keep it.
Yeah, thank you so much, Jimmy, for having me on.
It's such an honor.
And I've watched your show forever and you gave me so much hope during the COVID hysteria.
I thought I was the only left-winger in the world that could see big pharma when scamming us.
I've just been protesting big pharma.
Then we have COVID and now we're supposed to like big pharma.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
It's weird being a leftist in the U.S. Yeah.
Well, because all the lefties turned into right-wing authoritarian Nazis.
That's why.
Yeah, it appears to be.
And all it took was Donald Trump to be president.
That's all it took.
Yeah.
Well, now we finally got people wanting to protest again because we've got Donald Trump back.
Is that something?
And they're all talking.
Yeah, now you have people that were like praising Kamala Harris.
The next day, they're like, oh, yeah, it's great that they shot that CEO, class warfare.
I mean, they turn on a dime.
And it happened last time.
It always happens.
It's an endless.
I've made that point a million times.
You've heard me make that point that, you know, at least with a Republican in office, we have a chance that the people who call themselves liberals and lefties will protest the next war, maybe, but not when the Democrats doing it.
Barack Obama.
Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George Bush, and nobody noticed.
In fact, they gave him a peace prize.
Nobody noticed.
He kicked 5 million people out of their homes during the banking crisis and he made sure the bank executives got their bonuses and nobody noticed.
Nobody gave a shit.
He didn't give us universal health care with a public option.
He gave us a right-wing healthcare plan that bankrupts you when you get sick.
He did nobody notice and nobody gives a shit.
So at least with a Republican in office, that's what I've said since 2016.
We have a chance to protest it.
But they end up protesting garbage like RussiaGate instead of protesting actual things like the Ukraine war, the Palestinian war, homelessness, the lack of health care, the lack of, you know, the open border flooding, you know, lowering weight, the whole deal.
They have the wrong idea about everything.
And that's why the country is in the, because they're so easily propagandized.
The people who I know, it is so disillusioning that they still think what they see on CNN is the news.
They still think what they read the New York Times is the news.
They still think that.
They still think Jeff Bezos gives a shit about them in the Washington Post.
That is the exact opposite.
So anyway, we got to go.
Keith, great to see you.
Thank you, Jimmy.
Okay, take care.
Have me back some other time.
Okay, we'll do.
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