California Governor Gavin Newsom is trying to subject the homeless to involuntary psychiatric procedures. Gavin's Care Courts, SB1338 and AB2830, and Al
Muratsuchi's Homeless Courts Pilot Program, AB2220, violate due
process and they would really screw up the lives of some of the most
vulnerable, forcing them further underground, and forcing them to hide
from authorities.
This just seems to be how Gavin thinks. He sees California as a medical police state, as a 40 million bed psychiatric hospital, and as an internment camp. Gavin is a self-serving ego maniac.
Gavin started on this kind of stuff when he was Mayor of San Francisco, the Care Not Cash Initiative. The Board of Supervisors never would have done this, but Gavin put it before the voters. So the homeless, the poorest of the poor, no longer got the full GA allotment, just a reduced amount. Gavin was making the homeless, a group already stigmatized and the poorest of the poor, into his scapegoat.
Gavin innundated us with this same type of idiocy during 2020 with his daily COVID press conferences, where he would fly over our beaches in the helicopter and then scold us. And then he scolded us because
the precautions were not choking off COVID, and because the positive test results climbed from 5.1% to 5.6%. Like I said back then, "Unless you are seeking medical treatment, refuse
COVID testing. All the results do is fuel Gavin's Gaslighting and Grandstanding." Even the government's own COVID data never showed anything which warranted Gavin's type of hysterical response. Hospitals were never close to overflowing. His precautions did not protect anyone from a COVID infection. And he never made any move to try and do anything to protect those who were at the highest risk. All he did was promote hysteria, while destroying people's livlihoods and businesses. Gavin thinks nothing of using 40 million Californians as political pawns. This time it had been for embarrassing Donald Trump. Gavin had been selected as one of the point men. It's because he knows how to follow orders, and it's because he wasn't on the ballot that year.
Looks like we get one free LA Times view per day. This May 2 letter to
them is the most succinct analysis I have seen.
Taking Autonomy Away From Homeless
”
To the editor: As a worker in the mental health field and incoming
therapist, I am beyond horrified at the “CARE Court” proposal.
(“Newsom’s ‘CARE Court’ homelessness plan faces new questions from
lawmakers,” April 26)
It blatantly ignores scientific evidence on the causes of homelessness
as well as best practices in therapy. Not only that, but it amplifies
the potential effects of medication, something that is not always
effective nor a universal panacea. It also assumes that somehow people
can be forced to get “better.”
It would be far better and more effective to combat the causes of
homelessness rather than the symptoms. The root cause is nearly always
trauma related. For suggestions on how to handle this, I recommend Dr.
Gabor Maté’s work, particularly “In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts.”
The CARE Court proposal will not help anything. It will create more
work for the courts, create trauma for many, and make those who
actually could benefit from the supports offered far less likely to
seek them.
I urge state leaders not to take people’s autonomy from them in the
name of helping them.
”
Now sure, the leadership of the Democratic Party have been elected to their positions in order to make political compromises. But this does not mean that it is alright for them to use their positions to promote falsehoods and hysteria. And while many supported the removal of Donald Trump, this does not mean that it is okay to resort to becoming like Trump in order to defeat him at the poles.
Gavin was taking his cues from Fauci, but
Fauci's experience was with AIDS. AIDS does not transmit by casual
contact, it has a long incubation period which could be over a year,
and it has an extremely high mortality rate. On each of these three points, it is the exact opposite of COVID. So what Gavin was saying
was just grandstanding and muscle flexing. But there was in it a
threat of really harming people's lives. Gavin was fostering
superstitious irrational fear, and prejudice.
Gavin gave a police state tone to his COVID response when he said there was going to be "an army of 10,000 contact tracers". And
then he said he was going to do "targeted testing into marginalized population groups". That had always been the real danger in COVID, in the fear, predudice, and hysteria that could be unleashed, and that it could be turned against maginalized population groups. Fortunately that is not what happened in 2020, but now in 2022 this is what is happening, as Gavin tries to build Psychaitric Internment Camps. Always, Gavin is just completly blind as to how his policies will effect real people.
And COVID made for a huge upwards wealth siphon. The precautions hit the lowest income people the hardest. The more someone lived in the off the books economy, and the more funky their housing and relationship arrangements, the harder they were likely to have been hit. And this is why there are today more people living in shelters, in encampmnets, and in tents on sidewalks. So Gavin wants to take those people who have been hit the hardest by the COVID precautions and economic collapse, a collapse which he was a major player in, and designate them as a social meanace and make special courts to contain and medicate them.
And Gavin is levering this off against Republicans, figuring that 40 million Californians have no other choice but to follow him. So he reinforces the ideas of the Republicans just so that he can try to contrast his own supposedly softer approach to theirs. And he assumes that we do not know that the Republican ideas are just talk, not something which the voters would ever stand for. Even in Red States they don't have homeless internment camps. CA voters would never go for this. The reason Gavin thinks he can do it is because of the mental health gloss. It was when Trump came to San Francisco and he started talking about internment camps, that Gavin started talking about involutary psychiatric procedures. Gavin believes that he will come out of this smelling like a rose because he has the Real Estate Sector, Police and Fire Fighters, and County Behavioral Health, all on his side. Clearly he has learned nothing from the well earned first recall drive against him.
This concept of Mental Illness is just a way of taking someone's
liberty away without due process, and when they have broken no law. It
also attacks one of the most basic principles in our system of
justice, the Right to Remain Silent.
Anyone who is living on the street has at some point had their life
shattered. How this happened, or when, will vary. And many have been
so beaten down that they do not know. The vast majority have been tracked into this by the
family. But trying to force them to talk will always be very harmful. For most, privacy is the only thing
in this world they have left. Trying to make people talk is another
version of what is known as Second Rape. And usually the idea that
someone is "Mentally Ill" has started within the family.
Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics
Having very little in the way of transportation or
secure places to store their things, giving the homeless a court appearance will only result in them having a warrant and then having to hide. The homeless will no longer feel that they can trust police or firefighters, and public order depends upon this type of trust.
Gavin wants to take us back to the days of Frank Jordan and his Matrix Program. Police tied up enforcing a zero tolerance approach and writing citiation after citation for sleeping, knowing that the vast majority of these citations will never be paid, and knowing that the homeless really don't have anything to pay with anyway. Jordan's program was such disaster that it made him a one term Mayor. Then Willie Brown came in and Gavin was his protégé. Most of those who followed San Francisco politics were excited about the Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez. But no matter, Gavin was the darling of the business community, so so he was able to out spend Gonzales 11 to 1, but it was still close. And once in, Gavin wasted no time, money was good for everyone, except for the most poor, so they should not have it. And so now Gavin is again trying to take us back to those times when the unhoused were the scapegoat and were always on the run from the authorities.
NGO’s will try to house people, but they have no illusion that they could ever house everyone. So they only offer it to those who really do want to live by their rules, which means staying clean and sober. And there is no mental health component.
Gavin, on the other hand, is eyeing the windfall tax revenues from the COVID upwards wealth siphon. So his approach is not just housing, it is the internment of a perceived social menace, and this is why it is built first and foremost around courts and mental health. Trump had talked about internment camps, but Gavin is the one who actually believes that he can do it.
Even as it is now, many who are experiencing homelessness know that they have to stay away from what shelter and transitional housing space is available, lest Social Services be given a chance to construct a biography on them and then this be used to support a mental health case against them.
And in municipalities across California now, there are more and more accounts of the unhoused being targeted for police harassment. Officers are asking them personal things, things which have no possible relation to anything presently at hand which the officer could be concerned about. Officers will ask things like, "How long have you been homeless?" or "Don't you have relatives around here?" These officers are trying to build a biography on the party, as that is the beginnings of making a mental health case against them. Not all of the unhoused necessarily know right now how important it is to draw a privacy line with police. And not all police take well to someone who does that.
We all want to see that everyone is always housed, and we need a strong public housing offering to contain private real estate gentrification. But before we can get there, broad based public understanding will have to built, so that we are ready for deeper changes in the presumptions upon which our economic system is predicated. Only when we have these changes in understanding can we have universal housing, instead of pscychaitric internment and forced drugging.
And people have to understand how the mental health system is what enforces the dictates of capitalism, and how people are tracked into it by the family.
If someone is unhoused they have no social armor. They will be targetted all day long by people who want to project their own scorn, contempt, and pity on to them. So once someone is unhoused they learn that 95% of the people who approach them in a given day they have to brush off. But Gavin wants to defeat this basic self protection by hiring judges for each of the 58 counties to make the homeless comply, so that they can be forced to surrender what ever autonomy they still have, and then be made into basket cases by the Mental Health System.
Even though infuriated day after day by Gavin's Grandstanding and Gaslighting over COVID, as a lifelong Democrat I refused to participate in the recall campaign because I did not want his seat to go to a Republican. I wanted him to just resign. At least the recall attempt kept Gavin silent for a while.
But then right after, Gavin was back at it again, bragging that he was imposing the first vaccine mandate for school children. He was demanding that they be needled with a so called vaccine which probably never should have been allowed onto the market in the first place. The FDA was refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and disclose the qualifying data, saying it was going to take over 50 years, while Gavin was playing with the long term health of school children, children as young as 5yo, just to try and embarrass Ron DeSantis
Gavin is targeting the homeless right now, because that is who our society has set up to be the scapegoats. But once such scapegoating
starts, it knows know bounds.
Pink Triangle
With his daily COVID Press Conferences, and with his Grandsanding and Gaslighting, Gavin was trying to make a new kind of society, one which is without viruses, The Republic of Hygienic Virtue, and he was to be our Supreme Being. He wants everyone to be living in a Mental Hospital, or an Internment Camp, because that way they won't care if their livelyhoods are destroyed. And he wants everyone to have a case manager, because that way they'll be used to someone talking to them the way Gavin does. His posturing was so offensive that it almost got Gavin recalled. But now he is trying to do the same thing again. Gavin and Mark Ghaly want everyone to be subjected to psychiatric policing and court evaluation, because that will scare labor organizers, and they want all business to be subject to government approval, because that will control what people can do, and they want all economic activity to be subject to government review, because that will frighten even government employees into staying in unworkable situations. That Gavin might want to do something to benefit the homeless is overshadowed by the fact that he is trying to set up a Psychiatric Police State. Gavin is not a progressive, he is a totalitarian.
Gavin had an easy time getting in in 2018 and in the recall because there was so much anti-Trump sentiment. And I got his email messages, "Republicans are trying to get me out, please send money." Well in a
two party system you have to expect that. The parties are about equal size and the other one will always be primed to go against you. And then it was "Trump
Republicans are trying to get me out." So now it was a smaller subset. And what Gavin fails to understand is that these are all California voters. Gavin would be nowhere without wacko Republicans to hold up to delegitimate the oppostion. He runs against the supporters of the other candidates, rather than against the other candidates themselves.
Gavin really irritates people. The first time I was moved to call KQED radio
was because I was so angered the first time I heard the name and voice of newly elected S.F. Supervisor Gavin Newsom, and the utter contempt he held for South of Market residents. It's just like how he refused to see how much he was harming people with his COVID hysteria and blamed the recall drive on Republicans and on Trump Republicans, and today how he refuses to see how much trouble Care Courts is going to cause for people who are trying to rebuild their lives. Should he
get re-elected now, there will be another recall drive. Best is if he
would just resign now and let the Lt. Governor take over and be the
incumbent.
I am not a Republican. Coming of age in the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements, and coming to political consciousness in '68 and '72, I could never support any Republican.
I opposed the Gray Davis recall and I stayed silent during the recall against Gavin because I did not want their seats to go to Republicans. I wanted Gavin to just resign.
It's ironic that with over 200 years of advancing industrial technology and so much money having been put into weaponry, that at this time when we have now the ability to convert that technology and to take care of every single person better than even royalty had lived in past centuries, and where everyone could have a life of comparative leisure, that we still allow free floating real estate prices to keep the vast majority running in squirrel cages, and that we have now come so see a large portion of the population as completely expendable and suitable for internment and psychiatric drugging.
Imagine if we handled agricultural land in the same Gilded Age way that we now handle housing. At this point then there would be very little land in production. The rest of it would be used by speculators. Besides buying and selling, they would do little more than installing electronic security and putting up No Trespassing signs. For one individual to feed themselves it would by now cost over $100 per day. And then anyone without that $100 could be found to be suffering from mental illness and in need of drugging, internment, and conservatorship.
Well fortunately we do not handle agricultural land that way. As it is in most industrialized countries, agricultural land is protected by the central government, and so are food prices. Since the Great Depression the federal government has protected agricultural land, and paid out subsidies to limit production and protect the prices, while at the same time buying up large quantities of food.
This is not socialism, it's simply the government using its authority to protect capitalism from itself. We need to have a strong public housing offering.
When there was the recall against Gray Davis, Democrats offered up Lt.
Governor Cruz Bustamante. And Bustamante would have made a fine
Governor. But the turnout in a recall election is very different from
a scheduled general election. If only Davis had just resigned before
the recall drive was certified, Bustamante could have taken over and he would have been very re-electable.
Gavin survived the first recall against him because the otherside
lacked a credible candidate, and because of anger against Trump. Now we
need to drop Gavin and have him resign. Gavin angers people, and it is not just Republicans.
Gavin is not a progressive. He is not a Democrat in the FDR and LBJ mold. Listen to President Biden before the IBEW and before the AFL-CIO. Gavin would not be worthy of tying Joe Biden's shoes. All Gavin has ever offered to working people is pity, as his COVID hysteria pushed more and more people from regular employment into itinerant employment. Gavin is a neo-liberal. This is a repackaging of the old social Darwinism, and of the doctrines of the Nazi Party. It's just being presented in a different way, sugar coated, and as the lesser of other evils and as some kind of a necessity.
Very few abuse survivors would be able persevere in their struggle for political consciousness and self-awareness after a session with a court ordered psychotherapist, or after a dose of psychiatric neurotoxins. Mental illness is defined by what a person says. Newsom is trying to take away the last thing many who have been pushed to the margins in our society still have left in this world, their privacy.
And why is Gavin always so unable to see the effects that his policies have on real people? Is it simply because Gavin has never had to work a day in his life? There has always money behind him to start businesses, boutique businesses, vanity businesses, frivolous business, and to have people with far more smarts than he could ever have around to run them, and then to be able to sell them at great profit. He has never had to face the sorts of bottom of the barrel work environments, things which often as not don't even pay as agreed, and where if you show any ability you will certainly be fired, which the vast majority of the homeless have had to try and live off of. Its been nice for Gavin. But some have to actually earn their living and their social position. A hysterical response to COVID and Mental Health Courts makes that very hard.
Gavin has no occupational standing to protect, just like his income does not depend on being able to show up and work with people f2f. So the COVID hysteria was no direct threat to him like it has been for others.
We have Work Readiness Programs, Recovery Programs, and Salvation Ministries, which the homeless are routinely subjected to, and usually with government complicity. Gavin would never need to be worried about anything like this. Just like he wouldn't need to worry about being subjected to the mental health system or to Care Courts. Gavin lives in a completely different strata than the people who are subjected to his initiatives.
If he should get re-elected, then there will be another recall drive. Gavin irritates the hell out of people, and it's not just those on the opposite side of the asile. Gavin makes all Liberals look like Fascists, and all Democrats look like Idiots.
Mark Ghaly and Tom Umberg are presenting SB1338 before committees. But they are not being straight about what it does, or on how much power it gives to its courts and to others who can refer someone to the court. Ghaly and Umberg are liars. The homeless are already a target, and this just makes it that much worse. Ghaly and Umberg seem to want people to trust them, but there is no basis for this trust when they continually try to avoid admitting what this legislation would do. Trying to turn poverty and homelessness into mental illness is nothing new. This is why many in need of shelters and transitional housing will decline them when they are available. They recognize that they can't put themselves into positions where they could become targets for Social Services. The words that come out of one's own mouth, repeated out of context, are always the most damning. People know that they cannot playball with Social Services and let them construct anything like a biography. Ghaly and Umberg have no credibility and their deceptive role in this is shameless. They are trying to get something passed which is persecutory.
Gavin's Care Courts, SB1338 and AB2830, and Al Muratsuchi's Homeless Courts Pilot Program, AB2220, violate due process and they would really screw up the lives of some of the most vulnerable, forcing them further underground. We must oppose these. And we must drop Gavin Newsom and support someone else!
