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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on July 25, 2023 at 12:11 am
…Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature…. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time…we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself. But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
—-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses
Niccolo Machiavelli
As of 2022, seven states—California, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia—offer tenant protections via residential rent control.
Only 34 out of 482 cities in California have strong tenant protections.
And only 15 cities in California have rent controls on landlords’ greed: Alameda, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, East Palo Alto, Hayward, Los Angeles, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Oakland, Palm Springs, Richmond. San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood.
In California, 17% of the population lives in apartments—more than 6.7 million people or 2.1 million more than New York.
Nationwide, almost 39 million people in the United States—nearly one in eight—live in apartments.
Many tenants have lived with rotting floors, bedbugs, nonworking toilets, mice/rats, chipping lead-based paint and other outrages for not simply months but years.
And yet, there is little enthusiasm among these millions of people to protect themselves against predatory landlords.
Still, even in those cities where rent boards and building inspection agencies exist, landlords continue to victimize tenants every day.
Take San Francisco, for example.
To hear slumlords tell it, San Francisco is a “renters’ paradise,” where obnoxious, lazy, rent-evading tenants constantly take advantage of hard-working, put-upon landlords.
Don’t believe it.
A recent case shows the absolute necessity for reining in predatory landlords before they can inflict serious financial and emotional damage on tenants.
In September, 2021, Frank and Carol Thomas (not their real names) moved into a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment for $1,000 a month.
Frank had been manager of the apartment complex for 10 years. Now he simply wanted to be a tenant.
Meanwhile, Carol suffered three close personal losses:
- Her father died in January, in Knoxville, Tennessee;
- Her best friend died in June.
- Her aunt died in July.
Then, in August, Frank left for Tennessee to explore possible business opportunities there. It was while visiting Nashville that he suffered a heart attack and died.
This required Carol to travel to Nashville to:
- Arrange for Frank’s cremation;
- Obtain the release of his personal effects—including the release of his car, which had been impounded
She also had to spend time in Knoxville to:
- Arrange for the disposal of her father’s remains;
- Attend to his piano business;
- Attend to his estate, including arranging for the sale of his house.
Since she couldn’t afford commuting between California and Tennessee, Carol stayed at her deceased father’s house in Knoxville while making all these arrangements.
Weeks later, she returned to her San Francisco apartment.
In April, 2022, Carol received a notice from the property management company responsible for the premises.
It stated that Carol Thomas was last seen in her apartment in November, 2021 and currently lived at her family home in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The notice also stated that her rent would rise from $1,000 per month to $1,695 per month. 
Fortunately, Carol had a friend who had worked as a reporter and legal investigator. He was able to draft a response to her landlord’s rent demand.
It opened: “There is a moral dimension to this case that must not be overlooked.”
First, it extolled Frank Thomas’ 10 years as building manager for the property management company now trying to raise Carol’s rent.
Then it pointed out: “During the time Carol was gone, she paid her rent in full and on time. Had she not, We Screw Tenants [not the company’s real name] would now be demanding her eviction.
“What We Screw Tenants is trying to do is to literally profit from the death of this man and the grief of this woman.
“This is utterly despicable. Morally, it’s on a par with robbing corpses and selling fentanyl to schoolchildren.
“If We Screw Tenants is willing to try to extort monies from the widow of its former building manager, it will do the same the next time a tenant is required to leave one of its buildings for weeks.
“As compensation for this deplorable behavior, We Screw Tenants should provide Ms. Thomas with a moratorium on rent increases for at least ten years.”
Carol, who was in her early 60s, showed the suggested response to a case officer of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.
The officer then contacted We Screw Tenants and said he would be filing a complaint for elder abuse against the company.
The company immediately promised to drop its demand for a $695 raise in rent—if Carol agreed to forego any legal action.
Carol has not yet decided if she wants to pursue a lawsuit.
But she was able to fend off a predatory property management company—only because San Francisco has:
- Rent control laws limiting landlords’ greed; and
- A Human Rights Commission dedicated to protecting citizens against discrimination.
Other tenants—throughout California and the nation—usually don’t prove so fortunate.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Politics, Social commentary on July 10, 2023 at 12:29 am
Years ago, Michael Martin, a Los Angeles-based computer repair expert, offered me some advice I have found absolutely essential.
“When you call Technical Support,” he said, “they’re accessing the same information you can get via the computer.
“Most of the time they’re going to have you put the Restore Disk back into the computer and restore it back to default. It wipes out everything on your computer. Technical support costs a lot of money for a company—to hell with your data.
“Be very cautious when you get on the phone with any computer company and they advise you to run the Restore Disk.”
Michael Martin
What Martin said about the unwillingness of computer companies to provide technical support applies just as much to social media websites.
Consider the case of Facebook, the largest social media and networking service. By 2023, it had more than two billion daily active users.
Such a huge audience attracts advertisers. And this, in turn, has armed Facebook with total assets of $184.49 billion as of March 2023. These revenues have given its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, an estimated net worth of $104.4 billion.
Yet, for all the billions pouring into Facebook’s coffers, the company refuses to provide a way for its users to directly contact Facebook headquarters.
This may not seem important. But the following case will demonstrate why it is.
A short while ago, a friend of mine (whom I’ll call Janet) sent Zuckerberg a letter, which opened:
“Today while chatting with someone on Facebook I found myself bounced from the page. I was instructed to log in again. When I did so, I got the following message:
| |
Secure Your Account
Hi Janet, we think your computer is infected with malware, and it’s spreading spam through your Facebook account. We’ll walk you through a few steps to explain more and scan your computer for malware.
|
“Naturally, my first reaction was to contact Facebook to find out what, exactly, was meant by Spam. I quickly found, however, that although Facebook’s customers like me have made you a billionaire, they aren’t considered important enough to be provided with direct support for resolving problems like this.
“All that I could do was put a message on file with your ‘Report a Login Issue’ page. I received no response, so I sent another. This, too, has gone unanswered.
“At the bottom of the ‘Report a Login Issue’ page is this: “Thanks for taking the time to submit a report. While we don’t reply to every report, we’ll let you know if we need more details.”
“In short, even after a customer puts a help-request on file with Facebook, s/he has no guarantee that s/he will even receive the courtesy of a reply, let alone the help needed to resolve the problem.
“Is this really what you are proud to call customer service?
“I think it’s entirely appropriate to ask people I don’t know—and who want to roam freely through my computer—exactly what it is they believe is Spam. Because if it isn’t Spam, there’s no reason for them to be roaming freely through my computer.”
Mark Zuckerberg
Janet never received a reply from Zuckerberg—nor from anyone subordinate to him.
Facebook is still the most popular social platform on the Internet. Yet its future is far from certain.
The 2021 Apple iOS privacy update, App Tracking Transparency, limited the tracking capabilities of digital advertisers and enabled iPhone users to opt-out of data sharing. This has cost Facebook an estimated $10 billion.
And younger audiences are more comfortable telling stories and sharing updates by creating image and video content.
No doubt another major reason for their discontent is the arrogance of Facebook’s censors.
Another friend of mine—Jim—recently landed in “Facebook Jail” after getting this notice:
The offending post was a news story about Texas Congressman Joe Barton. It described how he had sent a series of smarmy emails to numerous women—while, of course, posing as a paragon of “family values.”
Jim sent a letter to Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California 94025:
“If Facebook is going to hold its users to a set of standards, those standards should be clearly and specifically posted. Certainly a legitimate news story—no matter on what the subject—should fall within allowable posting guidelines. But apparently Facebook’s anonymous censors do not agree.
“Facebook functions the way the gods of the ancient Greeks were believed to act: In a totally arbitrary manner, whose decisions, however unwarranted, are beyond appeal.”
One user offended censors by his too-frequent use of the “Like” option. How this violated Facebook’s terms of service was never explained.
During the 2016 Presidential election, Russian trolls used Facebook, Twitter and Google to post misleading articles and comments. These helped put Donald Trump, a would-be protégé of Vladimir Putin, in office.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook and Twitter were flooded with posts denying the reality of the virus and offering whackjob “cures” or “preventatives.” Untold numbers of Americans died as a result.
The moral: Social media companies have your wallet at heart, not you.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 30, 2023 at 12:05 am
The United States had been fighting in Afghanistan for almost 16 years—and between 2001 and 2017 had spent an estimated $714 billion.
Still, there was no end in sight.
Then Erik Prince suggested a remedy: Mercenaries—via his private company, Academi.
For $3.5 billion in taxpayer monies, he claimed that he could vin a victory that had eluded the United States Air Force, Army (including Green Berets) and Navy SEALs.
Erik Prince
By Miller Center [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1997, Prince created Blackwater, a private security company providing support to military and police agencies.
In August, 2003, Blackwater got the first of a series of Federal contracts to deploy its forces in Iraq. For $21 million, it safeguarded Paul Bremer, America’s proconsul running the occupation.
Ultimately, Blackwater got $1 billion to provide security for American officials and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to human rights organizations, Blackwater abused Iraqis and engaged in torture to obtain information.
In September, 2007, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 more in a Baghdad traffic circle.
Owing to its highly controversial activities in Iraq, Prince renamed the company Xe Services in 2009 and then Academi in 2011.
By 2018, against opposition by the Pentagon, Prince lobbied President Donald Trump to let Academi privatize the war in Afghanistan.
Ultimately, his company did not become the sole American military force in Afghanistan—despite his sister, Betsy Devos, being the Secretary of Education.
Since the end of the Cold War, the American military and Intelligence communities have grown increasingly dependent on private contractors.
In his 2007 bestseller, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner writes:
“Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business….The [CIA] began contracting out thousands of jobs to fill the perceived void by the budget cuts that began in 1992.
“A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day, wearing a green badge….”
Much of the CIA became totally dependent on mercenaries. They appeared to work for the agency, but their loyalty was actually to their private–and higher-paying—companies.
Writes Weiner: “Legions of CIA veterans quit their posts to sell their services to the agency by writing analyses, creating cover for overseas officers, setting up communications networks, and running clandestine operations.”
One such company was Total Intelligence Solutions, founded in 2007 by Cofer Black, who had been the chief of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center on 9/11. His partners were Robert Richer, formerly the associate deputy director of operations at the CIA, and Enrique Prado, who had been Black’s chief of counter-terror operations at the agency.
Future CIA hires followed suit: Serve for five years, win that prized CIA “credential” and sign up with a private security company to enrich yourself.
This situation met with full support from Right-wing “pro-business” members of Congress and President George W. Bush.
They had long championed the private sector as inherently superior to the public one. And they saw no danger that a man dedicated to enriching himself might put greed ahead of safeguarding his country.
But there are dangers to hiring men whose first love is profit. Recent examples include:
- Edward Snowden deliberately joined Booz Allen Hamilton to secure a job as a computer systems administrator at the National Security Agency (NSA). This gave him access to thousands of highly classified documents—which, in 2013, he began publicly leaking to a wide range of news organizations.
- His motive, he claimed, was to warn Americans of the privacy-invading dangers posed by their own Intelligence agencies.
- On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks published a “data dump” of 8,761 documents codenamed “Vault 7.”
- The documents exposed that the CIA had found security flaws in software operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Android and Apple iOS. These allowed an intruder—such as the CIA—to seize control of a computer or smartphone. The owner could then be photographed through his iPhone camera and have his text messages intercepted.
- According to anonymous U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement sources, the culprits were CIA contract employees.
But there are others who have offered a timely warning against the use of mercenaries. One of these is Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman of the Renaissance.
Niccolo Machiavelli
In The Prince, Machiavelli writes:
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure. For they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal. They are brave among friends; among enemies they are cowards.
“They have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to man, and destruction is deferred only as the attack is. For in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.
“The cause of this is that they have no love or other motive to keep them in the field beyond a trifling wage, which is not enough to make them ready to die for you.”
Centuries after Machiavelli’s warning, Americans are realizing the bitter truth of it firsthand.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 27, 2023 at 12:36 am
In May, 2014, Yevgeny Prigozhin founded the Kremlin-affiliated mercenary army Wagner Group.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Wagner has played a major role in the fighting.
Prigozhin has repeatedly clashed with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, blaming him for a lack of ammunition to his embattled fighters—resulting in thousands of casualties.
Yevgeney Prigozhin
Government of the Russian Federation, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
On June 23, 2023, Prigozhin claimed that regular Russian armed forces had launched missile strikes against Wagner forces, killing a “huge” number.
He announced: “The council of commanders of PMC Wagner has made a decision—the evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped.”
In response, criminal charges were filed against Prigozhin by the Russian Federal Security Service —the renamed KGB—for inciting an armed rebellion.
Wagner withdrew from Ukraine, occupied the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and headed for Moscow. While doing so, Wagner shot down a Russian fighter plane and several military helicopters.
Putin decried the action as treason, and vowed to quash the uprising.
Talks between Prigozhin and Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko resulted in charges being dropped. Wagner ceased its march on Moscow. Prigozhin will move to Belarus but remain under investigation for treason. Wagner troops will return to Ukraine.
The danger of relying on mercenaries forms the plot of The Profession, a 2011 novel by bestselling author Steven Pressfield.
Pressfield made his literary reputation with a series of classic novels about ancient Greece.
In Gates of Fire (1998) he explored the rigors and heroism of Spartan society—and the famous last stand of its 300 picked warriors at Thermopylae.
In The Virtues of War (2004) he entered the mind of Alexander the Great, whose armies swept across the known world, destroying all who dared oppose them.
But in The Profession, Pressfield created a plausible world set into the future of 2032. The book’s own dust jacket offers the best summary of its plot-line:
“Everywhere military force is for hire. Oil companies, multi-national corporations and banks employ powerful, cutting-edge mercenary armies to control global chaos and protect their riches.
“Force Insertion is the world’s merc monopoly. Its leader is the disgraced former United States Marine General James Salter, stripped of his command by the president for nuclear saber-rattling with the Chinese and banished to the Far East.’
Steven Pressfield
Salter appears as a hybrid of World War II General Douglas MacArthur and Iraqi War General Stanley McCrystal.
Like MacArthur, Salter has butted heads with his President—and paid dearly for it. Now his ambition is no less than to become President himself—by popular acclaim. And like McCrystal, he is a pure warrior who leads from the front and is revered by his men.
Salter seizes Saudi Arabian oil fields, then offers them as a gift to America. By doing so, he makes himself the most popular man in the country—and a guaranteed occupant of the White House.
And in 2032 the United States is a far different nation from the one its Founding Fathers created in 1776.
Douglas MacArthur (left), Stanley McCrystal (right)
“The United States is an empire…but the American people lack the imperial temperament,” asserts Salter. “We’re not legionaries, we’re mechanics. In the end the American Dream boils down to what? ‘I’m getting mine and the hell with you.’”
Americans, says Salter, have come to like mercenaries: “They’ve had enough of sacrificing their sons and daughters in the name of some illusory world order. They want someone else’s sons and daughters to bear the burden….
“They want their problems to go away. They want me to to make them go away.”
And so Salter will “accept whatever crown, of paper or gold, that my country wants to press upon me.”
Returning to the United States, he is acclaimed as a hero—and the next President.
He is under no delusion that his country is on a downward spiral toward oblivion: “Any time that you have the rise of mercenaries…society has entered a twilight era, a time past the zenith of its arc.”
Nor does he believe that his Presidency will arrest that decline: “But maybe in the short run, it’s better that my hand be on the wheel…rather than some other self-aggrandizing sonofabitch whose motives might not be as well intentioned….”
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli warned of the dangers of relying on mercenaries:
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal; they are brave among friends; among enemies they are cowards.
Niccolo Machiavelli
“They have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is. For in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.”
Centuries ago, Niccolo Machiavelli issued a warning against relying on men whose first love is their own enrichment.
Steven Pressfield, in a work of fiction, has given us a nightmarish vision of a not-so-distant America where “Name your price” has become the byward for an age.
Both warnings are well worth heeding.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on June 16, 2023 at 12:07 am
More than 500 years ago, the Florentine statesman, Niccolo Machiavelli, warned:
A prince…must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to avoid traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those who wish to be only lions do not realize this.
And never is the need greater to imitate the fox than when dealing with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Several years ago, a private investigative agency found itself in serious trouble with that agency.
One of its employees had suddenly quit the company—leaving behind a major financial disaster.
That employee—whom I’ll call Pete—had been tasked with sending payroll tax records to the IRS. The company’s owner, Bill, assumed he had carried out his assignment.
Until he learned from the IRS that they had never received the records.
Consider the potential consequences: payroll taxes results in an automatic penalty of 2% to 10%.
- Failing to timely and properly pay federal payroll taxes results in an automatic penalty of 2% to 10%.
- Similar state and local penalties apply.
- Failing to properly file monthly or quarterly returns may result in additional penalties.
- Failing to file W-2 Forms results in an automatic penalty of up to $50 per form not timely filed.
- A particularly severe penalty applies where federal income tax withholding and Social Security taxes are not paid to the IRS.
- The penalty of up to 100% of the amount not paid can be assessed against the employer entity as well as any person (such as a corporate officer) having control or custody of the funds from which payment should have been made.
About 70% of the annual revenue collected by the IRS comes from payroll taxes. Under-reported and unpaid employment taxes account for about $72 billion of the United States tax gap. So the IRS makes the collection of payroll taxes a high priority.
No doubt about it—Bill was facing serious trouble.
What to do?
Fortunately, Steve, one of Bill’s employees, had a B.A. in Communications and had worked as a newspaper reporter.
When Bill told him of the calamity he was facing, Steve offered his best advice: Immediately contest the charge that he had been delinquent in providing the records. And explain to the IRS—in writing—what had happened.
Bill agreed.
First, Steve interviewed him at length to make certain he fully understood the circumstances leading up to his present crisis.
Then Steve sat down and typed up a letter—on office letterhead stationery—-to the IRS. Letterhead would give it an official appearance—and Steve wanted every advantage he could get.
Steve offered a straightforward presentation of what had happened: Pete, the number-two man in the company, had been entrusted with submitting payroll tax records to the IRS. But, nursing a grudge against his employer, he had dumped the records in a box and stashed this in a locked filing cabinet.
Then he had given notice and left the company. Later, an investigation of the office turned up the records—as well as the revelation that Pete had often used his office computer to access pornography.
In his letter, Steve emphasized that Bill’s company had previously had an unblemished record for meeting its payroll tax obligations on time. And he stated that the newly-found records had been sent to the IRS by registered mail.
Finally, Steve wrote that Bill was prepared to fully meet his financial obligations to the IRS. But he asked that Bill not be penalized for the irresponsible actions of a single, disgruntled employee.
The result?
Bill ended up paying only those monies that he legally owed. He was not forced to pay a penalty.
So what are the lessons to be learned from this episode?
- In dealing with an agency as powerful as the IRS, don’t ignore its letters.
- You have nothing to gain by pretending it will go away. It won’t.
- If you owe money, don’t deny it.
- Remain calm, even if you feel angry or afraid.
- Don’t use profanity or insults.
- Don’t try to play tough-guy with the IRS. Even the Mafia fears this agency.
- And with good reason: Al Capone didn’t go to prison for murder or bootlegging. He went away for income tax evasion.
- If you have a legitimate reason for having missed a payment, say so.
- Remember that everything you say to the IRS—verbally or in writing—is considered evidence given under oath.
- If you lie and get caught, you can face perjury charges as well as those for failing to comply with tax laws.
- Offer to fully pay any monies that you legally owe.
- If these amount to more than you can meet in a single payment, say so. Ask the agency to set up a plan by which you can pay it off in installments.
- If the agency balks at cooperating with you, contact a veteran tax accountant or attorney.
- The best accountants or attorneys for dealing with the IRS are former agents now working in private practice. They not only know the tax laws; they know the best ways to short-circuit an IRS audit and/or penalties.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Politics, Social commentary on June 6, 2023 at 12:10 am
Right-wingers love to attack those they hate as “snowflakes,” and boast about how easy it is to “trigger” them into anger.
Yet it is Right-wingers whose sensitive feelings can be “triggered” by something as innocuous as a word: DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
Target, Bud Light and Disney have all faced backlash for their support of the queer community, which is officially known as LGBTQ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer).
Other companies that have found themselves targets for Right-wing ire have been:
- Keurig (for dropping advertising on Sean Hannity’s show on the Right-wing Fox Network)
- The NFL (for its players sitting or kneeling during the National Anthem
- Amazon (for supporting Washington State in a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order barring people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States)
- Starbucks (for its CEO opposing the same executive order)
- Nordstrom (for cutting ties with Ivanka Trump’s brand of clothing)
- Kellogg (for dropping advertising on the Right-wing Breitbart website)
Now comes Chick-fil-A as the latest business to enrage the self-appointed holy warriors of the Right. Its crime: Hiring a vice president of DEI.
And even worse for the Right: He’s black.
Erick McReynolds has been a longtime employee of Chick-fil-A. According to the company’s official statement:
“Erick McReynolds joined Chick-fil-A in February 2007 as a Business Consultant. Since then, he has been promoted to various positions like Team Captain, Director – Service Team, Executive Director (Midwest Region), and Executive Director (DEI).”
In 1988 he had earned an MBA from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University He then worked as a Sales Representative at International Paper till June 2001. He served as a Senior Business Analyst at Sprint for five years till January 2007.
Erick McReynolds
Chick-fil-A has long championed Right-wing causes. By 2012, it had donated over $5 million to anti-LGTBQ groups. When the company faced backlash for this, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee led counter-protesting efforts such as “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.”
Its owner, Dan Cathy, publicly denounced same-sex marriage, citing the “biblical definition of the family unit.” This enraged liberals but ignited support among Republicans.
The company promised in 2019 to stop donating to anti-LGBTQ groups. It would instead focus its philanthropic efforts on hunger, education and homelessness.
Although McReynolds has served as VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion since November, 2021, the Right was unaware of his appointment until May 30, 2023. That was when Right-wing strategist Joey Mannarino tweeted:
“We have a problem. Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This is bad. I don’t want to have to boycott. Are we going to have to boycott?
“It’s only a matter of time until they start putting tranny semen in the frosted lemonade at this point.”
Joey Mannarino
Adding to Mannarino’s resentment was McReynolds’ public statement:
“Chick-fil-A restaurants have long been recognized as a place where people know they will be treated well. Modeling care for others starts in the restaurant, and we are committed to ensuring mutual respect, understanding and dignity everywhere we do business. These tenets are good business practice and crucial to fulfilling our Corporate Purpose.”
Other Right-wing eruptions on Twitter included:
Director of Citizens for Renewing America Wade Miller: “Everything good must come to an end. Here @ChickfilA is stating it’s commitment to systemic racism, sexism, and discrimination. I cannot support such a thing.”
@BrandonStraka: “As a liberal I boycotted Chick-fil-A. As a conservative I’ll be boycotting them again. I will not support any company that pushes the disingenuously named diversity, equity, inclusion agenda.”
@amuse: “Sadly, Chick-fil-A is embracing DEI and ESG [Environmental Social and Corporate Governance] after being co-opted by race & trans activists who have made it impossible for the organization to reflect the Christian values of its founder. Marxists won’t allow belief in Jesus Christ.”
The Right generally and Republicans in particular have long been fixated on issues involving sexuality. This is especially true for those where children are supposedly victimized.
Thus, fetuses become “babies” even when they’re no bigger than a microdot. This allows Rightists to claim they’re “pro-life”—while they champion the “right” of criminals, terrorists and the insane to own military-style firepower
And even though 90% of child molesters are heterosexual family or friends, the Right continues to charge all homosexuals with pedophilia.
Anyone who dares to challenge its agenda is charged with being a “groomer”—someone who builds an emotional connection with children or young people to sexually exploit them.
Totally ignored by Republicans are supposed Right-wing moral paragons who turn out to be “groomers” like Josh Duggar (of the “19 Kids and Counting” series) who was sentenced in 2022 to 12 years’ imprisonment for possession of child pornography;
A useful rule of thumb: Be wary of those who loudly preach their own virtue—such as Charles Sutherland, an elementary school librarian who spray painted “groomer” around the D.C. area during the 2022 Pride week. When police arrested him for possessing child pornography, they found a child-sized doll in his bed.
Meanwhile, Right-wing politicians—most notably Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis—continue to exploit the fears and hatred of their equally Fascistic constituents.
With the 2024 Presidential campaign now underway, expect more of the same to come.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on May 29, 2023 at 1:25 am
Defenders of illegal aliens entering the United States often point to their paying taxes and performing jobs that native-born Americans don’t want to do.
What they fail to mention are the costs of maintaining millions of unskilled and semi-literate (at best) men, women and children for decades on end.
Fortunately, James Reinl, social affairs correspondent at the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, has taken the time to bring these truths to light.
This occurred in a September 16, 2022 article headlined:
“America’s $78B Bill for Teaching Schoolkids With Poor English is Rising by BILLIONS in Biden-era Immigration Surge, Study Says, and 76,000 New Language Instructors Are a Tall Order in a Teacher Shortage.”
Among its findings:
- One million public school students—ranging from kindergarten to high school—need special training in speaking and writing English.
- It costs $78 billion each year to educate them.
- Texas, California, Florida and New York are among the states most burdened with such students.
- Only three percent of these students are proficient in English when they graduate from high school.
- These costs are raised by billions owing to an unceasing tide of illegal alien children at the southern border.
These alarming statistics were produced by a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
The 5.1 million students lacking English language skills need help in all their classes. As a result, it costs 15 to 20 percent more to educate them than American-born students who grow up learning English.
Illegal alien climbing over the border fence in Brownsville, Texas
With the United States facing a severe teacher shortage, some states have lowered their hiring rules to recruit teachers with only a high school diploma.
In 2020, the 5.1 million illegal alien students in public schools cost American taxpayers $78 billion—an $18.8 billion jump from the cost in 2016.
Of those students, 1.15 million were in California, costing the state $19.5 billion. One million more lived in Texas, costing that state $11.4 billion. And 278,000 lived in Florida, at a cost of $3.1 billion.
Only 370,000 teachers nationwide are trained to teach them, and 76,000 more will be needed during the next five years.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, almost 200,000 immigrants were intercepted crossing the southern border in July, 2022. Many of them are entitled to claim asylum, and all children in the United States have a right to an education—even if they arrived here illegally.
Illegal aliens rounded up by ICE
Immigration remains a highly divisive issue among Americans. “Red” Republican states want to close borders. “Blue” Democratic states are more open to newcomers.
Yet even famously liberal enclaves of support for illegal aliens like New York are beginning to have second thoughts about taking in unlimited numbers of uninvited foreigners.
On October 7, 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency in response to the city’s migrant crisis, which he said will cost the city $1 billion this fiscal year.
Eric Adams
“We now have a situation where more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with babies and young children,” Adams said.
“Once the asylum seekers from today’s buses are provided shelter, we would surpass the highest number of people in recorded history in our city’s shelter system.”
Behind this unwanted influx lies Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
By the first week of October, Texas had spent more than $18 million busing illegal aliens found in Texas to famously liberal supporters of illegal immigration: Washington D.C., New York City, and Chicago.
Abbott announced the program in April as his response to the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Greg Abbott
New York City now has more than 61,000 people in its shelter system. Thousands of these are American citizens who are homeless. They are competing for assistance with illegal aliens who were bused to New York City from the southern border since April, 2022.
Behind this huge surge in illegal aliens and their continuing drain on America’s schools, housing and hospitals (among other facilities) lie three Communist-ruled countries: Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Rising levels of repression, food shortages and economic stability are motivating Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans to enter the United States. And assisting them in this effort is the longtime policy of the United States government to automatically accept those leaving Communist countries as refugees.
At some point, the United States must face the economic and social absurdity of allowing some cities and states to provide sanctuary to every illegal alien who appears.
Even Eric Adams, emphasizing that New York City remains a sanctuary city, warns it cannot cope with such an overwhelming influx of migrants:
“We are not telling anyone that New York can accommodate every migrant in the city. We’re not encouraging people to send eight, nine buses a day….We’re saying that as a sanctuary city with right to shelter, we’re going to fulfill that obligation. That’s what we’re doing.”
Abbott clearly believes he has the right to inflict thousands of illegal aliens on other states. And illegal aliens clearly believe they have the right to demand unlimited access to the United States.
At some point, America must stop allowing itself to be a dumping-ground for other countries’ unwanteds.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on May 23, 2023 at 12:10 am
President Joseph Biden acts as if he must accept Republican extortion demands or watch the country’s economy collapse.
But there are legal remedies for punishing such criminal behavior. Biden needs only to direct the Justice Department to apply them.
- Biden can direct Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate whether actions by Republican Congressmen broke Federal anti-racketeering and/or anti-terrorism laws.
- Garland, in turn, can order the FBI to conduct that investigation.
- If the FBI finds sufficient evidence that these laws have been violated, Garland can convene criminal grand juries to indict those violators.
Merrick Garland
Criminally investigating and possibly indicting members of Congress would not violate the separation-of-powers principle. Congressmen have in the past been investigated, indicted and convicted for various criminal offenses.
Aside from their guilt for extortion, at least 147 Republican Congressional members tried to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election to illegally retain Donald Trump in the White House. They can easily be indicted and prosecuted for electoral fraud.
Making the job easier for prosecutors: Former President Donald Trump, still de facto boss of the Republican party, has openly stated his desire to see default happen.
At his infamous May 10 town hall interview with CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins, Trump urged Republicans to default on the United States national debt if President Biden won’t agree to budget cuts.
Donald Trump
TRUMP: I say to the Republicans out there—Congressmen, Senators—if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default. And I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen.
But it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors. You know the expression?
COLLINS: You once said that using the—that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen. You—you said that when you were in the Oval Office.
TRUMP: Sure, that’s when I was President.
COLLINS: So why is it different now that you’re out of office?
TRUMP: Because now I’m not President.
In short: If I’m not President, the country can be destroyed for all I care.
Yet for all of Trump’s professed concern about the national deficit, on August 2, 2019, he signed into law a two-year budget deal that raised spending by $320 billion over existing spending caps set in a 2011 law.
The bill also boosted military and domestic spending, and lifted the debt ceiling, which is the legal limit on the amount of debt the federal government can have.
The bill threatened to push the budget deficit to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for only the second time since the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and add $1.7 trillion to the federal debt over a decade.
Besides ordering the Justice Department to indict extortionist Republicans, Biden could stand up to them in another way: By urging his fellow Americans to rally to him in a moment of supreme national danger.
President John F. Kennedy did just that—successfully—during the most dangerous crisis of his administration.
Addressing the Nation on October 22, 1962, Kennedy shocked his fellow citizens by revealing that the Soviet Union had installed offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba.
John F. Kennedy
Kennedy outlined a series of steps he had taken to end the crisis—most notably, a blockade of Cuba. Then he sought to reassure and inspire his audience:
“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”
President Biden could send that same message to the extortionists of the Republican Party—but he has refused to do so.
Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the newly-installed Speaker of the House of Representatives, has told CNN that Republicans would demand spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. Those cuts would come at the expense of the poorest American citizens, as this has been the standard Republican practice.
Appearing on The PBS Newshour on January 17, Wendy Edelberg of the Hamilton Project, a liberal economic think tank, warned of potential disaster if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling:
“It’s playing a game with the U.S. economy and people’s lives that I think is irresponsible….I’m very confident that the White House and Democrats in Congress stand ready to negotiate on future tax and spending laws and changes to those laws.
“What I don’t understand is why those negotiations are linked to the debt ceiling. Maybe they’re both about borrowing, and so people have gotten confused. One is about backward-looking obligations based on previous laws, tax and spending laws that were enacted, and one is about future.”
There’s no mystery: By linking the debt ceiling to tax and spending negotiations, Republicans believe they can extort any concessions they want from President Biden.
But this doesn’t have to happen.
Biden can choose to invoke criminal law against criminal extortion. If he does so, he will save the Nation from financial extinction.
And he will send a message to future Right-wing extortionists: The lives and fortunes of American citizens may not be held hostage to gain leverage in a political settlement..
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on May 22, 2023 at 12:23 am
Once again, Republicans are ruthlessly playing “chicken” with the nation’s financial security.
During the Presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans threatened to plunge the country into defaulting on its loans to force sharp budget cuts to non-military spending.
Seven years later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) praised the Republicans’ massive contribution to the national debt under President Donald Trump.
On August 2, 2019, Trump signed into law a two-year budget deal that raised spending by $320 billion over existing spending caps set in a 2011 law—and boosted military and domestic spending.
The bill also lifted the debt ceiling, which is the legal limit on the amount of debt the federal government can have.
The bill threatened to push the budget deficit to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for only the second time since the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and add $1.7 trillion to the federal debt over a decade.
By January, 2021, the national debt had risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. It amounted to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
But now, with Democrat Joseph Biden as President, Republicans have become “fiscal conservatives.”
Joseph Biden
And they are prepared to plunge the United States into financial ruin unless Democrats once again meet their extortion demands.
The debt ceiling is the legal limit for how much debt the United States can take on as a country. Once that limit is hit, the U.S. Treasury can no longer issue bonds to raise funds to pay for everything that the government does.
In a January 13th letter, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned congressional leaders that the United States is expected to hit the debt limit by June 1—and urged them to raise the debt limit as soon as possible.
“Once the limit is reached, the Treasury will need to start taking certain extraordinary measures to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations.”
Janet Yellen
Congress last raised the debt ceiling in December 2021 to more than $31.3 trillion. At the time, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.
But the 2022 mid-term elections gave Republicans control of the House. And Republicans are threatening the nation with defaulting on its loans now that Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is its new Speaker.
New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks described these Republicans on the January 6, 2023 edition of The PBS Newshour: “These are nihilists. They came here, and they’re quite open about that, especially with their friends, and they say, we just want to burn the place down.
“And so they just want to be negative, be oppositional, and then go on TV and say everyone else has screwed up. And so this is a form of nihilism that is in the Republican Party.”
Congressional Republicans have:
- Rejected a new White House offer to essentially freeze domestic spending at FY2023 levels;
- Demanded work requirements for SNAP recipients that are more rigid than those they originally proposed;
- Demanded that new immigration provisions be added to the GOP’s recently passed border bill (which Republicans didn’t include in their own debt ceiling bill).
If default occurrs, the results will be disastrous. Payments for some or many federal expenditures could go unpaid for part or all of the impasse. Affected payments and programs would include:
- Interest on the national debt
- Social Security
- FBI
- Medicare
- Income tax refunds
- Veterans’ benefits
- Defense
- Food safety inspections
- Border security
- Air traffic control
- Medicaid
- The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Yet President Joe Biden can end that threat via the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Passed by Congress in 1970, as Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1961-1968, its goal was to destroy the Mafia.
Originally, RICO was aimed at the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates. But in United States v. Turkette, 452 U.S. 576 (1981), the Supreme Court held that RICO applied as well to legitimate enterprises being operated in a criminal manner.
After Turkette, RICO could also be used against corporations, political protest groups, labor unions and loosely knit-groups of people.
United States Department of Justice
RICO opens with a series of definitions of “racketeering activity” which can be prosecuted by Justice Department attorneys. Among those crimes: Extortion.
Extortion is defined as “a criminal offense which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion.”
The RICO Act defines “a pattern of racketeering activity” as “at least two acts of racketeering activity, one of which occurred after the effective date of this chapter and the last of which occurred within ten years…after the commission of a prior act of racketeering activity.”
And if President Biden believes that RICO isn’t sufficient to deal with Republicans’ extortion attempts, he can rely on the USA Patriot Act of 2001, passed in the wake of 9/11. In Section 802, the Act defines domestic terrorism. Among the behavior that is defined as criminal:
“Activities that…appear to be intended…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion [and]…occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
The remedies for punishing such criminal behavior are now legally in place. President Biden needs only to direct the Justice Department to apply them.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on May 18, 2023 at 12:11 am
The latest wrinkle in San Francisco’s “be kind to Untermenschen“ (the German word for “subhumans”) campaign is the creation of “Navigation Centers.”
These are essentially holding pens for Unters—short for “Untemschen”—until they can be “navigated” to permanent housing.
But housing is in short supply in San Francisco, and there is no telling how long many of these drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill and/or bums will stay in them. Or what harm they will wreak on the neighborhoods warehousing them.
Since 2015, eight Navigation Centers have been opened throughout San Francisco; six are in operation.
Among the “amenities” they provide:
- Meals
- Privacy
- Space for pets
- Space separate from sleeping areas
- Laundry
- Access to benefits
- Wi-Fi
Hundreds—if not thousands—of their occupants are meth or heroin addicts. Such people will commit virtually any crime to support their habit. And their crimes of choice are burglary and robbery.
Thus, pouring large numbers of them into San Francisco neighborhoods via “Navigation Centers” guarantees that countless decent citizens will become targets for desperate criminals.
In fact, when they’re not swallowing alcohol or injecting, swallowing or sniffing drugs, many of San Francisco’s “homeless” spend a lot of their time ripping off retail stores.
Walgreens drug stores have proven a particular target for these DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums—the four groups that make up 90% of the “homeless” population.
“I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted,” a regular customer, Sebastian Luke, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”
“Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso told the Chronicle in October, 2021.
“During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”
“Why are the shelves empty?” a customer asked a clerk at a Walgreens store.
“Go ask the people in the alleys, they have it all,” replied the clerk.
As a result, Walgreens has closed 11 stores in San Francisco.
One store in the San Francisco area reportedly lost $1,000 a day to theft.
CVS Pharmacy has instructed its employees to not intervene because the thieves so often attack them.
Many shoplifters then sell their stolen goods on the street—often near the store where they stole them.
Under California law, theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor, but many prosecutors prefer to free those charged rather than holding them in jail.
The maximum sentence they could get: Six months.
Low-income and disabled seniors who depend on these disappearing drug stores for prescriptions are especially at risk.
“Navigation Centers” boast that they ban drug-abuse or drug-dealing on their own premises. But they allow DDMBs to come and go at will. Which means they are free to engage in drug-abuse and/or drug-dealing in the neighborhoods where these centers exist.
At a public hearing in January, 2020, San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin touted the importance of Navigation Centers—including the one that would soon be established at Post and Hyde Streets.
When a local resident asked, “Is one of these centers located where you live?” Peskin replied: “No.”
In short: The city’s elite make sure their homes are far removed from the plague they so easily inflict on San Francisco residents.
Huge areas of the city are covered in feces, urine, trash and used hypodermic needles. Hospitals overflow with patients that have fallen ill due to the contamination.
The city budgeted $1.1 billion for fiscal year 2021-22 on DDMBs. Dividing that amount by about 7,754 DDMBs provides the figure of about $128,925 per DDMB per year.
And what is the legacy of allowing San Francisco to become a Roach Motel for undesirables?
- Sidewalks are littered with tents, sleeping bags, human feces and urine, used hypodermic needles and empty cans or bottles of alcoholic beverages.
- Elevators in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system are often unusable because “homeless” people urinate and/or defecate in them.
- Restaurants have been forced to close because they’ve become havens for DDMBs. A Burger King at Civic Center Plaza recently suffered this fate. So did a McDonald’s in the Haight Ashbury district.
- Tourists—and residents—are daily forced to sit next to filth-encrusted men and women who reek of urine and/or feces in restaurants and movie theaters, as well as on buses.
- The city has lost several major conventions through its reputation for coddling Untermenschen at the expense of tourists.
- Oracle has moved its annual OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas for at least three years.
- And cloud-computing VMware canceled its contract with the Moscone Center for its 2023 conference.
- As a result tourism is down about 16% from 2019, when a record 26.2 million people visited the city.
- When tourism dollars disappear, so will San Francisco as a vital city.
It is a recipe for guaranteed disaster.
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NEEDED: TENANT PROTECTIONS AGAINST SLUMLORDS
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on July 25, 2023 at 12:11 am…Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature…. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time…we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself. But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
—-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses
Niccolo Machiavelli
As of 2022, seven states—California, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia—offer tenant protections via residential rent control.
Only 34 out of 482 cities in California have strong tenant protections.
And only 15 cities in California have rent controls on landlords’ greed: Alameda, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, East Palo Alto, Hayward, Los Angeles, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Oakland, Palm Springs, Richmond. San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood.
In California, 17% of the population lives in apartments—more than 6.7 million people or 2.1 million more than New York.
Nationwide, almost 39 million people in the United States—nearly one in eight—live in apartments.
Many tenants have lived with rotting floors, bedbugs, nonworking toilets, mice/rats, chipping lead-based paint and other outrages for not simply months but years.
And yet, there is little enthusiasm among these millions of people to protect themselves against predatory landlords.
Still, even in those cities where rent boards and building inspection agencies exist, landlords continue to victimize tenants every day.
Take San Francisco, for example.
To hear slumlords tell it, San Francisco is a “renters’ paradise,” where obnoxious, lazy, rent-evading tenants constantly take advantage of hard-working, put-upon landlords.
Don’t believe it.
A recent case shows the absolute necessity for reining in predatory landlords before they can inflict serious financial and emotional damage on tenants.
In September, 2021, Frank and Carol Thomas (not their real names) moved into a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment for $1,000 a month.
Frank had been manager of the apartment complex for 10 years. Now he simply wanted to be a tenant.
Meanwhile, Carol suffered three close personal losses:
Then, in August, Frank left for Tennessee to explore possible business opportunities there. It was while visiting Nashville that he suffered a heart attack and died.
This required Carol to travel to Nashville to:
She also had to spend time in Knoxville to:
Since she couldn’t afford commuting between California and Tennessee, Carol stayed at her deceased father’s house in Knoxville while making all these arrangements.
Weeks later, she returned to her San Francisco apartment.
In April, 2022, Carol received a notice from the property management company responsible for the premises.
It stated that Carol Thomas was last seen in her apartment in November, 2021 and currently lived at her family home in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The notice also stated that her rent would rise from $1,000 per month to $1,695 per month.
Fortunately, Carol had a friend who had worked as a reporter and legal investigator. He was able to draft a response to her landlord’s rent demand.
It opened: “There is a moral dimension to this case that must not be overlooked.”
First, it extolled Frank Thomas’ 10 years as building manager for the property management company now trying to raise Carol’s rent.
Then it pointed out: “During the time Carol was gone, she paid her rent in full and on time. Had she not, We Screw Tenants [not the company’s real name] would now be demanding her eviction.
“What We Screw Tenants is trying to do is to literally profit from the death of this man and the grief of this woman.
“This is utterly despicable. Morally, it’s on a par with robbing corpses and selling fentanyl to schoolchildren.
“If We Screw Tenants is willing to try to extort monies from the widow of its former building manager, it will do the same the next time a tenant is required to leave one of its buildings for weeks.
“As compensation for this deplorable behavior, We Screw Tenants should provide Ms. Thomas with a moratorium on rent increases for at least ten years.”
Carol, who was in her early 60s, showed the suggested response to a case officer of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.
The officer then contacted We Screw Tenants and said he would be filing a complaint for elder abuse against the company.
The company immediately promised to drop its demand for a $695 raise in rent—if Carol agreed to forego any legal action.
Carol has not yet decided if she wants to pursue a lawsuit.
But she was able to fend off a predatory property management company—only because San Francisco has:
Other tenants—throughout California and the nation—usually don’t prove so fortunate.
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