L.A. housing crisis boils over

This story lays bare the disaster that results when our public officials chisel away at individual rights but allow property to be used for unreasonable purposes. Because property thinks it's people and all.

A UN human rights investigator from Brazil recently met with folks in Los Angeles about the United States' growing housing crisis and the homelessness that has resulted.

She had been denied entry to the U.S. by the Bush regime - forcing her to wait until this year. The regime's idiotic excuse was that housing is not a human right, so it felt she had no business investigating.

The people of L.A. had no shortage of legitimate complaints about housing. For one, housing costs are too high. For another, failure to rein in foreclosures has made residents homeless - and then police throw them in jail for being homeless.

This despite the fact that vagrancy laws were ruled unconstitutional decades ago. If anyone is breaking the law, it's the city, for not obeying court orders. These illegal arrests, in turn, make it almost impossible to find housing later!

And they might not be able to anyway, because public housing has been torn down.

Other residents were angry that Los Angeles City Council no longer requires landlords to follow basic safety regulations that are on the books. This is the same City Council that passed a resolution demanding that schools require uniforms, but it won't require that building owners make sure their buildings are safe for tenants?

The city is so eager to suppress individual rights with uniforms and vagrancy laws, but it won't enforce reasonable regulations on large property owners - because they think that violates "property rights."

That, my friends, is fascism.

Most astonishingly, one resident pointed out that in Cuba, nobody goes homeless, because housing is considered a basic human right. Yet the U.S. won't even recognize this right!

Cubans have more rights than we do now??? Seriously, if Cuba can make sure everybody has housing, why can't the U.S.? What's the excuse for this? There is none.

What can we do in the meantime?

Los Angeles City Council should be arrested for contempt of court.

Also, we need to establish that housing is a human right - not a privilege that only gets doled out to those born into America's fraternity of wealth.

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/12/united-nations-us-property-fallout)