Compton Becomes 4th California City to Face Bankruptcy

Compton Becomes 4th California City to Face Bankruptcy

I have extensive knowledge of this derelict municipality located at south end of LA city. The tawdry south LA ghettos merge quite seamlessly with the Compton ghettos. Compton is one of the older inner city LA county burgs, as evident by it's abundant 2500-3000 sq ft teeny home lots with equally puny 900-1000 sq ft homes, most put up prior to World War 2, and many as far back as early 20th century.

Drive thru the Compton's inner core along Compton Blvd or Wilmington avenue, and you see endless rows of bland tenement apt blocks, bleak corner mini-malls, storefront churches, barbers, and a slew of liquor stores with locals and ghetto youth hanging out.  I worked in this hood in 80's and early 90s and there is no more depressing city in CA. Every shop in Compton  has iron-grated windows and wrought-ironwork burglar-proof storefront gratings.  The Compton population back in 80s-90's was almost evenly split between Hispanics and blacks but has trended since then into being a densely-packed latino immigrant zone. Hispanics,mostly recent and older immigrants, now account for 65% of Compton's population.
   The tiny lots and homes of Compton, abundant  in Willowbrook and the area north of Compton Airport, are packed with recently-arrived Hispanic immigrant illegals, as well as older established Hispanic residents. But the cities ruling power structure was long dominated by black politicians, ruling thru nepotism and favoritism, greased by grafts for families and friends of the Compton ruling elite.

COMPTON CRIME STATS:

"Although the U.S. News & World Report does not even list Compton in the "The 11 Most Dangerous Cities" for overall crime rates in the United States,^[35] it contrasts the CQ Press, using data from the FBI's annual report of crime statistics "Crime in the United States 2010," ranked Compton as the 8th most dangerous city in the country.^[36] Statistics will vary depending on how property crimes and violent crimes are weighted in each statistical survey. See Statistical variability."
(wikipedia).

 During the  rein of Mayor Omar Bradley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Bradley_(California_politician), the city was a cesspit of vice and corruption. It got so bad that the state of CA put Compton's schools in receivership, and the tiny, grossly corrupt gang-like Compton Police Force was disbanded in 2000 and the city's policing was contracted out to the LA County Sheriffs Department.
    I once went into the puny Compton City hall bldg to deliver an item and was able to go direct to the 2nd floor Compton City Attorneys Office without a single security guard checking me. The entire Compton City Hall seemed almost empty and deserted.

COMPTON lies within a dense semi-industrialized hub of south LA County and is astride several major freeways, has direct links to major LA metro rail connections, and is right next to the nationally strategic Alameda Transportation Corridor,  which makes Compton's impoverished, corrupt BK status all the more baffling.  There are large modern corporate parks along the 91 freeway, which marks Comptons south boundary, and in the Rancho Dominguez Industrial District which adjoins Compton at the southeast.

At the western margin of Compton abutting Gardena and the 110 freeway there is the older somewhat rust-belt sem-industrial district running thru the LA old imdustrial strip/corridor- old shops, factories, processing plants, warehouses. ect
Compton, being centrally located amid a south LA semi-industrail hub district and astride the Alameda corrdor to the east, doesn't lack jobs for it's 100k residents, especially in warehouse work and small workshops & factories. Problem is Compton city administration and civic culture is extremely corrupt. The level of civic corrution in Compton reduces it to a 3rd wld cesspit.
   During the nascent RE boom in early- to- mid 2000's LA Times was touting Compton as an emerging LA inner city boomtown, with newly built splashy retail malls & shops along Wilmington Ave/ Santa Fe Avenues, and in Willowbrook . However, when the economy went bust in 2008 Compton's fortunes quicky returned to what they were prior to the 2000 decade, a ragged ghettoized hi- crime zone where blacks and hispanic gangs regularly war against each other.

2016 The Movie, a personal review

      I went to watch the movie '2016 the Movie.', dealing with Obama's early  background and how it may affect his presidential decision-making process. It is not possible to get a thorough review of Obama's presidency in a 1.5 hr movie but I will attempt to provide my own admittedly inadequate impressions from viewing the movie.

I get the impression that Obama seems more aligned with the third world and the world's impoverished 3rd world nations than with the USA and the Western European nations. He appears to be some kind of anti-colonial figure straight from the 50's/ early 60's like Nehru, Nassar, Sukarno, et al, not a President who cherishes deep ingrained American historical traditions and values. I do not think he is very grounded in American patriotic values, or wears them on his sleeve. He was not raised in a  pure American apple pie mileus, being born in Hawaii, which was an American territorial outpost till shortly before he was born there. His father was a Kenyan national, his stepfather was Indonesian, and his mom seemed to be a white anti-colonialist America-hating radical.

     He basically grew up without a steady father authority, and his alcoholic, abusive Kenyan father was a poor father figure with numerous wives & multiple offspring spread over several continents.
      Getting away from Obama's personal life, i got the impression from the movie that he seems quite anti-US military and wants US military presence reduced and US role in world reduced. Not in an isolationist sense but in pegging US downward and more on an even plane with the rest of the world. He does not believe in American military might and USA being the paramount world power- that was one of the movies themes.

   Also from the movie there is no evidence that he has one iota of business training nor background, and though he has his roots in 3rd world slums he grew up in sheltered academia with radical anti-US, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist college mates and mentors, and never mixed into the real world of ordinary working people.
Scary thought but his background seems like Lenin, wholly absorbed in theory and law books. No real world roll-up-your-sleeves type experience, and not one bit of real world grounded business experience.
 
    The most damaging revelation in the movie is his known ties and long  association with Frank Marshall Davis, a dedicated Hawaiwian-based communist.

   I think that Obama really views American from an anti-colonialist, anti-european slant. Certainly Western European 19th and early 20th century colonialism  has it's detractors and is a controversal subject today but cannot be seen entirely in black & white.  Obama may actually see it in black & white, and view USA as just another corrupt colonial power, no better than the old Soviet Russia, Red China and even WW2 Germany and Japan. Shocking but may be true. That is why he has packed his administration with pro-illegal alien open borders apologists( which is not treated in the movie), in keeping with his conviction that America needs to be a more tolerant society to minorities & recent immigrants, which he may actually view as oppressed by the US/ white European neo-colonial capitalist yoke.

 I gleaned from the movie a view of Obama as a firm believer in radical wealth re-distribution, and the movie gives some evidence that Obama means to tax the US wealthy and middle classes to the hilt in his second term, to not only re-distribute to the nations poor but also to the world's poor.

    The movie's treatment of Obama's actual presidential decisions is given short rather simplistic snapshots( acompanied with graphs) but are fairly damaging revelations.

   All in all a 1.5 hr movie cannot provide much details on a big complex subject like the Obama Presidency but the movie's painstaking research and ample documenting of  Obama's early family background, and especially his patriarcial side, may provide clues as to his drift.

  I was already confirmed in my view of POTUS as a leftist radical long before the movie so i picked up no new revelations. The movie may provide startling revelations for those less sophisticated politically or who have never delved deeply into politics/history via internet or deep reading.
















 



 










  

3rd world Cartel-fornia: Anaheim CA police shooting part 2 protests and riots- commentary

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/dunn-364896-officer-police.html

"ANAHEIM, Calif. –  City officials voted unanimously Tuesday to ask the U.S. attorney's office to investigate recent police shootings, including one of an unarmed man over the weekend, that have sparked four days of protests and a fiery clash between residents and officers.
Police stepped up patrols and some donned riot gears as hundreds demonstrated outside City Hall while many more packed the council chamber inside to discuss the shootings that have stoked anger over a spike in police shootings in the city. On the street, protesters tossed rocks and bottles at police and ignored warnings to disperse, forcing officers to form skirmish lines and fire pepper balls at the crowd.
At least two people were arrested, police Sgt. Bob Dunn said. At one point, police shut down a gas station when protesters were seen filling cans with gas, Dunn said.
The killing of Manuel Diaz, and another man Sunday, have taken the tally of shootings by police officers in this Orange County city to six so far this year, up from four a year before. Five of the incidents have been fatal.
On Tuesday, Diaz's family filed a civil rights lawsuit seeking $50 million in damages from the city of Anaheim and its police department, claiming he was shot while running away, said lawyer James Rumm."


3rd world Cartel-fornia: Anaheim CA police shooting protests and riots- commentary
 http://www.ocregister.com/

http://www.ocregister.com/

http://www.ocregister.com/news/police-365734-anaheim-people.html

diaz-anaheim-department-w

 http://www.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra?t=&u=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.onset.freedom.com%2Focregister%2Fgallery%2Fm7lq5c-m7lpu712annadrive.0722.sp.jpg&n=diaz-anaheim-department-w

Anaheim CA police shooting protests and riots- commentary

Hundreds protest over Anaheim police shootings, city officials call for investigation | Fox News

I have roamed thru Anaheim here and there. It has a dense and growing Hispanic second generation/ anchor offspring population (53% of cities PPL)which is quite brash and loud. There are tawdry illegal immigrant tenement zones at the gritty central and northern edges of the city and where the cities gang problems are most rampant, but Anaheim's Hispanic ppl are now mostly US born second generation. Many are educated and speak English well. Many harbor resentment of the city's power structure and the Anaheim Police Dept, which are still mostly white. This second generation Hispanic crowd. mostly teens and young adults, are the brash and loud elements one saw in the riot clips crowding Anaheim City Hall, demanding justice.

 Anaheim is a fairly large city of 350,000, diversified in racial makeup though Hispanics are now the majority ( 53% Hispanic, 30% white 17 % other races.) Anaheim is not quite the poor ragged 3rd world slum-zone like most inner LA City districts.  It has some diversity in the economy, with a good mix of retail, industry, and tourism (Disneyland). There are large stretches of ghetto tenement zones in the city's old central core areas, and Anaheim has trended recently toward sprouting vast mega-clusters of piled-on apt units and condos, epitomized by the gigantic urban razed re-development zone called the Platinum Triangle( just west of Angels Stadium).  Into these block-like units are packed the cities large population of lower white collar retail and sales workers, as well as lower-working class  immigrant families.

Anaheim has it's tawdry seamy side: seedy corner malls in which you can find  tucked-away strip cubs, bikini bars, endless hotels/motels , and persistent prostitution activity along miles of Beach Blvd to the south of Disneyland.

Anaheim is all in all a bland urban seamless mis-mash of  endless sprawling apt districts and malls galore, with some landmark urban recreational frills like Angels stadium, Arrowhead Stadium (Ducks hockey) , and Disneyland.  But stray a  bit out of this zone even a few miles and you run into older industrial/railroad corridor districts  into which are crowded the cities dense immigrant /illegal immigrant PPL.

 In one of these seedy apt barrio districts Manual Diaz was shot by Anaheim police while fleeing and/ or resisting arrest and/or reaching for a weapon.( It will be a long-drawn out investigation taking a year or likely longer, and the endless lawsuits will take even longer to revolve). Anaheim city, PD, and the majority of Anaheim PPL who want law and order will help bury the shooting investigation, and the band plays on.

I once went to one one these sprawling apt Barrio complexes and saw numerous idle youths, the offspring of immigrant illegals, ganged up around their apt units, not doing much. This is the seeds of trouble- restless congeries of idled teens and  young adults hanging around all day in apt complexes.

Anaheim and North Orange County's immigrant population differ a bit from their LA cousins. Here in the North OC they are a bit more sassy, smarter, and bolder than their LA bretherin in the depressed inner LA ghettos. There is a higher quality of work available in the large North OC industrial belts of South Fullerton, East Anaheim Canyon industrial dist, Placentia, and in the old Southeast Anaheim railroad corridor district. These employ large numbers of recent immigrants, including any number of illegals, in such sweatshop industries as furniture making, garment shops, food processing, warehouse, chemicals/ paint shops, pallet & lumber yards, and metals fabrication.

The higher quality and opportunities for work available to immgrants in  the large north OC industrial belt( which runs along a 1 to 3 mile-wide belt along the 91 freeway),  imparts a sense of smugness among these latino immigrants, gives them a highly-developed sense of their perceived rights , and makes them more likely to be aggressively confrontational with the police.


 http://www.ocregister.com/articles/dunn-364896-officer-police.html

San Bernardino seeks bankruptcy protection - latimes.com

San Bernardino seeks bankruptcy protection - latimes.com

 "San Bernardino on Tuesday became the third California city in less than a month to seek bankruptcy protection, with officials saying the financial situation had become so dire that it could not cover payroll through the summer. ...
The unexpected vote came at the suggestion of the interim city manager, who said the city faces a $46-million deficit and depleted coffers."

 http://www.trbimg.com/img-4ffd97d3/turbine/la-discuss-san-bernardino-bankruptcy-0711-sl/187/16x9
 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/live-chat-how-many-other-california-cities-fast-bankruptcy-risk.html

Shorthand:
   San Berdoo=San Bernardino City and/ or County of same name

   IE = Inland empire, the regional informal nickname describing entire
          settled region of  San Bernardino and Riverside Counties west and
          south of the SoCal Transverse ranges (San Bernardino Mountains and
          San Jacinto Mountain ranges). e.g., Palm Springs is not part of the IE.  

          Some traditionalists have restricted the term 'Inland Empire' to refer to the
          original old core cities of San Bernardino, Redlands, Riverside City,
          Fontana, and Colton, before the Empire began sprouting endless suburban
          offshoots  beginning in the 1970's

RIP to the San Bernardino i remember back in the 70's. Back then it was a pleasant rural/rurban community of farms, pastures, endless orange groves,orchards, county ranch homes, rustic church steeples, rural pleasant country roads, and the 1/2 mile wide rocky-bed Santa Ana  river, which was still a rugged semi-wilderness bush-lined streambed worth a days exploration. This was how I remember SB  back in the early-mid 70's when i used to visit my in-laws there.

It was not completely idyllic back then.  From May thru October it would be steamy, muggy and hot, with yellowish air due to all that smog rolling eastward from LA into the IE, where the San Berdoo mts would trap it.  San Berdoo had not yet become a dismal derelict impoverished 3rd world destination for millions of LA immigrant illegals and LA ghetto expats fleeing the LA slums to find cheap affordable single family homes, but there was back then signs of barrio poverty in the inner San Berdoo ghetto areas. The great coastal exodus from LA to the IE took place from the 80's all way into the first decade of the 21st century, and reached a peak during the great IE housing boom of  2000-2007.

During that period the formerly rural aspects of San Berdoo, and entire IE, underwent drastic changes, being literally bulldozed and razed into huge new housing tracts and endless retail malls. SB/IE was a developers free-for all, not subject to rigorous environmental reviews nor any type of government planning. I traveled a great deal thru the IE in the course of work duties almost entire decade of the 2000's and witnessed first hand the enviro-devastation wrought by haphazard unplanned, roughshod RE and infrastructure development. The over-crowded LA and OC coasts saw millions of  its inhabitants, squeezed by rising RE prices and tightly-packed LA coastal burgs, fleeing into the still-wide open expansive IE to pick up overpriced, but by coastal CA RE standards, cheaper large single family homes put up in droves all over San Berdoo and Riverside County. They were using liar loans and other RE mortgage trickery/ gimmicks to get into these homes with virtually no down payment and low teaser interest rates, which when the mortgages ballooned, and the Mortgage monthly payments doubled or tripled, they ran into trouble when the enire CA and USA economy collapsed in 2007-2008.

During the 2000 decade San Berdoo and Riverside PPL went up 3x-5x-fold during this period, and home tracts mushroomed like gigantic algae blooms. Problem was there was no jobs/industry diversification at all in the IE. The San Berdoo economy was basically only logistics, trucking, distribution, construction, retail, a few office jobs, and even fewer government jobs. The IE had a flimsly base of economic under-pilling to support such an explosive population and housing growth during this period.

There were scattered pockets of small workshops and corporate semi-industrial tracts scattered here and there, but most of these these firms were only about warehousing and distribution to handle the massive volumes of imports from Asia/China, which were unloaded from LA Ports and initially shipped to gigantic IE warehouses for later trans-shipments all across US via 18-wheelers or less likely, trains.

 There was never any sort of traditional manufacturing of big durable goods at all in the IE . There was the massive iconic Fontana Steel Mill, but that was basially a hulking rust-belt symbol of the long-past golden age of USA/SoCal manufacturing might, dating from the WW2 generation up to the 70s-80's. Rancho Cucamonga did have incipient small-workshop, small business/entrepreneual-level development, as did Upland, Temecula, Ontario, and Moreno Valley, but they were all in incipient embyronic stages and could not be fully expanded-built-up to fill the needs of a rapidly expanding IE for more massive domestic industrial jobs-creating infrastructure development.

This is why San Berdoo filed BK. Simply put, the real basis of wealth-large corporations and large well-tended corporate parks, was never there. lack of large established blue-chip corporations and RE collapsing values doomed the city into a slow bleeding death - the great USA economic collapse of 2008-2012 simply accelerated this trend.

San Berdoo sort of became what we see in Detroit. The tax paying base simply vanished or shrunk. There never was any high-paying unionized middle class-supporting jobs and middle-class factory workers. Ephemeral hi-paying Contruction jobs and hi-flying contracting firms all shrunk drastically during 2007-2010 IE real estate crash.  IE is now all low-paying retail jobs. There is little or no tourism left in the formerly rural, scenic orange grove country, which was virtually all plowed under and replaced by endless brown-stucco-ed home tracts and malls.























  

Grand jury report tells story of Victorville's plunging fortunes - latimes.com

LA Times article on the hi-desert boom and bust community of Victorville, a
microcosm of the BK state of CA

Grand jury report tells story of Victorville's plunging fortunes - latimes.com

Opening intro to LA Times article:

 "Victorville hoped to strike it rich with a new hybrid gas and solar power plant near the old George Air Force Base, buying up homesteads for the site amid the High Desert's real estate boom. The city shelled out $375,000 alone to Chris Massey and his family in 2007 to buy a tiny house plopped on five desolate acres of scrub and Joshua trees — 10 times the property's assessed value."

"Today, the old Massey home sits abandoned, half-demolished by vandals, thieves and the merciless desert sun. The 500-megawatt power plant? It has yet to be built, even after a city agency spent $76 million. The failed project was just one of many financial disasters that had the city teetering on the brink of ruin after the collapse of the housing market in this patch of Mojave, when unemployment shot skyward and city tax revenues fell into the basement, an audit by a San Bernardino County grand jury found."

Comments: Victorville (VV) is just one of a slew of CA cites ready to follow Stockton into bankruptcy. City leaders say Victorville(VV) won't go 'Stockton' but they like all politicians are masking the real truth. VV was one of numerous SoCal hi-Desert/Inland Empire communities which were riding the crest of the great California RE boom pre-2007.  Desert property was soaring in value. Homes were listing for $400,000 and more for cheaply-built 2 story standard Lennar homes hastily put up in the most wretched scrub/cactus-brush forlorn tracts in hi-desert outskirts of such cities as Hesperia, Lancaster, Apple Valley, Phelan, Bear Valley, Adelanto, and some other faceless desert burgs located on the back sides of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Traverse Mountain Ranges of Southern California.

Large-scale housing tracts were springing up all over the vast expansive hi-desert scrubland like desert poppies, and cookie-cutter strip malls and retailer giants were blossoming all along Interstate 15.  I witnessed all this thru making 100 or so trips to VV, or passign thru it, on various courier deliveries from 2002-2007.   I saw vast RE contruction tracts springing up all over the Hi desert along Bear Valley Road and Highway 18: the entire CA hi-desert was riddled with realtors/homebuilders offices.

If you: ever have gone thru VV you can easily see that there simply is no real basis of wealth in VV no large-scale manufacturing plants (nor any type of industrial build-up period). It 's basically all RE tracts and shopping malls. The one large- scale jobs creating project, the proposed Inland Energy 500 MG Hybrid Gas/Solar Plant, is dead in the water for now.  Only thing VV has in the way of jobs generation is gov-run facilities such as the VV correctional facility, and a slew of welfare agencies and medical clinics which leech on government handouts.  BTW VV is no tourist draw, though it may snag a few travelers stopping for gas or a quick bit en route to Las Vegas along I-15.  It is flat, dry, searingly hot in summer, and now has 1000's of bargain-basement foreclosed and abandoned properties listed as low as $50,000 for ample 4 bdrm/2 baths on 1 acre lots, a far cry from the halcyon pre-2007 days of Hi-desert homes  pumped up with fake 300% to 500% valuations.

Repeat: VV was never a very attractive hi-desert draw to begin with. It is hot as hell in summer, with no scenic value and endless tacky urban-desert sprawl. Hoards of inner-city LA expats moved to VV to take advantage of cheaper  affordable hi-desert housing, and are now a huge welfare-collecting, gov-dependent class out in the hi-desert. Same thing occurred in Lancaster, Victorville's  hi-desert cousin 50 miles to the west.

 Victorville's civic leaders displayed absolute stupidity in financing municipal projects like drunken sailors pre-2008. The great financial meltdown of 2008 was the final torpedo shot which condemned VV into a permanently listing hulk slowly but inexorably sinking into a bottomless pit of a financial abyss

Legislature approves high-speed rail spending - SFGate

Legislature approves high-speed rail spending - SFGate

 "A divided state Senate approved billions of dollars in funding to start construction on California's ambitious high speed rail line Friday, handing the controversial project $7.9 billion in state and federal money for the first 130-miles of track and a series of local transit upgrades. "

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/07/06/all-aboard-for-bakersfield-california-pours-7-9-billion-into-bullet-train-bottomless-pit/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

I won't dwell on the nitty-bitty details but i do want to comment on the first phase of construction- building a 130-mile hi-speed rail line from Bakersfield to Madera. This basically follows the old Highway route 99, which i have traveled numerous times from Bakersfield to as far as Fresno. The route goes thru largely empty central valley farming country with occasional tiny farming communities like Pixley, MacFarland, Earlimont, Goshen, Kingsburg, Tipton, Malaga: some of these agri-map dots consist of just a few agricultural outbuildings, single rest/gas stop, and farm equipment/warehouse/tractor lots. The only communities of considerable size along route 99 are Bakersfield, Delano, Tulare, Visalia and Fresno(combined population approximately 2.5 million). Entire population of the San Joaquin Valley, which this railroad would serve, is approximately four million. The road vehicle traffic along the 99 route is primarily farm trucks, construction trades pickups, straw/hog/chicken haulers, gov utility trucks, with occasional 18-wheelers( Most big-rigs use the faster, more kept-up interstate 5 further west).

In 20-30 trips along the 99 I have never seen much passenger movement. Even in height of summer travel season(June thru August) the weekday passenger volume is fairly light. I have seen some traffic jams out of Bakersfield for a brief couple hrs but otherwise this route 99 is fairly open and lightly traveled, at least on weekdays in summer, when i have observed it. From this observation i can deduce that bullet train travel along the entire route will be extremely under-utilized on weekdays for entire year, and may only see a bit of ridership increase for only three summer holidays.

There is virtually no passenger metro buses plying this route, at least from my observing travel volume along route 99 as i traversed the wide open, empty, baking-hot farmland spaces of the South Central Valley nearly every summer for 30 years on my way to Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park. If U have ever been to Fresno or Bakersfield it is easy to see why. There is not much worth seeing in either city-neither is what one would call a tourist magnet. Sorry if i am offending Fresno and Bakersfield but i am well-traveled all over CA and am equally harsh on my home region of LA and not much enamored of the Inland Empire.

The 99 route traffic volume is a fair indication of the ridership volume expected when this bullet train is completed. It will be a flat-out failure as far as passenger volume unless CA is planning to sell property and land for pennies and thereby cause a massive Oklahoma-type land rush to fill up all those empty agri-field spaces. Yeah, folks will be grabbing at the bit to move en mass into the frypan-hot, dusty agricultural Central Valley, which features 1930's-era depression-level agri-communities racked by 20-30% level UE.


Very foolish for CA to do initial rail construction along this route. Entire population of the Southern Central Valley( or San Joaquin Valley) is around four million. The two main cities being connected, Bakersfield and Fresno, have combined populations in their MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Areas)of around two million. For comparison the Los Angeles/Orange County/Inland Empire combined MSA has nearly 20 million and the San Diego MSA is 3 million. Or the Las Vegas MSA is over 2 million. Of course it is far easier to bulldoze a High-speed rail route thru flat mostly open agricultural fields with little environmental opposition than putting up an LA to San Diego coastal route, whch would be the most expensive colossel construction project in US history, and would be tied up in infinity by those pesky CA environmentalists