The Doom Loop
The CDC Wears No Clothes :: SF's mercenary army :: LA's Griftocrats :: and more
Failensky, amirite?
On Tuesday CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) opened the hearing by explaining that Walensky was appearing under threat of subpoena after months of stonewalling.
“It appears that maybe the Biden Administration did not want you to speak regarding these topics,” Wenstrup said to Walensky. And indeed, Walensky’s testimony made it clear why that may have been the case.
First, Walensky disclosed that the CDC did not have — and never has had — national data about COVID hospitalizations by vaccination status. "At a national level we have never been able to get hospitalization, vaccination, and COVID [data]” she said. “We did not get data in aggregate on vaccination and hospitalizations."
This is more than just a simple data collection problem. Recall that the Biden administration justified vaccine mandates for healthcare workers and federal employees through the claim that, across the country, unvaccinated people were at high risk for death and hospitalization. “For [the] unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death… for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” Biden warned in December 2021. Now it turns out, as Walensky divulged, there was never national hospitalization data to support this claim. Surprise!
At another point in Walensky’s testimony, when asked about her 2021 statement that COVID vaccines prevented transmission, she answered, “that was true for the alpha variant at the time that I said it.” The vaccine trials, though, did not test for transmission, and some people in the vaccine group still got symptomatic illness. So her claim was largely based on wishful thinking, not actual data.
Walensky’s testimony is characteristic of her tenure as CDC director. Vaccine policy was the defining aspect of her time as director, yet Walensky once admitted that she first learned about the vaccines’ efficacy from CNN, not from reading the actual trials. Her job as CDC director was to both understand and effectively communicate national public health data, and her legacy will be that she did neither.
—AG
The Inmates are Running the Asylum
If you walk down certain streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District at certain times of the day, you’ll find them spotless. It’s a surprising sight in the middle of one of the country’s biggest open-air drug markets. The force behind this change is Urban Alchemy, a non-profit city contractor that employs ex-convicts as “street ambassadors” to maintain a modicum of order in the crime-ridden neighborhood.
These cosmetic improvements have made Urban Alchemy popular among San Francisco politicians, who have forked over tens of millions of dollars to the group. But you only need to stroll across Market Street to see that the transformation is almost entirely superficial. The streets south of Market are outside of the street ambassadors’ jurisdiction, so the drug scene has merely shifted a few blocks into SoMa. On any given day on the corner of 7th and Mission, there’s a phalanx of dealers and users crowding the sidewalk, openly selling, smoking and injecting meth, fentanyl and heroin.
And indeed, the impact of Urban Alchemy may be worse than merely naught. Last year, in Sausalito, a picturesque town across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco that hired the non-profit to manage a homeless encampment there, Urban Alchemy ambassadors did meth with camp residents. At least one of them had sex with a woman who lived in the camp. (Urban Alchemy denies the accusations.) One ambassador sported visible neo-Nazi tattoos on his calf.
In San Francisco last November, an Urban Alchemy worker shot a man outside a homeless shelter where he was stationed. One source told me that one Urban Alchemy ambassador is a major drug dealer in the Tenderloin. Another traffics prostitutes in SoMa.
Taxpayer-funded Urban Alchemy ambassadors make a habit of unlawfully evicting people from public spaces, a violation for which the group has already been sued. Just this week, someone who spends countless hours in the Tenderloin reaching out to homeless addicts was approached by an Urban Alchemy ambassador in a public space as that person was offering their phone to a homeless man to call his mother. Upon refusing, the person was surrounded by five Urban Alchemy workers, one of whom screamed and cursed at them and threatened to punch them in the face.
Complaints from the homeless themselves are even worse. A mother of a homeless addict told me that once when her son stopped to blow his nose, he was sprayed with a hose by an Urban Alchemy ambassador. Her son also said that Urban Alchemy workers often put their hands on disabled people when clearing the streets early in the morning, when few witnesses are about.
Urban Alchemy was designed to be an alternative to the police. Unarmed and trained in de-escalatory tactics, the theory went, these former criminals would be able to build rapport with homeless addicts, treat them with respect and dignity and clean up the neighborhood without resorting to the use of violence, coercion, or incarceration. The organization’s website claims that its ambassadors “heal society.”
But police officers are beholden to formal structures of legal accountability, while Urban Alchemy employees don’t even wear name tags. There’s no question that cops sometimes abuse their authority and even engage in crimes. But if a San Francisco police officer was discovered to have hosed down a homeless person, shared drugs with residents of homeless encampments, or had sex with homeless addicts on the job, it would be a citywide scandal. If a cop were known to deal drugs or prostitute women, it would probably land the entire department in federal receivership.
And yet Urban Alchemy has been known to do all of these things, and much of it has been reported in the media. That hasn’t stopped the contracts from rolling in.
Stripped of the social justice rhetoric, Urban Alchemy in fact represents something much less glamorous than a progressive alternative to the police. It represents privatization. It represents the outsourcing of the most important responsibility of municipal governments: keeping their residents safe.
Like so many other public-private partnership schemes, this has meant a loss of transparency and accountability for the public, and with that loss, an increase in abuse of power by this deputized private police force. Urban Alchemy workers are, at best, unlicensed security guards of public spaces, and, at worst, taxpayer-funded mercenaries. This is what the “defund the police” movement has brought us.
—LW
American Kleptocracy
The endless cavalcade of Los Angeles public corruption scandals is the grift that keeps on giving, a neo-noir storyline torn from the pages of a pulp magazine. Disgraced politicos are just part of the local culture now, like plastic surgery, tacos, and gridlock. Though Mayor Karen Bass said she was “saddened,” it’s hard to believe anyone was particularly shocked when District Attorney George Gascón announced this week that Curren Price, a 10-year veteran of the City Council and former state legislator, is facing an indictment on 10 counts of embezzlement, conflict of interest and perjury.