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Dictatorship USA Run By A Plundering and Murderous Ruling Class 2019 (309)
San Franciscos Slow-Motion Suicide
NationalReview, April 8, 2019
I have an announcement to make: San Francisco is past its prime and the fires of creation have abated.
With all the millionaires newly minted, you might expect this enclave to become the next Babylon of American capitalism. The citys current concentration of wealth likely doesnt represent the beginning of a golden-if-sinful era, but the end.
Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close. In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible: It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. To the untrained eye, it looks magical: a city of the future, a city of gasps. Then, slowly, it reveals itself to be a city of lies.
The distant future Silicon Valley sells with the zeal of a crusader all the lip service it pays to making the world a better place shimmers like fools gold, monopolistic surveillance capitalism cloaked in the language of the common good. With a devilish consistency, this city sets you up for disappointment.
Fewer and fewer companies choose to come launch here. You cant build a successful startup from a garage if a garage costs a million bucks. The flow of new creations is being choked off first and foremost because there are fewer cheap places for new things to start.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco recently hit $3690 per month. The citys average Class A asking rent has risen 124 percent since 2010 to over $80 per square foot.
In San Francisco, the true creative class cant afford to rent any space anymore. The artists have fled. There is no longer a San Francisco music scene, either.
Up and down the citys disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women junkies, winos, the dispossessed passed out in the vestibules of empty storefronts on otherwise busy streets. Encampments of tents sprout in every shadowy corner: under highway overpasses, down alleys. Streets are peppered with used syringes. Strolling the sidewalks, you smell the faint malodorous traces of human excrement and soiled clothing. Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.
The confused mumble, the incoherent finger-pointing tirade, the twitch, the cold daemonic stare, the drunken stumble and drool these are the rhythms of a city on the edge of a schizophrenic explosion.
Somewhere in the bureaucratic hierarchy faceless city functionaries administer labyrinthine regulations that benefit the rich over the poor, the old over the young, the here over those to come, the past over the future. Im not holding my breath for a revolution.
From afar city politicians pay lip service to helping the poor. But up close the facts tell a different story. None of their policies in the last half-century have done much to rescue the poor from poverty. The stratospheric cost of housing has flung minority families to the outer edges of the Bay Area, reinforcing segregation.
And anyone else who comes here should be aware that most bathrooms require a code to enter.
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