CNN reports: “Gov. Gavin Newsom issues executive order for removal of homeless encampments in California.”
KEITH McHENRY, [email protected], @keith_mchenry
McHenry is co-founder of the global Food Not Bombs movement, which provides free meals to anyone who needs them. He is also a regular contributor to the ongoing series “Food Fight” on “Flashpoints.”
He said today: “The campaign to make it a crime to be homeless has been pushed by CIA-linked Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute [he is also co-founder of Palantir]. That effort has just received another boost with California Governor Gavin Newsom signing an Executive Order directing state and local officials to start removing homeless people’s encampments noting that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson now empowers cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public.”
“Newsom’s order will cause much more suffering as the state and local governments increase their destruction of people’s survival gear and are forced to flee from location to location with their meager belongings.
“According to a report published in Forbes, about 80 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, placing hundreds of thousands of people in jeopardy of becoming homeless. Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development claims there was a 12 percent increase in those becoming homeless in 2023. These numbers are likely to increase. Newsom’s Executive Order will devastate the lives of thousands of people already struggling to survive.”
Background: Forbes reported in 2013: “Palantir was rescued by a referral to In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, which would make two rounds of investment totaling more than $2 million.” NPR recently reported in “Amid record homelessness, a Texas think tank tries to upend how states tackle it,” that “The Cicero Institute was founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, whose data mining products have been used by the CIA.”