Richmond and Los Angeles have been mugged by reality

By Rob Smith
Real Clear Wire

Windsor Farms is a beautiful residential neighborhood in Richmond. My great uncle developed it 100 years ago. The streets are laid out in the style of an English village and there are many stately Georgian homes with beautiful gardens.

During the George Floyd “Summer of Love” antifa and Black Lives Matter marched through Windsor Farms, no doubt to protest against “nice stuff,” preferring everyone to live in graffiti ridden squalor as a measurement of social justice fairness.  I wrote at the time that if any of these Georgian mansions were given to any of these neo-Marxist protestors, within 6 months all the windows in the house would be busted out, there would be broken glass and 3-foot-high grass in the front yard, and the mechanical systems would all be trashed.  The same is true with a city. Give these types of people the keys to any city and in short order, the city, just like the free house, will be destroyed. They are incapable of taking care of anything.

Here in Richmond, we just went through nearly 3 days with no municipal water. Now, we have to go through 2-3 days of not being allowed to drink the water coming from our taps.  Several hundred thousand people in a major metropolitan area with hospitals, manufacturing plants, universities, nursing homes, and millions of square feet of office space had no water. It’s third world. Our race hustling, low IQ Marxist mayor hired a DEI candidate to run the Department of Utilities, the first time ever a non-engineer held that post. Her major initiative was hiring other DEI candidates to work for Public Utilities. Incompetent boobs, hire other incompetent boobs and before you know it, there are more boobs than the runway at the Bada-Bing.

Los Angeles is burning down. The government incompetence there is extraordinary. LA has its own DEI problems. Its fire chief was hired because she is an outspoken lesbian. Her initiative has been to hire more women and LGBTQ firefighters. Yep, I want a 99 lb mentally ill woman who thinks she’s man pulling me out of a burning fire! Who wouldn’t?

I’ve been known to be unabashedly blunt, but of course always right. DEI is the process of hiring simple minded knaves at the expense of competent and qualified artisans. Worse, it instills a sense of unearned entitlement in those who “Didn’t Earn It.” It is a cancer metastasizing through the ranks of work forces given grave responsibilities, and it spreads to the point where no one in an organization has the work ethic or skill to change a light bulb. 

As bad as DEI is, what’s worse is the political class that initiates DEI policies. There should never ever be any reason to vote anybody into office that has not had a career in real world practicalities. Community activists, academics, government apparatchiks, non-profit do-gooders, clinicians, blah, blah, they generally know nothing other than the au courant platitudes of the bougie Bolshevik chattering class. In Richmond, 8 of our 9 council members are women, and the one man is a soy boy. Have any of these folks ever crawled under a house to fix a leaky pipe, changed the oil in a car, operated earth moving equipment or walked a police officer’s beat at 2 am in the morning? Have any of them started a business from the ground up and hired and fired dozens of employees? No. Yesterday, I ran into my friend Frank. He runs a small independent HVAC company. Frank understands how things work. Cities need guys like Frank to run them as opposed to purple haired social justice Sallyboys. 

When I was fresh out of law school, my real estate mentor hired me to build a subdivision. I had to learn to read plans, to know how sanitary and  storm sewer systems worked, where the run off went, how it was tested,  where the water came from, fire hydrants, water pressure, gas pipe lines, underground power, soil compaction, emergency contingencies and a host of other real world matters that I likely never would have learned had I become a practicing lawyer or an academic. I’m not special, there are thousands of local people who know everything about these real-world issues. Yet, no one on our city council knows anything about such matters because they are political activists, academics or lifelong government hacks. They are talkers and not doers. Just about anybody I know who runs a business could have taken a tour of Richmond’s water treatment plant and immediately noticed the lack of emergency redundancies and the peril the city was in, but soft hands politicians can’t because they’ve never done anything in the practical world. There are no Franks.

If It’s even possible to be more brain dead than the politicians running Richmond, the prize goes to California. Every advanced civilization from the ancient Minoans ( 2,000 BC) to modern times knows that to have an adequate water supply, communities need to impound water. I learned how to do this developing real estate. Every civil engineer and earth moving operator recognizes that to have a plentiful water supply, water must be captured and held in storage. But the political leadership in California doesn’t have a clue. California has plentiful and abundant water resources, but what does it do? It lets its water run off into the Pacific Ocean instead of impounding it. Now Los Angeles is burning to the ground. Fire hydrants have no water.  There are more than enough resources to make millions of acres of barren land fertile and to give communities all the water they need to fight forest fires and keep land from drying out. But the deranged, brainwashed, wacko politicians refuse. It’s better to have half of LA destroyed than to “harm the environment” by using California’s natural resources to make its environment better. No Frank would ever think like this in a million years.

If politicians were more like Frank they might know something about forestry. My family owned timberland as did many others I knew growing up. California owns a million acres of forest land, and they do the exact opposite of what all private owners do to be protect the value of their land. Any tobacco spitting, shotgun toting good ole boy knows what these government flunkies don’t.  One has to cut fire roads through timberland. Good stewardship requires “thinning” of underbrush. Brush needs to be cleared under electrical lines and limbs need to be cut back from power lines. If not, you get forest fires.

How in the world does the City of Richmond not know that crucial infrastructure needs a budgeted sinking fund for maintenance and that a water treatment plant needs multiple redundancies that need efficacy checks on a weekly basis? How is it that California does not know that it needs to impound water and manage its forest land? The astounding incompetence is mind blowing. Isn’t it high time to judge woke politicians not by their words, but by what they do? As Forrest Gump famously said, stupid is as stupid does.

Frank doesn’t have a PHD in Gender Studies. He’s never participated in a pro-Palestinian rally. He doesn’t even drive an EV, but he’s a hell of a lot more capable of running a city than the flunkies running Richmond and California.

Robert C. Smith is Managing Partner of Chartwell Capital Advisors, a senior fellow at the Parkview Institute, and likes to opine on the Rob Is Right Podcast and Webpage.

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