Trump mildly thrashed slow-walking LA Mayor Karen Bass — Does the United States need an autocratically directed bureaucracy trashing?

© 2025 Peter Free

 

26 January 2025

 

 

Y'all need permits . . .

 

. . . to return to and clean up your fire-swallowed Los Angeles region properties?

 

 

From LAist

 

California-style government characteristically screwing We the People:

 

 

Health officials in Los Angeles County have issued an order banning cleanup or removal of debris from properties damaged by the fires.

 

People cannot clean up debris — like burned wood, metal, foundation material and soil — until a hazardous materials inspection has been completed by an approved government agency in the areas burned by the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth, Creek, Hurst and Lidia fires.

 

Authorities warn that burned building materials can contain harmful substances like asbestos, and exposure can have short- and long-term health consequences.

 

Residents can still remove personal belongings, but authorities caution they should wear protective equipment, such as N95 masks, safety goggles and long sleeved clothing.

 

© 2025 Yusra Farzan, LA County bans cleanup and removal of fire debris until after official inspections, LAist (16 January 2025)

 

 

Can you imagine how long it would take . . .

 

. . . a bureaucracy of this city's size to complete these inspections?

 

Accompanied further, by all the added bureaucratic meddling that disposing of supposedly hazardous material would require?

 

Many homeowners will go broke, while trying to keep up with their now useless property's mortgages and paying rent and commuting to work from somewhere else.

 

Some folks have whispered that they think this is an Oligarchic Plot to force the sale of land by soon to be impoverished former home-owners.

 

Conspiracy, or conspiracy thinking, spreads.

 

 

Meanwhile, President Trump flew in . . .

 

. . . like a breath of reasonable get-something-done air.

 

Below, he tangled with LA's apparently obtuse mayor, Karen Bass:

 

 

© 2025 Colin Rugg, President Trump and LA mayor Karen Bass spar on live TV, Trump tells her to stop taking so long, X.com (24 January 2025, 8:45 PM)

 

 

Having lived in California twice myself . . .

 

. . . and been a California attorney, I can imagine that many among the Golden State's population are now thinking more favorably of our autocratically inclined president, than of their state's (typically impeding) government bureaucracies.

 

 

The moral? — Getting things accomplished in the United States . . .

 

. . . (at all levels) is often supremely difficult. Which is why we are falling behind China's achievements at a rapid rate.

 

One might hypothesize that our complacency-oriented and always quarreling cultural traits prompt many voters' approval of the modern American presidency's increasingly dictatorial ways.

 

Either way, alleged democracy and liberty are doomed. A very diverse and 347 million mass of anger-prone dissimilar people does not a functioning democracy make. Switzerland's 9 million agglomeration of culturally like-thinking folk appears to mark the upper limit.

 

The Grand American Plutocracy knows this, and it keeps the claws of divisiveness working, so as to accomplish its parasitic looting.

 

They might not be after your burned property. But they are — we can reasonably conclude — after control of your wallet, bank account, and life.