He stood there in the corner schmoozing while the Association board talked about the squatter problem in Sherman Oaks: so many houses have been foreclosed south of Ventura Boulevard that a large squatter community has sprung up, moving into and in many cases even running businesses out of the foreclosed homes.
Sherman Oaks is one of the more upscale communities at this end of the San Fernando Valley, and south of Ventura is its more upscale end. To have a squatter situation like that, with the accompanying increases in crime and squalor, in such a neighborhood is a telling indictment of this Administration's handling of the current economic meltdown.
Yet when Berman took the podium to speak, he seemed never to have heard a word they said. After applauding his own vote on Obamacare, to tepid applause, he praised his own vote for the stimulus bill... the one that has done nothing to help the people of Sherman Oaks. He repeated Obama's debunked claim of 2.8 million jobs created, while boasting of all the jobs the bill was bringing to his district through the government programs it funded... while ignoring the fact those jobs were going to exisiting state and city empoloyees who didn't live in his district.
He didn't seem to be able to pick up on the connection between the trouble people were having getting loans and the Administration's demand that the lenders start keeping larger cash reserves against what Geithner has called "a future government intervention."
He knew nothing about the judicially imposed economic and ecological disaster in the Central Valley, where hundreds of miles of farms have been destroyed by having their water turned off, and didn't seem to see why having no farms might not be a good thing for California. He suggested that he'd heard the water had been turned on again, which is not correct, in fact, further cuts are imminent.
He thought Ahmedinijad getting the Bomb might be a bad thing, but didn't know what to do about it.
He supported the Ground Zero mosque.
He did agree to debate his GOP opponent, Merlin Froyd, which is a change from a week ago when his didn't know he had an opponent. Berman has done virtually no campaigning in the District he has come to view as his private fief.
He supported repealing the Bush tax cuts for the upper income brackets, ignoring the fact that the people listening to him were IN the upper income brackets.
There was no sense of urgency in the man, and damned little, in my opinion, of any real interest in the concerns of his constituents. He had nothing to say to squatters but was all over carbon credits, loves 'em.
Now for someone who treats the interests of the people with genuine passion, consider his opponent, Merlin Froyd...
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