BHS - 7A – Nathan Hochman Sworn In | The Great Grocery Squeeze

George Gascon, who I think it's fair to say it's one of the weirdest, about the weirdest DA LA's ever had, sweeps into office as this ultra pro defense prosecutor, almost to the point where you know, where you see a prosecutor table and a defense table at trials, it's almost as if they're only the defense table, prosecutors and the defense lawyers at the same table. So he's sweeps in the office in the aftermath of George Floyd and the anti police and the anti prosecutorial movement that came in.

You know, black lives matter, and it's ill, but beyond just black lives matter, the entire criminal justice system. So he sweeps into office based on this insane pro defense philosophy, no more death penalty, small crimes, small misdemeanors, theft that just you know, vandalism. We're not going to try them at all. We're not even to prosecute. We're not even a file charges. And it's just on and on. Where enhancements for drug for gang membership or heinous crimes off

the table. And one which really pissed me off that when there was a parole hearing and family members were asked or were allowed to testify the prole hearings as to the heinousness of the crime and how they're family members usually were killed. Prosecutors usually join that. Gascone said, no prosecutors. Nope, no prosecutors. Well, he lost by twenty points. Over twenty points. I mean, we knew that George Gascone was being swept out. So new guy in town, new

sheriff in town. Oh, we got a new sheriff here, Nathan Hochman, promising to restore justice and balance and says, well, the DA's office just has lost its way over the last four years and blew me. A lot of people agree with that. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swore Hawkman in former governor, said that Los Angeles has failed. We need a prosecutor who is fair, who is not pro not hard ass prosecution, and hawkman just bringing back the prosecutor's office to a

reasonable position. He's not particularly left wing or right wing. He is just a reasonable position. That's what we have to do. Now. At the swearing in ceremony, hundreds of people, prosecutors, cops, victims' rights organizations were cheering, standing up and cheering. When's the last time you would ever think a prosecutor would be standing in a crowd waiting to cheer on a new DA. That's how much he was hated by the prosecutor's office. Schwarzenegger blamed Gascogne for a lot of us

for a rise in lawlessness and chaos in La County. Now, I want to give you a reality check for a moment. Now, let's look at the stats. Violent and property crimes did rise twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three, mainly under Gascon's watch, but that was during the post pandemic crime and hit other California counties with conservative DA's even harder, and criminologists are looking at and saying, you know what, the idea that Gascone or any progressive prosecutor be blamed for the

ebbs and flows of crime trends shouldn't happen. I mean, maybe it was his influence, but was it primarily his influence? Was it because of Gascon and his policies? You know, not necessarily so on mister Greemer crimes hawkman Veau vowed to bring charges where Gascone didn't, but he is offering diversion, restitution programs addiction issues. He plans to have prosecutors offer a choice between prison or an eighteen month intensive rehab program. And I don't know who's going to pay for that,

because that's always a question. He is going to pursue death verdicts again, which Gascon took off the table. He'll only do it in rare cases, which by the way, is in rare cases anyway. Even when California did have the death penalty, which it still does, but it was a moratorium because Gavin Newsom is saying no death penalty. We're not going to kill anybody while I'm the governor. But it's only a moratorium. Next governor can institute it, and so we haven't had an execution. I don't know

fourteen years now the death penalty. Californians want the death penalty. I had the pleasure, and I use that word selectively, I had the pleasure of witnessing an execution here in the state of California, and it was one of the best days of my life. I thought it was hugely entertaining, hugely entertaining. Hawkman announced the formation of task forces to deal with homelessness, fentanyl, human trafficking, organized retail crime, residential burglary,

and hate crimes. And also he's going to clean out the higher end of the prosecutor's office, which always happens. New DA comes into town, gets elected, it is his or her closest advisors, senior people to where the DA was. I mean, just you bring in your own people and you fire the ones that followed or believed in the previous administration, the policies. In this case, everybody who staunchly believed in what Gascon was doing. People that he promoted gone.

I mean, they're still in the prosecutor's office. They're not going to be great. Story about Todd Spitzer, who had someone who was very high up in Rucklehouse's administration when he was the DA, and it was someone who absolutely defended the former DA. I mean, just crazy defended him and was one of this senior prosecutors. I think, if I remember correctly, was assigned to the intern program dealing with high school students who wanted to be prosecutors or cops.

Big change and Todd. If I have that wrong, I know Todd listens, let me know, and I'll correct myself. I don't want to mention names, but I will correct myself. I'd say, Nah, Handle, you're wrong like you normally are. Okay, coming up the Great Grocery Squeeze. Neil has talked about this food deserts, and we're not talking about a grocery store in the middle of the Mohave. We're talking about food deserts where there are no grocery stores in populated areas.

to miners? Yeah, think can say no. I think it's a legitimate argument for sure. All right, let's continue on. Then I want to go off politics for a while until we go back to politics coming up at eight twenty with Donald Trump's newest selection, and I'll talk about that. So now I want to talk about a story came out in the Atlantic, and this is the concept of

food deserts and what's a food desert? Americans who live in low income communities with no access to fresh groceries and why Well, the consensus is that the population isn't big enough, stores can't make enough money, and they just don't have what it takes to attract a supermarket either too poor, too parsley, too sparsely populated. And the argument that there is a racist pattern of corporate redlining, which I don't know how extensive that is. I believe some

of that is true. Rather, when did food deserts rive. Didn't happen until the nineteen eighties. Before that, small towns, poor neighborhoods had grocery stores, sometimes even several. The term food desert was coined in nineteen ninety five by a task force studying this new phenomenon. For example, let me give you an example of a food desert. There's a high poverty, majority black neighborhood in Washington, d c. In the nineteen sixties, it had more than half a dozen

grows grocery stores. By the nineteen nineties, the number had dwindled to two. Today none zero. And this is also going on across rural America. Until the nineteen eighties, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store, some had several. Now half of the rural residents of North Dakota live in a food desert. By the way, the USDA defines a food desert as a low income census tract where the nearest grocery store is more than ten miles away in a rural area, more than one

mile away in a city. Now, I don't know how many people live more than a mile away from a grocery store. I do now where I live, and so I'm in a food desert. And then right outside of a mile, like one point one miles from my house is a Gelson, So I am in a food desert. So there were a bunch of state and federal programs tried to address food deserts, giving tax break subsidies to supermarkets to go to these areas. That's failed. There are more now than there were in twenty ten. So what

happened well in the thirties is when things changed. A and P, which was the biggest supermarket in the country, was supplanting local grocery stores and what became market dominant and Congress the investigation said A and P had a huge advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, legitimate ways of competing, which is why the

law allowed them to do what they did. A and P was using its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over small retails retailers, and the food manufacturer had no choice. A and P said, you sell us for a lower price, or we're not buying. And what are they going to do? So they charge food manufacturers charge independent grocers more money. Well, Congress in nineteen thirty six passes the Robinson Patman Act, and what

is that Well, it bars price discrimination. It is illegal for suppliers to offer president preferential deals for retailers who demand them, but it does allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. For example, if a supermarket or supermarket chain buys by the truckload, that's going to be less money they're going to that they're going to be able to

buy that product, those groceries for less money. What this nineteen thirty six law said is that anybody who buys buy a truckload has to be allowed to buy it at the same price. You can't have that kind of discrimination. So in nineteen fifty four, the eight largest supermarket chains had twenty five percent of the entire grocery sales. Same thing in nineteen eighty two. Now it's the three biggest

market chains. So what is going on, Well, it was in the nineteen eighties when that all went away under Reagan and this law that was passed disappeared because it was a regulatory act that the government forced this kind of non discrimination activity, and Reagan said we can't have governmental intervention here. Reagan hated bureaucracy. So then it blew up and now they're in the same position that Walmart buys at a a ridiculously low price because it buys

by the palette full. It buys by the container, buys by the shipload and gets great prices. But if I buy by the shipload the same product, I have to be able to get the same price. That's what this act does. And there's a move to bring it back because the mom and poppers have disappeared. They're just gone. You know, the seven to eleven is going to be the seven one hundred and eleven. All right, we're done. See, I mean that's analysis. Okay, Neil, we've been talking about

that legal analysis, show analysis. You put the ass in analysis. I do, thank you so much. Okay, here's a question. When does the telescope become a serious national security risk? A telescope.

And by the way, both sides have a legitimate argument on those. Sometimes people are nuts on each side of an argument. There's one side that's crazy. For example, gay rights, Okay, we want to stop our next door neighbors who are gay for marrying. We want to discriminate. That's crazy. Abortion legitimate argument both sides. You know. I'm on one side of it, but it's legitimate. So that one also, I think is legitimate. I'll talk about that over the next

few days, for sure. Now here's a question, and I saw this article and and pointed this out, and it's just an interesting question. Not only the question, but the guy who's involved in the middle of this. It's an astronomer named Zilky or zilchko iv Che or Ivit del Kay. He's clearly Croatian of some kind, and he is the fifty nine year old director of the Vera Reuben Observatory. The United States is developing this in the Chilean High Desert and has been for twenty years. It's a billion

dollar telescope and he's being stopped by the government. The United States government saying, well, we have to change this around. He doesn't even know who he's talking to, no idea. The government is so concerned with security, didn't even know which agency, and so he's communicating through intermediary intermediaries at the National Science Foundation. It's like Hamas and Israel negotiating through Katar. That's what's happening here. One person, several people

who knows. Now, this satellite is on a mountaintop in Chile, the at Kama Desert, and it's like the James Webb space telescope of a few years ago. It's going to be able to see the far edge of the universe, but the web telescope can only see a tiny fraction of the sky. The Vera Rubin will be able to point to and lock onto a big section of the sky and after thirty seconds share it with everybody. There's

an algorithm in real time. Well, here is the problem, and that if it's able to grab large sections of the sky and it's instantly readable by astronomers all over the world spy satellites, it's going to be able to see spy satellites and all of a sudden, every astronomer on the planet can see a spy satellite, and the United States, in our case, I would say, is a little bit careful about the Russians knowing where are spy

satellites satellites are specifically. So now comes these negotiations and spy satellites which can be seen by the vera rubin. You know, it goes in the opposite direction too, because big telescopes. For example, during Apollo, potential landing sites on the Moon were figured out by big telescopes. They inspected damage panels on Skylab, on the shuttles made in flight to find out where those tiles had been damaged or not.

They flipped the shuttle over and one of these spy scot satellites or one of these big telescopes was able to see literally from the grounds. It's with that kind of specificity. And so if you have this telescope up there and here the whole sky, and all of a sudden, here's a spy satellite. Instantly people can figure out which country, which model, how big the camera is. And so the national government, our government is a little bit upset about that.

So here's what they decided to do. And therefore this is where this astronomer got really interested in this or negotiated. They negotiated that before it goes to astronomers all over the world. In real time, it goes to the military. It's censorship program they have, but it's not really sophisticated. So you have these sensors who are not particularly astronomers and brilliant about it, take marking pins and draw across

the image. Now these satellites, this one in particular, we're talking about tiny little dots to figure out where the universe is and how far these galaxies are. And all of a sudden, you have this honking marking pen going across the screen and he goes, come on, that's kind of insane. So here is the negotiation up to this point. Because they haven't finished yet. Okay, we'll get an algorithm,

we'll write it. That then goes to you guys, and if there is something moving across the sky asteroid doesn't matter, spacecraft of any kind, and it can tell because it's a time lapse. If there's anything moving, it goes to the military to figure out and they have eight nine days to figure it out, which then goes back to the astronomers. They know what should not be seen, and then that information is released. This telescope is as good as the James Web telescope billion dollars over twenty years.

And as you know, telescopes can read people reading a newspaper from two hundred miles up. I mean literally the headlines and you can actually see the stories, so it can get pretty specific. So that seems to be the negotiation going on so far. It's just kind of fun. I like the story of the guy with the marketing pen. You know, the sensor, you know redacted, whole sections of the universe redacted.

Handles show. Also, well, the pastathon is gone at the Anaheim White House, but go to the website if you would and that's kfiam six to forty dot com slash pastathon. As of ten o'clock last night, nine hundred and forty five thousand dollars raised for Katerina's Club and almost eighty

thousand pounds of pasta and sauce. That's forty tons, almost one hundred thousand dollars over where we were at the same time last year, and we blew through one point three million dollars last year to help feed the kids, and man, without you, it just doesn't happen. We're half of the total. We're half of the budget of Katerina's Club. By Bruno likes us so much. Okay, something that we've been talking about a long time that I sort of personally am involved with, and that is the number of

colleges that close each year. And I've been talking about it and it's such a concern that the federal government actually looked at this, and this is the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Because now we want real numbers. Now, we want science, Now, we want real surveys, because quite often we come up with stuff that seems to be but there's no there's no there there without scientific background.

This is now a real report coming up with real numbers under the worst case scenario, assuming a one time fifteen percent drop in students, like right now, that's a demographic cliff. It's called eighty colleges right now would shut down one hundred thousand students twenty thousand staff members. Now nationally, that's not a whole big number, but the trend is there. For a bunch of reasons. Higher education has come under some serious pressure the last several years. And why are

fewer people going to college? And just a quick aside my personal involvement. One of the schools that closed was my law school. Whittier Law School is now defunct. It is done, it is finished, it is out of business. If you look at my law degree, and there it is in a frame that I graduated natsuma kum laudy, not kum laudy, not well loud, yes, because that was my law school. So I graduated kumb loud because too loudy. Yes, And it's just shut down. So my school is one

of those victims. Thank god I graduated law school before it shut down. Although a lot of people would argue that why are the number of students way down? We'll look at this the birth rate is down. We know that a larger number of students are looking at the value of a traditional college degree. Tuition has exploded. Borrowing money from the US government to pay for school has the highest borrowing costs more than fifteen years. I mean, it is way way down. And the value of a

college education. Well, I get asked all the time, should my son go to law school? Should I go to law school? And I say no, Now you can go to where I went to school. It's now a parking lot and check out the school. Is it going to help you hard to get a job? Now, when you hear about these one hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year jobs, are they out there first year? They are? But you have to go in IVY League school. We have one in California, Stanford, Although UCLA and SC are

pretty good. We're talking Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago. These are schools where if you're at the top, top, top of the class, you're going to get that kind of job. The rest of us no. So, for example, why did I go out on my own because there wasn't a law firm on earth that would hire me, that's why, and I was forced to go out and start my own practice. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are going to school and anesthesiologists. Look

at what anithesiologists make. I once was having a conversation with an ant caesiologist about school. I mean they walk into two hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, three hundred thousand dollars a year, I mean day one if their board certified. Yeah, how did they get there? How long did it take? Where other people are working and making money. Four years of undergrad four years of med school, five years of residency, So they're in their mid thirties

before they could even start. Oh, let's talk about the five hundred thousand dollars student debt they have to come up with now. Granted, anestesiologists are able to pay that debt off in about thirty minutes. However, you know, it's hard to start a family, buy a house when all of your money is being spent on school and you're borrowing up to the hilt, and you're starting your career at thirty five or thirty six. I mean, that's a tough week to go get.

So we still have plenty of show. KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.