Represent The People

Politicians in the United States, particularly at the national level, have long since failed to represent the interests of everyday working people. One could make a strong argument that this observable condition has persisted since the founding of the Republic. Even so, U.S. political culture has veered sharply away from the interests of ordinary people in the years following the now infamous Powell Manifesto. Since that time, relentless promotion of pro-business, “free market” dogma has systematically suppressed, often violently, all competitive social, economic and political ideologies.

Lying With Forked Tongue

The pro-business propaganda pushed onto the rest of us often first take shape in a “think tank” of one sort or another. A typical example is a “report” published in July, 2011 by the Heritage Foundation, a mouthpiece for big business launched in 1973 by former “young Republicans,” conservative political hacks and an assortment of wealthy and rabidly right-wing businessmen. The report -- titled “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?” -- essentially attempts to subvert mounting evidence, no matter how plainly visible to the naked eye, of the rapidly growing destitution spreading throughout the land.

We can put aside the disingenuous reference to color televisions, video game machines and microwave ovens as sure signs that a triumphant free market has utterly vanquished poverty for all but the most depraved, shiftless and needlessly “needy” among us. Post-consumer rubbish like last year’s game box, three year-old televisions and cheap microwave ovens are readily available cast-offs one can find at virtually any exurban garbage dump or by quickly scanning the freebies on Craig’s List. Poorly constructed housing stock, particularly housing units built post-WWII, explains the ubiquity of air conditioning more than anything else. Until recent decades, dwellings and work places were cooled through intelligent use of shade trees, windows and through the application of other well-designed ventilating and cooling techniques. The shoddily built crackerboxes hurriedly and haphazardly strewn across America’s urban, suburban and exurban wastelands over the past couple of generations uniformly require forced air cooling just to keep occupants from suffocating or dying of heat stroke.

Things Are Tough All Over

Over the past year, a PortlandWiki volunteer has witnessed four of his neighbors forced to vacate their apartments. Three were evicted and one left “voluntarily” before eviction proceedings could commence. These four evictions / near-eviction represents an out-migration of fully one third of the twelve-unit apartment building. Of the three people evicted outright, two were forced to transition directly onto the street. The other found temporary refuge with a reluctant parent, but has since likely transitioned onto the street.

The latest person to suffer straight-to-the-street eviction is a grandmother in her late 40s whose various physical, mental and emotional ailments cost her her job several years ago. After her unemployment insurance payments expired, her attempts to obtain financial assistance because of her disabilities went nowhere. In July 2011, after attempting suicide, she spent two weeks in a local hospital. In several separate conversations with a neighbor over the span of a couple of months, she has consistently referred to four of her women friends who successfully committed suicide while going through the eviction process. Three other friends facing eviction, by her own accounting, have attempted to kill themselves. This grandmother was just one of the PortlandWiki contributor’s neighbors forced to transition out of her dwelling and directly onto the street.

Evicting people from their homes is no picnic for the landlord either. Particularly if the landlord is an individual human and not a property management company. And especially if that individual human landlord is not a slumlord, but a relatively decent person who only resorts to such extremes after weathering a lengthy cycle of repeated short- or non-rent payments, and taking other financial hits. What ensues is an ugly and often protracted series of increasingly hostile confrontations, recriminations, court dates and administrative procedures with accompanying administrative expenses.

Word On The Street

Out on the street one observes a swelling army of society’s castoffs. Throwaway people no more valuable to a heavily narcissistic, post-consumer culture than the detritus shoved into the same culture’s swelling, post-consumer garbage heaps. The castaways include the usual suspects: the sick, the addicted, the makers of “bad choices,” and those with exceptionally rotten luck. In other words, those whose negligence, ill health or bad luck have cost them their ability to adequately fend for themselves.

Others also end up on the streets. Chihiro Wimbush is a film maker in San Francisco, and a former outreach coordinator for a community radio station in Portland. For the past three years, Wimbush has filmed scenes arising from the daily struggles of a half-dozen or so homeless people wandering the streets of West Oakland, California. They are folks who eke out an exhausting, hardscrabble subsistence collecting recyclable materials and selling them to a recycling center in the neighborhood. Wimbush identifies three qualities he notices in virtually everyone he encounters who ultimately “fell through the cracks” and ended up on the street:

1. People who made exceptionally poor life choices.
2. Those who have experienced exceptionally bad luck.
3. People who, for whatever reason, find it impossible to conform or “fit in” well enough to function in “normal” society.

Of this latter category, those who can’t or won’t “fit in,” one observes growing anger and resentment. Observed at a mid-summer “potluck” serving free suppertime meals to hungry Portlandians was a clear example of one such angry and resentful person: a street musician. A decade or two earlier, this street musician’s dad or older brother might have had a more laid back style, characterized by simple, clumsily played chord progressions and rambling lyrics. This younger brother, however, was much more intense. A sort of cross between a twenty-first century Bob Dylan and a bitterly angry Kurt Cobain, the young street musician played and sang with furious intensity, his rapid-fire vocals punctuated with shouted-out exclamations of “fuck you.”

The Collapsing Veil

Financial crisis and the bailouts.

Special Period

The “North Korea” approach vs the “Cuba” approach.

External Links

• The Heritage Foundation: Conservative policy research since 1973