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 takes 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 immediately put aside the Heritage Foundation’s disingenuous reference to poor folks wallowing in the luxurious comforts of color televisions, video game machines and microwave ovens. Also dismissable is the absurd notion that the mere presence of these artifacts of a consumerist anomie are clear signs that a triumphant free market has utterly vanquished poverty for all but the most depraved, shiftless and needlessly “needy” amongst us. Post-consumer rubbish like last year’s game box, three year-old televisions and cheap microwave ovens are the 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, constructed with unseemly haste and carelessly 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 tenants / ex-tenants at 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.”

Austere Desperation

At mid-afternoon, the PortlandWiki volunteer editing this article gets up from his desk and steps outside into the bright, warm and clear summer’s day. Walking to Portland’s main post office on NW Hoyt Street near the vicinity of Union Station, our wiki volunteer encounters a twenty-six year-old woman clutching the hand of her eight year-old son. A bit chubby, she’s mildly attractive but her face clearly reveals the strains of someone forced to withstand the repeated blows dealt by a hard and luckless life. Her little boy, also a bit chubby, appeares to have already absorbed a few hard knocks during the short span of his young life. Striking an unfamiliar observer as possibly a bit developmentally disabled, the boy reaches out to momentarily grasp the observer’s wrist, then lets go.

The young mother explains her predicament using jumbled, disjointed words with a voice approaching frantic. She and her boy missed their Greyhound bus to Phoenix. Her husband was just released from jail and she is scared for her safety, and that of her little boy. They’re short $15 to update their bus tickets and they need help. Unfortunately, our PortlandWiki volunteer cannot help with the cash, his income having sputtered to a complete stop early in 2011, and currently keeping a modest roof overhead only through the graciousness of overly generous friends and loved ones. But it’s a generosity that leaves him with exactly zilch for “walking around” money. Disappointed, the young mother immediately approaches the next person emerging from the post office with her plea for help. The old man she approaches refuses her plea.

Shortly afterward, a young man, also twenty-six (as the observer would soon discover), rolled up on his bicycle to where the young mother and her boy stood. His skate board sat nestled in his bike’s basket. He listens to the young woman’s plea for help and decides he can help out. The three of them--mom, little boy and young man--walk over to the Greyhound bus station a block or so towards the river. It turns out the surcharge is actually $15 for each ticket, for a total of $30. The young man pays it and mom and boy get their updated tickets. All they have to do now is hunker down and wait for their bus to depart Portland at close to midnight, then endure the long ride to Phoenix. And hope the jailbird husband doesn’t appear before they can make their getaway.

You’re Not Paid To Think

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Writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe interviewed by BBC News.

Darcus Howe is a West Indian writer and broadcaster who the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) interviewed for his “take” on the London riots. The interviewer began her inquiry by immediately garbling her subject’s name. But not until she -- paying twisted homage to John Kerry -- got Howe’s name right (in her pre-interview introduction) before getting it wrong (with the first question). She began by asking “Marcus Dowe, are you shocked by what you’ve seen there last night?”

Darcus Howe: No, not at all. I have been living in London for fifty years. There are so many different (moods?) and moments. But what I was certain about, listening to my grandson, and my son, was that something very very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks, and young whites, with a discerning eye, and a careful hearing, they have been telling us, and we would not listen (to) what was happening in this country to them, and what is...

BBC Interviewer: Mister Howe, if I can just ... if I can just stop you for a moment... You say you’re not shocked? Does this mean you condone what happened in your community last night?

And so it went. Whenever Mr. Howe attempted to illuminate and clarify, the BBC interviewer respond by trying to stuff words into Howe’s mouth. By describing the manner in which London police killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man police had under surveillance, Howe identified the spark that ignited the London riots. The BBC interviewer responded with her objections over Howe’s depiction of how Duggan was killed, insisting that Howe couldn’t offer his own assessment, but instead would “have to wait” for the results of an “official inquiry.”

Despite the BBC interviewer’s repeated attempts to get Howe back on message, Howe carried on, pointing to what he saw as a sort of global “insurrection” happening in various hot spots all over the world in this “hysterical moment.” Clearly irritated at Howe’s refusal to play along and allow her to stuff “official” words into his mouth, and caring not a whit about trifles like “a discerning eye” or “a careful hearing” or what anyone has “been telling us” or that “we would not listen,” the BBC interviewer finally pulled out her trump card:

BBC Interviewer: Mr. Howe, if I can just ask you, you are not a stranger to riots yourself I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself.

Revolution in an Idiot Box

Instead You Pay To Not Think

Let’s return for a moment to the propaganda piece from the Heritage Foundation about poor folks basking in worldly pleasures like video game boxes and cable TV. The same report that Cornel West and Tavis Smiley call “A Declaration of War on the Poor.” Let’s also consider the nature of the relationship between an abuser and the abused. The Heritage report’s authors sneer at poor folks crying “poor” even as they fork over a significant chunk of their precious dollars to stay hooked onto cable TV’s hypnotic tether. What propagandists at Heritage don’t tell you is how central the programmed depravity -- pumped through the cable networks or broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves -- is to maintaining social control.

Without powerful distractions like television -- the most advanced mind-control appliance ever invented to date, and a dear friend to totalitarians of all persuasions -- there’s a very real danger you might actually observe some of the mayhem happening all around you. Worse, you might even act on those observations. And that would be intolerable. The bad news is that poor folks, or anyone else for that matter, pay their cable bills. The much worse news is everyone pays for the “pleasure” of such programming in ways most of us can’t even conceive of.

Let’s return our attention to the August 2011 riots that destroyed so much property and so many livelihoods in London and other UK towns. With pent-up fury that finally exploded, many of the most active rioters were mere children. An angry shop owner, her store destroyed by some of these rioting children, denounced them in harsh language, calling the looters “feral rats.” Indeed. These kids did go “feral.” And what decent person doesn’t empathize with a mom, shop owner and hard worker who just had her means of making a living destroyed by “feral” -- maybe even sociopathic -- children?

But who are these children? Who are their role models? Where does their sociopathy come from? What made them go “feral”? Feral animals are often highly destructive. Sometimes feral animals are even as destructive the domesticated herd they, if only momentarily, escaped from.

These “feral rats,” of course, are the products of the best feral rat training program money can buy. That money, in fact, is eager to buy. It’s a program that teaches, unequivocally and emphatically, that greed is good. That dominance rules. That power controls and that absolute power controls absolutely. That the best things in life cost money, and plenty of it. And that anyone who lacks money, plenty of money, ain’t worth shit.

Insulated

Just as the small-time landlord is forced to evict tenants who can no longer pay the rent, the small-time shopkeeper is also at the mercy of social and economic policies that she or he has virtually no control over. Unlike the makers of such policy, neither the small landlord nor the main street shop owner is insulated from the effects of policy gone terribly, horribly wrong. Instead, they find out the brutally hard way that their place on the social and economic hierarchy is, at best, just one or two steps above the people they’re evicting onto the street, or the “feral rats” who are looting and torching their shops.

No need here to get too teary-eyed about the poor, unfortunate “feral rats.” They’re no more valiant or noble than any of the rest of us, but no less so either. Those who put liberal credentials on ostentatious display by claiming to champion the cause of the poor, the downtrodden, the despised and dispossessed -- in other words, “fighting the good fight” -- are clearly doing a lousy job. The poor, downtrodden, despised and dispossessed are obviously worse for the wear. It’s probably fair to point out, however, that the bleeding-heart liberal is, at very least, less bad than the vacant-hearted reactionary who strives with great glee to actively punish the less fortunate. And our culture is currently chock full of gleeful vacant-hearted punishers.

Instead of wasting time gently petting or harshly pounding the downtrodden, you might take a hard look at who is using you to insulate themselves from the despised, the downtrodden and the otherwise “unworthy.” Because unless you are one of the unworthy untouchables, or unless you routinely travel by private jet or chauffeured car, you are an insulator. A buffer zone. A proxy for implementing social policy by those who set it, and enforcing it on those who must withstand its harshest effects.

Your usefulness depends on your cleverness at functioning in your assigned role. Put another way, your lack of cleverness with efficiently and obediently fulfilling your role as “buffer” or “insulator” puts you in serious jeopardy of getting shoved into the pit carved out for the uninsulated, the rebuffed, the hopeless, the damned. And it’s becoming harder and harder to gracefully maintain your position within society’s insulating class.

The Collapsing Veil

The Berlin Wall that once separated East Berlin from the Western portion of the city officially “came down” in November, 1989. A few months later, in February 1990, the Soviet Union entered into its final stage of unraveling. Just two years later, on December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The Soviet Union dissolved primarily because it had completely lost all credibility with the people it governed. Meanwhile, so-called “free-market capitalism” -- with its laugh-out-loud trickle-down theories, its eagerness to devastate whole communities with a single factory relocation, its relentless financial crises, its unapologetic swindles, scandals and scams, its resource wars, and on and on -- was losing credibility fast. The final nail in the coffin containing what was left of any legitimacy for capitalism’s current world order was driven in by the September 2008 global financial implosion, and the repugnant financial bailouts that followed this catastrophe.

Global capitalism “is easily the most complex social system in history.” This “mega-complexity increases the likelihood of system failures.” But it’s the psychotic depravity of its grasping, avaricious, greed-at-all-costs managers that guaranteed the destruction of any moral, ethical or even sound economics legitimacy that global capitalism may have once enjoyed.

Now that the proverbial “cat” is “out of the bag” -- now that global free-market capitalism is seen by all but its most delusional adherents for the corrupt, non-free, rapacious and destructive system that it is -- the hammer of enforcement is coming down with brutal efficiency. The people were told they must bail out the banks; the people didn’t want to bail out the banks but were forced to do it anyway. Now the people must account for their wild and reckless spending. Spending that includes their enforced “willingness” to bail out banks, and to allow bailed out bankers to pay themselves obscene bonuses while the rest of the global economy continues its free-fall into the abyss.

To pay for such reckless spending, the people must give up their already meager Social Security checks, assuming they live long enough to collect them. They must forget about getting a decent job. They must give up any hopes for educating their children. They must get used to the reality of an America without the dream; an America were a man’s home is his foreclosure statement; an America in which a woman’s place is on the street, right where her eviction notice put her. Unless she puts herself into the grave first.

The Abuser, The Abused, And You

One major current of “civilized culture” we leave seriously under-scrutinized is the relationship between the abuser and the abused. It’s a relationship in which each of us plays a role, however unwitting or unwanted, of one sort or another. In fact it’s common as dirt for abuser-abused relationships to form between one family member and another.

A hint at one of these family-centered abuser-abused relationships came to light during a conversation the soon-to-be-evicted grandmother had with our PortlandWiki volunteer observer. The observer asked her if she could stay with one of her family members, maybe her son. The neighbor-on-eviction-row replied that she could not. Her relationship with her son was strained. His grandmother -- the neighbor’s mother -- had “turned him against” her. Why? Because she still held “a grudge” against her daughter, the grandson’s mother.

The neighbor explained that her mother never forgave her for a family tragedy that happened when she was a little girl, only five years old. She and her two sisters waited in the house. The mom was out in the yard of their rural home on top of a riding mower, cutting the lawn. The pot of spaghetti cooking on the stove began to burn. The neighbor, then a five year old little girl, opened the screen door and called out to her mother, trying to get her attention. A younger sister, barely a toddler, dashed out the door and ran into the yard. The mom accidentally ran over the little girl’s leg with her riding mower. The mower immediately spat out a toe, portions of shredded shoe and bits of little girl foot. The mom never forgave the older sister, now a grandmother in her late 40s, for allowing the toddler to escape.

The neighbor momentarily slipped from her usual composure -- a sort of monotonic, emotionally vacant dullness -- to briefly sob before bringing herself back under emotional control. She vaguely alluded to the various Chester the Molester-types that drifted in and out of her orbit while growing up. The observer could not help but wonder about the extent to which these childhood traumas, many experienced as a little girl, maintained their emotional and physiological hold on this woman, a grandmother now sentenced to eviction row. What role did such trauma play in disrupting this woman’s ability to make her way through life without getting tossed out onto the street?

Examining The “Abuse Chain”

In examining the “abuse chain,” the “abuse hierarchy” or however we might agree to label it, perhaps the bottom rung of the hierarchy begins at home with the child beater, the in-home child molester, the wife batterer and so on. A bit further up the chain we encounter the pimp, the rapist, the predatory child molester, the mugger, the armed robber, the murderer and so forth.

As we go up the chain, the depravity and destruction of lives becomes more pronounced. At perhaps mid-level we encounter the human traffickers, the drug barons, assorted mafia kingpins, the arms merchants, the military contractors, the sweatshop factory owners, the religious cultists of various stripes and so on. Abusers at this mid-level rung on the abuse hierarchy are much more efficient at destroying lives. Their skills in taking advantage of opportunities to move in and exploit social disruptions -- decaying neighborhoods, war-torn regions, natural disaster zones and the like -- are much more finely tuned than any of the abusive “skill sets” found among the low-level abusers.

Standing on the top rungs of the abuse hierarchy are its most dangerous and pathologically destructive participants. Unfortunately they are also our culture’s most prominent and “respectable” citizens. They are our heads of state, our corporate chieftains, our major politicians, our most prominent military commanders and our statesmen and stateswomen. They run our largest banks and control major financial centers. Their support network includes military and police forces, surveillance networks, strategic and policy analysts, top-drawer “think tanks,’ international agencies and more.

They launch military invasions and full-scale wars. They craft social and economic policies that can destroy the livelihoods -- even the lives -- of millions with the stroke of a pen. Including policies that turn ordinary children into “feral rats” who run amok to loot, plunder and torch entire neighborhoods.

Special Period

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

External Links

• The Heritage Foundation: Conservative policy research since 1973