Represent The People
U.S. politicians, particularly at the national level, have long since failed to represent the interests of everyday working people in the United States. One could make a strong argument that this truism has remained a constant 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.[1] Since that time, relentless promotion of pro-business, “free market” dogma has systematically suppressed, often violently, all competitive social, economic and political ideologies.
The pro-business lies 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?”[2] -- 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.[3] Poorly constructed housing stock, particularly that 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 and windows. The shoddily built crackerbox built over the past couple of generations requires 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 leave 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 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 for 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 eviction. 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.
Eviction 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 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 other financial hits. What ensues is an ugly and often protracted series of increasingly hostile confrontations, recriminations, court dates and 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 from the daily struggles of a half-dozen or so homeless people in West Oakland, California who eke out an exhausting, hardscrabble subsistence collecting recyclable materials and selling them to a recycling center in the neighborhood.[4] Wimbush identifies three qualities he notices in virtually everyone he encounters who ultimately “fell through the cracks” and ended up on the street:
- People who made exceptionally poor life choices.
- Those who have experienced exceptionally bad luck.
- People who, for whatever reason, find it impossible to conform or “fit in” well enough to function in “normal” society.
The Collapsing Veil
Financial crisis and the bailouts.
Special Period
The “North Korea” approach vs the “Cuba” approach.