Copaganda Distorts Our Treatment of Crime

The following is from the introduction to Alec Karakatsanis' book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. He call propaganda about the "punishment bureaucracy" (the American "justice" system) "copaganda," and spends considerable time documenting his experience as an attorney encountering its distortions of reality. The bracketed numbers are his footnotes. Book excerpt: 

So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles. 

Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat 

The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined--such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies--costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That's over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. [20] 

Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure "safety' as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or rob­bery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn't pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclusively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-­recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money. 

Job #2: Manufacturing Fear 

The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd [killed by police] uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of "crime waves" concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near historic fifty-year lows the entire time. [21] As a result of continual news­-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling. [22] 

Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.)[23] This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear. 

Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution 

The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to inter­personal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people's lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as "disorder" solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option. 

If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, ... greater in­vestment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police­-recorded crime. [24] Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. [25] 

Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as "crime." ...and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance. 

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. [26] 

Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying. ... ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years...
 
This book focuses on copaganda in the news. I'm not going to ana­lyze other common types of copaganda, including fictional copaganda in television, movies, and music. Cultural copaganda is all around us­from the CIA, starting in the 1950s, funding projects like the Iowa Writers' Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence mod­ern journalism and fiction writing, to the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows, to the vast array of police and military consultants who shape every fictional TV series, podcast, or movie that touches on crime.[27] Shows like COPS and Law & Order have done a lot to distort society's un­derstanding of what the punishment bureaucracy does. 

Average Change in Annual Income Once the Trump Bill is in Effect

 

average change in annual income for americans once the big beautiful bill passes (imminently) pic.twitter.com/CZOqjty5JX

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 3, 2025

China Builds Homes for One Third Western Costs

 

Sacramento Supervisor Wants Law Enforcement to Handle Poverty Too

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez's newsletter says her contribution to the County's budget deliberations was a success. The budget originally included "cuts to the Sheriff’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) and Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) units, as well as reductions that would have limited the District Attorney’s ability to prosecute misdemeanor crimes." She negotiated restoring those programs, but mentions nothing about how successful they were.

Meanwhile, surveys say the majority of homeless people are too poor to afford housing. Yet Ms. Rodriguez wants to employ the same organization that catches and prosecutes criminals to handle poverty as well. So, is poverty a crime? If 60% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, it's pretty widespread.

If, in addition to poverty, mental illness and addiction are responsible for a significant amount of homelessness, aren't the medical professions better equipped to deal with that than sheriffs with guns and tasers? Isn't threatening people who are ill, well, Medieval?

There are alternatives. For example, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and reaped considerable savings. After all, it's seven times more expensive to incarcerate addicts than to treat them. The state of Oregon tried the same thing, but had the police implement the decriminalization. They bungled it so badly that Oregon reversed course, repealing the decriminalization after a short trial.

Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if our public servants solved problems rather than pandering to popular prejudice?

Like Ms. Rodriguez, once upon a time, I'd believed Hollywood's version of sheriffs and police. Don't cops, courts, and cages always nab the bad guy and keep us safe? That's what all those "Law & Order" and "Perry Mason" shows say!

In reality, the police solve 13.2% of crimes--that's for California in 2022, despite $25 billion in funding. Police are terrible at solving crimes. 

However, like me, most voters bought the Hollywood fantasy. Voters didn't object when the population increased 42%--between 1982 and 2017--and spending on police rose more than four times faster (187%). Hollywood's fantasies impact US incarceration rates, too. The US puts people in cages at four to five times the world's per capita incarceration average, seven times more than Canada and France--countries that have lower crime rates.

How do the French and Canadians manage lower crime with fewer prisoners? For one thing, the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually, while France and Canada have Medicare for all. Could making half a million people financially desperate every year lead them to try desperate things, like crime? Do we really even have to ask?

Studies of this problem say addressing the poverty that causes homelessness would be kinder and more effective. Given that Canada's single-payer healthcare is roughly 30% cheaper than the profit-driven medicine the US now enjoys, it would not only be kinder, it would be cheaper and prevent more crime than asking the sheriffs to become mental health professionals and addiction counselors, never mind addressing the problem of poverty.

Public policy matters when it comes to homelessness, too. The federal government used to build affordable housing. Richard Nixon put a stop to that. Then, as he cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan also reduced HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. The US had nothing like the current homeless population since the Great Depression before those events

Nevertheless, Ms. Rodriguez remains in the thrall of Hollywood's mythical thinking. Relying on cops, courts, and cages to handle a problem that's largely a result of poverty is just gratuitous cruelty.

Update: Oregon's alternative

 

If you want to find zero accountability, don't bother with Trump; it's the Democrats

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

My Democratic friends are as upset as can be about Trump's high-handed quasi-dictatorship. But asking them to consider the history, or the Democratic precedents and presidents, is a fruitless endeavor. They are unrepentant. 

But repentance is exactly what's needed here. An angry response to the (angry) Trump voters even makes things worse. Unfortunately, as understandable as it may be, anger doesn't always make for sensible thinking.

This Guy Won the NYC Democratic Primary

He's a socialist and a Muslim. So much for identity politics!

 

For a more in-depth look at the primary and its implications, see this article on the Naked Capitalism blog.

Also, see "A Democratic Socialist Smashes Wall Street in New York: What Zohran Mamdani Means for the Anti-Monopoly Movement"

 

The Fed Can Now Give States and Cities Money Power to Fund Essential Social Programs

To fully understand this post, you have to know that the US has privatized the bulk of currency creation to (private) banks. Banks create "credit" (i.e. money) by making loans. If you borrow $20,000 to buy a car, the bank will create an asset (checking) account for you with $20K recorded in it. It will also create a liability (debt, IOU) account for you to pay payments into. Notice that no deposits were touched in this transaction. If the car dealer has an account at the same bank, the scorekeeping (money) will shift from your checking account to the dealer's account. Again, no deposits touched. If the dealer has an account with a different bank, then the central bank (the Fed, which makes government money, or dollars) settles claims between banks at the end of the day. If the lending bank is short of cash to transfer to the dealer's bank, the Fed can lend it to them, literally without limit.

This is why Henry Ford said that if people knew how banks operated, there would be a revolution tomorrow. The revised policy gives small, local and state governments broader access to the credit creation that we call money, especially if they empower public banks.

The Fed Can Give States and Cities Money Power to Fund Essential Social Programs

by Michael Brennan, June 22, 2025 [CommonDreams]

…States, cities, and universities fiscal policy exists downstream from government money and bank money. Their lack of access to money power is a fundamental political problem by design. The federal government retaining the sole power to create government money keeps states and cities subordinate to Washington as a power center; the Federal Reserve granting access only to privately owned banks means our society prioritizes private wealth accumulation first above social needs. As Congress and the president push to stop the flow of new government money, states and cities can use this as an opportunity to refocus on bank money and the discrepancy between giving private banks the money power instead of the public.

The Federal Reserve can resolve this unjust dynamic by opening up the money power to states, cities, and universities directly. Just as it offers credit to banks at policy-dictated interest rates, the Fed can create credit facilities for states and cities at a policy rate that will further its mandate of price stability and maximum employment. Toward that end, the best default interest rate would be permanently at 0%.

The Fed did open credit access to states and cities during the Covid-19 pandemic via the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF)….

Trump's Reactionary America

(c) by Mark Dempsey

"We’re in the early stages of an attempt to divide America fueled by a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, marriage equality, immigration, the negative impacts of trade deals, and the technological revolution. Trump is trying to normalize a heavy-handed response by the federal government. Right now, people are sympathetic, but their tolerance will eventually run out. If crack downs become too harsh or the unrest lasts too long, he may pay a political price. It’s probably going to be a long, hot summer." - from Thomas Mills

 The term "backlash" is appropriate. The "No Kings" protests were an inevitable reaction to Trump's attempts to deport the "illegals," which was a reaction to recent economic circumstances, tainted with the bigotry forbidden by civil rights laws, and those laws were a reaction to the history of slavery, a reaction to...well, this causal chain can go as far back as Adam and Eve. Whether backlash sticks or provokes another reaction is anyone's guess.

If you want to find out where an abusive person got their ability to react, it's always good to look at the history. A child abuser was often an abused child of other abused children, whose parents were abusive, whose grandparents were abusive, etc.

The only way out of this doom loop is what Christianity calls "forgiveness." Resenting Trump voters as bigoted morons--as many of my Democratic friends do--is just another reaction in the chain of reactions.

At least in my world, Trump voters were reacting (legitimately) to the fecklessness of the Obama administration, which not only committed war crimes, it gave Wall Street a non-penalty for what arguably amounts to the largest theft in human history. I'm certainly not the first to say it, but Trump voters were angry, not stupid. Admittedly, an angry response is not always a sensible one, but given Obama's corruption, what other choice did they have?

 

 

 

Ukraine Escalates

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Recently, Ukraine completed "Operation Spider Web," destroying some of Russia's nuclear triad (bombers) as deep as in Siberia. One of my friends, a Democrat, suprised me by praising Ukraine for that attack. 

I wonder how my friend would react if Cuba, or Canada used Russian weapons to attack bombers in North Dakota. In the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba--not firing them--the US was apoplectic. We were literally ten minutes away from nuclear holocaust. A Soviet submarine captain--Vasili Arkhipov--ignored an order from the Kremlin to start World War III by firing his submarine's missiles. (Let's all celebrate Vasili Arkhipov day--October 27!)

As for whether the US is implicated in the Operation Spider Web attack, the experts I read (see the links below) say there's no question Ukraine couldn't have done this without using US intelligence. It was, in effect, an indirect attack on one nuclear power (Russia) by another (the US).

My Democratic friend's position is premised on the idea that Putin is the quintessential bad guy, and he attacked Ukraine in 2022, completely unprovoked. But that's false. The US provided many provocations over several decades.

First, in the late 1980s, G.H.W. Bush promised Gorbachev that, if he let East and West Germany unite, the US wouldn't expand NATO "one inch" to the east. Clinton and George W. Bush both broke that promise, and the US State Department spent $5 billion in "democracy promotion" in Ukraine leading up to the "Orange Revolution" protests in 2014.

In 2014, the elected president of Ukraine (Yanukovych) was offered two different aid packages: one from the European Union (EU) and the IMF, and one from the Russians. The Russian package required far less of Ukraine. The loans were at a lower interest rate, and, unlike the IMF loans, no public austerity would be needed to pay for them. 

 

Yanukovych turned down the EU deal and approved the Russian aid. With the encouragement of the US, protests erupted in Kyiv. Was the US behind organizing the protests? Never mind the billions spent by the US, neocon Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, literally handed out cookies to the demonstrators. There was even evidence the snipers who killed demonstrators, whipping the crowd into a frenzy, were not Yanukovych's people--they were a false flag attack, a provocation from the neo-Nazi Ukrainians. In any case, the protests deposed Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. The Russians (who already had a lease there) claimed Crimea.

 

Both Ukraine and Crimea are critical security assets for Russia. Both Hitler and Napolean invaded Russia through Ukraine--it's the pass for invaders. As Tulsi Gabbard says, the Russians have legitimate security concerns here.

 

Publicly-available recordings disclose Victoria Nuland selected the next leader for Ukraine--no need for those pesky elections! In any case, there was no election, and eastern Ukraine (the "Donbass") was unhappy. Protests and riots erupted there. Kyiv responded by shelling the region, causing an estimated 14,000 casualties.

 

This was in 2014, and the Russian Special Military Operation (the "unprovoked" invasion) didn't occur until 2022. What was Russia's immediate response? Besides securing Crimea, where they already had leases, Russia sued for peace. Two meetings in Minsk and one in Istanbul were negotiating for peace.  Angele Merkel, the former German leader, said the West dragged its feet in negotiating to give the Ukraine time to arm.

 

"Truth is the first casualty of war" is an old saying. One example connected to Ukraine: the Snake Island  incident in which the Russians were blamed for assassinating Ukrainian soldiers who defied Russian demands for surrender. In truth, they became prisoners of war. But anything to get the blood lust for war going!

For background, here's John Mearsheimer's (video) assessment of the provocations for the Ukraine war from 2015, before the invasion. Here's a bit of his writing from after the invasion. In any case, he thinks US policy regarding Ukraine has been ill-advised. That video is a rather mild indictment of that policy compared to others but he still calls US policy "scary." 

Jeffrey Sachs'  account of US, Ukraine, and Russia policy condemns the provocations too. Sachs was involved directly in the meetings that came to many of the decisions about Ukraine, and he deviates from the standard narrative. He was protesting US belligerence as he participated in the decisions.

Finally, Laurence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has a rather pointed reaction to "Operation Spiderweb" (the attack on the Russian bombers). He says it's a bad idea, and a provocation that threatens nuclear war.

The praise for an Operation Spiderweb that threatens nuclear holocaust from my friends is at least a suboptimal response, and at worst vengeance misplaced.

...all of which reminds me of Winston Churchill's admonition: "I can always trust my friends, the Americans, to do the right thing. Unfortunately, they often do everything else first."

The Iran Emergency

From here:

Israel's evaluation of the threat posed by Iran:

 

Update: (from Wellstone Democrats) - Stop the war!

Five Actions that everyone can do to help.

1. Call and email your members of Congress and ask them to support the No War Against Iran Act.
Joining Senator Sanders on this legislation are Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.).

Tell Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit military action against Iran without Congressional approval. | Friends of Bernie Sanders https://share.google/4ipSuJr0WFXx6sQjM

2. Support resolution introduced by Sentaor Kaine
https://www.peaceaction.org/.../no-war-with-iran-senate...

3. Support bi-partisan resolution introduced by Rep. Ro Khann (D) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R)
https://m.community.com/cRl3nHQKF42NFPTlQ

4. Support immediate ceasefire and diplomacy
https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSc0M1Ko531MQP.../viewform
Sign on if you wish You do not need to be Israeli or Iranian to sign.  

5. CALL ON YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TO MAKE A PUBLIC STATEMENT DEMANDING THAT US DOES NOT ATTACK IRAN & PUT AMERICANS IN HARMS WAY.
Please take action NOW and share with others.
#ceasefirenow
Iranian American Democrats of California 

Update #2: 

 

pic.twitter.com/LEto8xaPWi

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) June 20, 2025

How The US Normalized Homelessness Detailed in New Book

Drug use skyrocketed in the U.S. in the 60’s and 70’s but widespread homeless emerged in 1982 when federal housing funding and mental health funds were slashed.

Randy Shaw
Jun 4, 2025

Forty-Plus Years of Federal Inaction

Prior to 1982 the United States had no widespread visible homelessness since the Great Depression. Since 1982 homelessness has exploded. What happened? Why has the United States normalized nearly a million people living without homes even during economic boom times?

Maria Foscarinis, a longtime activist and attorney representing the unhoused, answers this question in And Housing For All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America. Foscarinis details how the federal government’s failure to fund real solutions has allowed homelessness to not simply to persist but increase.

Blaming federal policies, rather than the unhoused themselves, goes against the current political mood. But I also began combating homelessness in 1982 and found her analysis indisputable. Extreme cutbacks in government funding for affordable housing and mental health care that began under Nixon and worsened under Reagan have left far too many Americans unable to avoid homelessness.

Four decades of rising homelessness has led many to seek alternative explanations. The most common blames homelessness on drug addiction, rather than the lack of housing low-income people can afford.

I offer the author’s and my own response to such claims below.

Homelessness Exploded Under Reagan

Foscarinis’ first three chapters should be essential reading for anyone interested in why homelessness skyrocketed in 1982. In addition to Nixon’s ending of new public housing in 1974 and Reagan’s massive 1981 budget cuts to affordable housing, she reminds us of other misguided policies.

For example, Reagan cut 500,000 disabled people from federal disability payments (SSI and SSDI). I remember how this impacted people in the Tenderloin. It was devastating. Reagan also cut off disabled person’s access to free mental health treatment. This caused vulnerable people to break down and fall into homelessness

How did Reagan discontinue people who had overcome all the hurdles to qualify for federal disability payments? By requiring recipients to re-apply for eligibility. Republicans are using the same trick now to cut millions of people from Medicaid. When you require people with government-certified disabilities to reapply for benefits but provide no assistance for doing so, people with proven disabilities miss the deadline. And after losing their benefits they become homeless.

Reagan’s housing cuts coincided with rising gentrification in San Francisco, New York City and other cities. Young people growing up in suburbs now preferred city living. Starting in the late 1970’s this caused rents to sharply rise in once affordable urban neighborhoods.

The federal government should have responded to rising rents by increasing affordable housing budgets to keep low-income people housed. The Reagan Administration did the opposite. Instead of expanding Section 8 rent subsidies and moving to ensure that low-income people priced out by gentrification got the assistance they needed, the 1981 HUD budget cuts allowed them to become homeless.

Foscarinis was actively involved in the legal and political struggles that occurred through the 1980’s. She won small but hard-fought victories but until 1987 the federal government largely refused to even acknowledge that homelessness was a problem.
From Emergency to Normalization

In 1987 Foscarinis played a leading role in passage of the McKinney-Vento Act. This long overdue federal funding to address homelessness was a breakthrough. But this first step was not followed by bigger funding commitments. She quotes Henry Gonzalez, then head of the House Housing Committee, saying he feared that “instead of attacking the root causes—the lack of affordable housing, Congress would stop at emergency responses.”

His fears proved correct.

Democrats took the White House in 1992, raising hopes that a serious effort to reduce homelessness would finally follow. That didn’t happen. Instead, Bill Clinton ended the federal welfare entitlement, contributing to rising family homelessness. The 1994 elections saw Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America usher in Republican control of the House, ending any chance for major new homelessness funding.

I led a national campaign with Religious Witness With Homeless People that secured 50,000 additional Section 8 vouchers in the last Clinton budget. But it was too little too late. By then the dot com boom of the late 1990’s priced out even more vulnerable people, increasing the need for much higher levels of federal aid.

The 21st Century Continues Normalization

Foscarinis continues the narrative of the federal government failing to provide funding to end widespread homelessness through the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations. Successes, such as reducing homelessness among veterans, confirmed that increased affordable housing funding makes a positive difference. Many forget that President Obama only controlled Congress for his first two years; his administration could not make up for decades of underfunding in that short period.

By the time of Obama’s presidency, Republican Senators who backed affordable housing through the 1990’s and into the first Bush Administration were gone. The current Republican Party consistently opposes major increases in funding affordable housing and addressing homelessness. After all, the big cities where homelessness is the biggest problem are all run by Democrats.
Drugs v. Housing Affordability

Foscarinis ends her book with multiple chapters calling for “Housing as a Human Right.” She cites successes in Finland, examples of social housing in the United States, and makes a strong case. But Donald Trump’s election means that at least until 2029 there is no chance of the federal government declaring Housing as Human Right. Unfortunately, this goal is far from current political reality.

Foscarinis does not address rising claims in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities that drug addiction, not the lack of affordable housing, drives homelessness.

I disputed this belief in the original 1996 edition of The Activist’s Handbook (revised and updated in 2013). I noted that drug use skyrocketed in the U.S. in the 1960’s and 70’s but widespread homelessness did not result. America did not suddenly wake up in 1982 to hundreds of thousands eager to sleep outside under the stars. Instead, widespread homeless emerged in 1982 when federal housing funding and mental health funds were slashed as Foscarinis describes.

Are there people whose addictions keep them unhoused? Absolutely. There are also people who refuse housing because they prefer using drugs in encampments or on the street.

But that’s not why over 700,000 people (the official number is widely seen as too low) are homeless in America.

Programs offering drug-free housing options all require subsidized housing. Most low-income people who get off drugs cannot afford to live in major cities absent rent subsidies. There are also a lot of unhoused people not on drugs who only need rent subsidies to avoid homelessness.

“And Housing For All” offers an essential reminder of how America normalized widespread homelessness. Foscarinis, founder of the National Homelessness Law Center, has fought to end a crisis that continues to worsen.

This article was produced by Beyond Chron.

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
BudgetAffordable HousingHousingEconomyHomelessness

By Randy Shaw

Randy Shaw is the Director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic and the Editor-in-Chief of the online daily newspaper "Beyond Chron," where this article comes from. He is the author of three books, "Beyond the Fields", "The Activist's Handbook", and "Reclaiming America".

Modern Monetary Theory Maven Stephanie Kelton Debates a Deficit Hawk

 The video:

 

A few excerpted slides from her closing:

 

 

 Ancient debt warnings: