For those fans of Milei's Argentine libertarian experiment.

 

pic.twitter.com/1KpUTFjpoE

— No Context Majority Report (@NocontextMR) October 11, 2025

Real Estate

 

Today #NorthCarolina became the first state to change its Residential 1-2 Family Code to the 1-4 Family Code, a reform that opens up:
- lower cost triplexes & quads
- more viable missing middle housing
- more flexible alignment with zoning

It’s potentially revolutionary for… pic.twitter.com/YQbC1ivrr8

— Aaron Lubeck (@aaron_lubeck) August 16, 2023

Sure. There are many moving parts but here are the most critical ones:

1 most of the rest of America has two codes: the 1-2 family “residential” code, and the “commercial” code which covers everything else;
2 the commercial code is substantially more expensive to operate in;
3… pic.twitter.com/rH4XuBXu9g

— Aaron Lubeck (@aaron_lubeck) August 17, 2023

Stages of the Suburban Experiment Ponzi Scheme

Stage 1: Lots of growth. Aren't we smart!

Stage 2: First maintenance bills come due. Ouch, but hey, still growing!

Stage 3: Growth slows, maintenance costs mount, local taxes go up, debt goes up. Pain, but it's only temporary…

— Charles Marohn (@clmarohn) June 12, 2024

The Revenge of the Gold Bugs?

 

I was studying other times in history when gold prices more than doubled in the reserve currency of the time, as they did in the past year: it's rare and almost always a sign of a profound loss of confidence in the existing monetary and political order, going all the way back to… https://t.co/M3reToeQ1d

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 7, 2025

Serious Fun

 

Price 2999, are you planning to spend this money?
Huajiang Canyon Bridge, with a height of 625 meters.😃 pic.twitter.com/SVap7NK5ld

— Sharing Travel (@TripInChina) October 7, 2025

The Clinton Legacy

From Xitter: 

Basel Musharbash

@musharbash_b

We are where we are in our politics today because of neoliberal idiots like James, and they are insistent on learning absolutely nothing. Clinton gave us the Telecom Act of 1996, which enabled the rise of the media monopolies that Trump is now using as kill switches for our freedom of speech. Clinton passed Section 230, which shielded tech companies from liability for their algorithms and gave us the disastrously polarizing, hate-fueling, nihilism-inducing social media horrorscape we live in today. Clinton deregulated banking and finance, which gave us the Great Financial Crisis, tens of millions of home foreclosures, and Too Big To Fail banks — all while destroying the community banks that used to serve our small businesses and keep our small towns alive. Clinton blessed merger waves in the defense industry, allowing a handful of monopolists to roll up our defense industrial base, degrade its production capacity, and profiteer off of our military even as they can’t even produce enough ammunition or working fighter planes. Clinton gave us NAFTA and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which decimated our manufacturing base en masse and destroyed communities across the South and Midwest. Clinton gave us the Faircloth Amendment, which capped the number of public housing the federal government can fund and is a big part of why we can’t build enough affordable housing in this country. Clinton passed the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1997, which pushed farmers to grow soybeans and corn above all else and beyond all domestic demand, fueling the rise of ultra-processed foods while making farmers dependent on Chinese and other foreign buyers to sell their crops. Clinton gave us mass incarceration, the destruction of welfare programs, the abandonment of racial integration, the outsourcing of government to contractors, and so much more of what ails this country. But perhaps worst of all, Clinton normalized all of this corruption. He normalized a government and a political culture that looked the other way while Big Business and Wall Street ruled and looted the country. But yes, by all means, James — let’s go back to this “winning platform.”

Quote

James Surowiecki

@JamesSurowiecki

·

14h

Raise taxes on the wealthy, push for universal healthcare, be pro-free-trade, cut defense spending, pass tough crime bill, sign law tightening immigration enforcement. With the right candidate, that probably would be a winning platform for a Dem. x.com/patrickruffini…

Who is the biggest crook?

 

Just a reminder: Trump is terrible. For example, see this video about how his pardons, clemencies, and commutations gave crooks $2 billion for reimbursements and court fines they now don't have to pay.

 

Meanwhile, Obama gave Wall St. a pass for the subprime/derivatives meltdown--arguably the largest theft in human history. Nobody went to jail (except one Swiss banker). Nobody lost their job. Heck, nobody lost their bonus.

For an idea of how big this was, according to the Federal Reserve's own audit, it extended $16 - $29 trillion in credit to Wall Street's thieves to cure the subprime disaster.

And a trillion is 1,000 times bigger than a billion.

So who's the biggest crook here? And is this a contest anyone would want to win?

My Democratic friends seem to think Trump voters are just ignorant bigots. I say they have a legitimate reason to be angry--not that anger always leads to the clearest thinking or the most sensible solutions.

 

Imperial Blowback

 "We're Bringing the War Back Home!"

From Wikipedia:

The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2] Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).[3][4][5] According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South.[6] It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.

The problems with Democrats (and Republicans)

One of my Democratic friends was ready to accept the idea that the Obama presidency had no scandals--in contrast to the scandal-ridden Trump administration. I've already disclosed that Obama's presidency was rife with scandal (here and here), but disclosing such malfeasance apparently makes no impression. The response: "You're entitled to your opinion!"

So the belief that Obama was a "good guy" persists, without much modification. Reminding that Democratic friend that Obama bombed Libya--a war crime--provokes comments like "Well, I trust he did the right thing." [unsaid "You cain't bomb or unbomb them Ay-rabs, they just won't behave!"]

So to such people, Trump voters don't have a legitimate complaint that Obama didn't do a good job. They're simply ignorant bigots! [Oh the irony!]

And if you could come up with a more effective way to divide and confuse the voting public, I don't know how you would do it. Insisting on Obama's innocence ensures the persistence of Boss Tweed's maxim "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." We bounce between corporate donor-indentured Democrats and corporate donor-indentured Republicans, but short of a catastrophe, nothing much will change.

So both major parties are completely committed to servicing their donors rather than doing public service. One example: while large majorities of the American public and the Democratic party do not support Israel's genocidal attacks on Gaza (and the West Bank), both of California's Democratic Senators vote for the US to continue its support for this very unpopular war.* 

The Democrats need to repent, yet there's no sign that's happening. The central party apparatus just killed a resolution to end support for Israel's genocide.

Ralph Nader's latest email blast laments that no one is standing up to Trump's attacks on American values, laws and traditions, but given the alternatives currently available, what is available besides sorrow? (And to handle that sorrow, resignation, and/or despair, there are tools.)

Honestly, I still want to believe some Trump voters elected a wrecking ball simply to get the attention of the smug patricians backing the likes of Obama, who I believe--and I'm entitled to my opinion--is the single most influential person in electing Trump.

Meanwhile, the conditions for the kind of public anger were set up by Obama, whose Simpson-Bowles commision was designed to implement an agenda of austerity. And austerity, cutting public services, leads almost inevitably to anger. Unfortunately, anger doesn't always make for sensible thinking.

 ...which produced Trump.

On the other hand, if you believe Obama was just an innocent victim of a Republican Congress, despite the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of his presidency, then Trump voters are just ignorant bigots, at least to Democrats. But if Trump voters have a legitimate grievance, then the population isn't divided. They may disagree, but it's not Morlocks and Eloi, Republican thugs and Democratic crooks...both major parties have betrayed us.

As Dave Dayen says: "Trump pulls back when criticized...populism without popularity is doomed. ....What I didn’t account for was the complete uselessness of the opposition party that could turn those trends into successful pushback that retains some semblance of a democratic system—but hasn’t…." 

_______________ 

*My letter to Senator Schiff:

Senator Schiff,

You wrote me a long email protesting that you really, really, really want peace. Sorry, you can't say that and continue to vote to provide the weapons for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians. 

I don't care how long your letter is. I don't care about whether you believe Hamas started things in Gaza. I don't care if you're ignorant of the Netanyahu government's support for Hamas in aid of killing the two-state solution. 

I really, really, really don't care.

All your excuses, explanations, and rationalizations are the typical corporate Democrat's expressions of support for the donor class rather than the people you're meant to represent. You will not get my money or my vote by continuing this pathetic charade. 

--Your constituent 

Housing affordability... Is it permanently out of reach?

 

An affordability nightmare:

It would take a -38% drop in home prices OR a +60% JUMP in household income JUST for affordability to go back to 2019 levels.

You must now make ~$113,000/year to afford the MEDIAN home in the US.

Will housing ever be affordable again?

(a thread) pic.twitter.com/4bM4ROuNWm

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) September 25, 2025

And 2019 was no banner year for affordability (lots of homeless even then)

The Argentine "Miracle"

 

In just 2 months, Britain's preeminent historian has gone from cheerleading the "Milei Miracle" to cheering the US taxpayer bailout of Milei's collapsehttps://t.co/l3DFbAcAOk pic.twitter.com/42nlkROOJn

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) September 22, 2025

Irony is lost on the neoliberals:

The US Treasury — one of the architects of the Washington Consensus — is offering to bail out a neoliberal capitalist experiment in order to prove that it works.

It doesn't get more ironic than this. pic.twitter.com/wfqc9F19h1

— Jostein Hauge (@haugejostein) September 23, 2025

The Political Calculation

"If it weren't for lies, there wouldn't be any politics" - Will Rogers

 

Some recent social media conversations between anti-monopolist Matt Stoller and anti-punishment-bureaucracy Alec Karakatsanis demonstrate they have a feud of some kind, yet they're both fans of freedom from arbitrary coercion. Stoller writes to oppose the coercion of monopolies, Karakastanis opposes the coercion of the "punishment bureaucracy," as he calls it. They look like they should be allies, but they're quibbling about some political disagreement. Responding to an email query, Stoller said "It happens."

Unfortunately, quibbling--especially among the left-of-center--is common. Politicians are experts at avoiding the buzz saw of fights they deem lost or unnecessary, so they're frequently called "spineless." Stoller's comment: "People get mad at Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries for not fighting, but the passivity is pervasive in every major liberal institution, including many unions."
 

What's more, small "d" democracy absolutely requires compromise, even compromise between those who disagree. It's naive to expect ideological purity from any politician in a democracy.

This kind of rough-and-ready disagreement / compromise is baked into the democracy cake. It's not going to change no matter who is in power, unless of course we have the dictatorship--and a dictatorship of the oligarchs appears to be the way public policy is happening now.

 

Ralph Nader has been so frustrated by this he's sent out an appeal to readers asking what else he can do since federal public policy makers won't even return his phone calls, much less do something constructive.

 

So, to this writer, anyway, it looks like some kind of dislocation or catastrophe that's impossible to deny--a war, a depression, an environmental breakdown--is what we're left with to break this frustrating deadlock. The big question is whether our so-called "democracy" can handle it. After all, the Princeton study demonstrating that the US has an oligarchy, not a representative democracy, is more than two decades old now. 

 

LBJ is a perfect example of how confusing political calculations can be. He literally stole his Senate seat and pioneered the way the Senate majority leader (like Mitch McConnell) could railroad or delay legislation. He had multiple mistresses, was a crook in business. and a bigot with his fellow southerners. He was everything you could imagine is wrong with Donald Trump. The big difference: he grew up poor.

 

Yet LBJ was instrumental in passing Medicare, Civil Rights legislation, and the "war on poverty." These are considerable accomplishments. His nemesis: the Vietnam War, bungled so badly he couldn't get out (and Nixon / Kissinger apparently sabotaged the peace process). 

 

What to do? 

 

As Matt Stoller writes: "The thing about politics is that in order to have an impact, you have to know what’s going on." In addition to this blog, I recommend Naked Capitalism.

Posted for no reason

 

My first academic article was on the dictatorship of Uzbekistan inventing a group called "Akromiya" that did not really exist but which they used to arrest anyone with whom they disagreed under the pretext of "terrorism". Just bringing this up for no reason whatsoever!

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) September 18, 2025

Today's all-too-true image

 

Answer to gold bugs

 I've just read a LinkedIn post saying the dollar is on the precipice of total devaluation, it's a Ponzi scheme, etc. The only solution is commodity-backed currency--gold, and in the modern world, bitcoin, whose commodity is the energy needed to calculate the complex number that is the "coin."

The peril for the economy and the dollar is real, but gold won't solve it. Here's my answer to that post:

I've hesitated to respond, but such overwhelming ignorance of money and its origins really is worse than any potential reckoning for fiat currency (which clearly will be blamed, even if it's not the culprit).

First: The assertion is that only commodity-backed money has any value. (Energy is Bitcoin's commodity). David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years says we've had gold-backed money for only 200 years in the last 5,000, or since money has been around. So the other 4,800 years of economies were all a bust? Please, tell me another.

Why aren't FDR and Lincoln taking the US off the gold standard to fight the wars mentioned? And what about "Cast Away"? Would the guy stranded on a desert island still find dollars, or gold, or bitcoin valuable? The society providing the resources for which currency is exchanged gives money its value; the rest is baloney.

Second: There has never been economic money without some authority (state, temple, king, etc.) to require it in payment for taxes. The Confederate States of America can't collect taxes, so its money is valueless.

Third: Because they are limited, commodity-backed currencies covertly favor deflation. Remember the Great Depression? Deflation! Political economist Mark Blythe says we can have either gold-backed money that leads to an oligarchy or democracy, not both.

What's shameful is how much credence this inexcusable deception receives.

Trump Evaluated by Heather Cox Richardson

Here. Excerpt:

"A Wall Street Journal–NORC poll released yesterday found that only 25% of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living. Nearly 70% said it was no longer possible to work hard and get ahead. A majority of those polled said the generation before them had an easier time starting a business, buying a home, or staying at home to parent a child.

"A different piece in the Wall Street Journal explained that there were 927 American billionaires in 2020 and 1,135 in 2024. Together, they are worth about $5.7 trillion. The 100 richest of the set control more than half of the total at about $3.86 trillion. As the number of billionaires grew, “supply side” economic policies in the U.S., designed to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy among investors rather than on the “demand side” made up of consumers, hollowed out the middle class. From 1975 to 2018, at least $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

"Yet another piece in the Wall Street Journal, this one by Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider, noted that consumer confidence is sliding. While wealthier Americans seem to be doing fine, they write, rising distress about the economy is obvious among the middle class: those making about $53,000 to $161,000 a year. Chief economist at Morning Consult John Leer told the reporters: 'There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world. Then things fell off a cliff.'"

Just how credible is trickle-down economics?

 

A tool to control impulses (very good!)

 

America at War

America is terrific at attacking, and war-making. It's terrible at making peace. Trump is even thinking of changing the "Dept. of Defense" to the more accurate "Dept. of War." It's part of how us USians got control of the continent. Actually, Old World diseases are more responsible than military attacks for the defeat of the North and South American natives--a genocide that wiped out more than 90% of the New World's populations.

The imperialist impulse is why, between 1798 and 1994, the US is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders. 

Taking credit for that "victory" is what part of what drove US imperialism up until the Vietnam war, that is. 

And speaking of Vietnam: (from Naked Capitalism) "A vignette provides confirmation of Vietnam’s fierce retention of its identity during the period of Chinese rule. In the documentary The Fog of War, a not-exactly-satisfactory effort at atonement by former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, he recounts how, many years after the Vietnam War, he was able to arrange a dinner with the leaders of North Vietnam during the conflict.

"Needless to say, it was a pretty tense affair. Finally, one of the North Vietnamese officials asked: 'Why did you go to war with our country?'

"McNamara invoked the domino theory, that if North Vietnam won, China and Chinese communism would advance across Southeast Asia.

"McNamara reported that his counterparts nearly leaped across the table: 'How could you go to war understanding so little about our country? We spent 1000 years expelling the Chinese.'"

Want to know the history of the Federal Reserve?

 You can read Greider's Secrets of the Temple, or (much simpler) read this from Matt Stoller.

Stoller unveils the political motivations behind our central bank's shenanigans... It's really fascinating to know, for one example, that Alan Greenspan was a consultant for Silverado Savings & Loan in addition to being a libertarian acolyte of Ayn Rand. 

Excerpt:

But the 2008 financial crisis blew up the Greenspan era, challenging the officials in charge of the Fed in a number of different ways. It was a crisis the Fed should have seen and prevented. The Fed was, after all, the institution that had regulatory authority over mortgages, which it never used. But its leaders were blinded by their obsession with the macro; Ben Bernanke gave a speech titled “The Great Moderation” as the crisis was brewing, in 2004. The blindness was a result of their obsession with macro-economic forces, and ignoring the actual banks and institutions in the real economy. Banks, even big ones, were still micro, left to the losers in the bank supervision department.



And yet, somehow, during the crisis, these banks had affected the real economy. In response, the Fed did what it had done since the Volcker era; it bailed out Wall Street. In this case, it did so by expanding its balance sheet by several trillion dollars, buying bad assets from banks and supplying cash in return. By 2022, its balance sheet had reached $9 trillion. The Fed now regularly loses huge amounts of money due to losses on its portfolio, and those losses are essentially the accounting for a subsidy to Wall Street.

The crisis generated a legitimacy problem for the Fed, since its wizards and oracles had failed, and yet the public had no way to vote them out. But rather than engage in real reform and introspection, like most establishment institutions, the professional managerial economists doubled down. Federal Reserve Independence, rather than a temporary historical phenomenon that should be eliminated as a failed experiment, became sacred, to the point that Joe Biden’s White House had a policy that no administration official could even comment on interest rates.

...

Fed Chair Paul Volcker used to carry around a card of union wage rates, as a reminder that his goal in achieving low inflation was to break union power. The Federal Reserve is responsible in part or fully for the legalization of derivatives, the explosion of subprime lending during

the 2000s, the great financial crisis, a trillion dollar transfer of wealth to big banks as interest rates increased, the institutionalization of crypto-currencies, the merger explosion of the early 2020s, and the failed regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, among other problems. It’s also a highly political institution, pushing free trade and defending large banks; in the 1990s, Fed officials secretly bailed out Mexico so as to protect Citibank and pass NAFTA.

...

here’s more. After the crisis Congress required the Fed to place compensation limits on bank executives. Jay Powell simply refused. The Fed fostered a giant corporate merger wave in 2021, intentionally sabotaged its own payments network, FedNow, because it might be cheaper and better than the system run by large banks, and didn’t block a single merger application of the over 3500 it received from 2006-2021. This choice, as I noted years ago, “includes Silicon Valley Bank in 2021 buying Boston Private Bank and Trust, which the Fed board unanimously justified by noting that SVB would not ‘pose significant risk to the financial system in the event of financial distress.’” Speaking of which, the Federal Reserve’s chief legal officer, Mark Van Der Weide, helped author the legislation that removed regulations on Silicon Valley Bank, and the Fed, and Jay Powell, lobbied for it.

There’s just an endless amount of bad behavior from the technocrats, so the opponents of Trump, asserting that we must protect the “independence of the Fed,” are really missing the point. And I fear that their goal, after Trump leaves office, will be to “restore the independence of the Fed.”

 

 

The Real Homeless Situation: The Housing Hunger Games. (long, but worth it)

From The Intercept (go to the link to hear the interview or read more than the excerpts below)

The Housing Hunger Games

Author Brian Goldstone talked to The Intercept about homelessness. A few excerpts:

"Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

"The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

"Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

The housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”....
"[Homeless woman] Celeste’s story begins in a really dramatic way. One day, she’s driving home from work with her children. She’s just picked them up from school. She’s left her warehouse job, and her neighbor calls to say that her rental home is on fire.

"And by the time Celeste makes it back to her rental, it has burned down. The street is closed off, and the family loses everything. The only possessions they have left are the few things that were in the kids’ backpacks and a few loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had thrown in her Dodge Durango that morning, intending to go to the laundromat after work. They’ve lost everything else.

"And it’s later determined that an abusive ex who Celeste had recently taken a restraining order out on was responsible for the fire. And even though this fire was kind of the first domino that fell on Celeste and her children becoming homeless, I think it’s really important to note that it wasn’t the fire, it wasn’t even the domestic violence that led them to become homeless.

"What led them to become homeless ultimately was the fact that months after the fire, Celeste was applying for apartments and she was denied. She was told that there was an eviction that had been filed against her, and she said, that’s not true, I don’t have an eviction on my record.
"Come to find out that after this fire took place, Celeste called her landlord, which was not just like a mom-and-pop landlord, it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group. They owned tens of thousands of rentals across the south. And when Celeste called to request that she be put in another home in their portfolio, they told her that in order to “terminate her lease” on this house that had just burned down, she would have to pay not only the current month’s rent — the fire had happened at the beginning of the month, so she hadn’t yet paid her rent — but an additional month’s rent as well. And she would lose her security deposit. And Celeste had hung up in disgust. But yeah, like months later, found out that after she hung up, they filed an eviction against her for nonpayment.

"In Georgia, a tenant doesn’t even have to be notified of an eviction in person. The sheriff was able to carry out what’s called tack and mail dispossessory. And when she actually drove to the house that had been burned down — it still hadn’t been repaired — in the mailbox, she found an eviction notice on which the sheriff had written “served to fire-destroyed property.”

"So at this point in her story, Celeste realized that her chances of getting into an apartment were basically destroyed. And her credit score — this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as basic as a place to live — she realized her credit score would basically lock her out of the formal housing market.

"So at that point, when Celeste realized that she was locked out of the formal housing market, she was desperate to get out of her car. And she did what scores of other homeless and precariously housed families and individuals in America are doing: She went to an extended stay hotel.

...."Like many people, Celeste, up to this point, she thought that these extended stay hotels that she was passing by every day as a resident of Atlanta were hotels....These hotels … are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. … They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live.”

...."The weekly rent at this place was almost double what she had been paying for the rental home that had just burned down."

...."And even the Department of Education actually categorizes families and children living in these hotels as homeless, along with families and individuals or children who are living in doubled-up arrangements with others in apartments. They consider that homeless because school social workers and teachers saw over the years that this was just as volatile for children, just as precarious as being in a homeless shelter or being on the street.

"So the Department of Education considers them homeless, but HUD does not. And the caseworker tells Celeste, “I’m so sorry. If you want to be considered homeless and therefore qualify for assistance, you have to go with your kids to a shelter.” But then the kicker comes in where Celeste says, fine, we’ll go to a shelter, and the woman says, wait, you mentioned your son just turned 15. None of the shelters in Atlanta allow boys over the age of 13. So he would have to go by himself to a men’s shelter. And of course, Celeste is not willing to do that.

"The point in saying all of this is not that this was some bizarre aberration; this was just a tragic falling through the cracks. This is an engineered neglect. It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families just like Celeste, who are homeless. But they have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness. They literally don’t count. And one of the shocking things that I discovered in the course of working on this book and reporting it was that there’s this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight that we’re not seeing. And what that tells us is that as bad as the official numbers on homelessness are, the reality is exponentially worse.
 

...."All of the people in this book, they are working and working and working some more. But their wages — which are effectively poverty wages — are not enough just to afford this basic human necessity. 

...."Celeste, when she’s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she’s having to decide, do I go to my warehouse job or do I go to my chemo appointment? Because if I go to my chemo appointment, I don’t get paid because I don’t have sick leave. And if I don’t get paid, me and my children go from living in this awful extended-stay hotel room to being on the street or being back in our car.

...."It’s helpful to remember that mass homelessness, as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon in America. It erupted in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. And from the beginning, there was a concerted effort on the part of that administration, and the part of those in power at that time, to control the narrative about homelessness — to shape public perception.

"So even though at that time the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of 6, these ideas that homelessness is caused by mental illness, by alcoholism, by addiction, or as Reagan put it, by a “lifestyle choice” — a refusal to work. Those really became the dominant narratives in this country about homelessness.

"By the end of the 1980s, the New York Times and CBS News conducted a poll asking New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness. And the number one answer was psychological problems. The number two answer was a refusal to work. Not a single person mentioned housing.

"Never mind the fact that the Reagan administration, as many listeners will be aware, ushered in this neoliberal experiment in slashing, decimating the social safety net, gutting assistance for housing, especially low-income housing. Researchers, scholars who wanted to study the effects of a legacy of racist housing policy or the gutting of the safety net on this burgeoning homelessness crisis, they were systematically not funded. They were not given grants. But scholars and researchers who wanted to look at alcoholism or addiction or mental illness in relation to homelessness, they were the ones who were funded. To the extent that the journal Nature actually had an article called “Reagan versus the social sciences” because of just how concerted that tactic was to make a certain kind of research and therefore a certain kind of knowledge possible. That attempt to control the narrative was very much successful. And I think we’re living under the legacy of that today.

...."What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford. That is the variable. That is why we see huge rates of homelessness in places that are very, very expensive or where affordable housing does not exist, and we don’t see it in places that might have high rates of drug use, like certain areas of Appalachia, but housing is still relatively available. That is the variable, is not having access to housing that people can afford.

...."Part of what I’m trying to argue in the book is that the current homelessness disaster that we are witnessing is less a crisis of poverty than of prosperity — a particular kind of prosperity. It’s the product, not of a failing economy, but a booming economy, a thriving economy. It’s just not thriving for the people I’m writing about. 

...."The signs of growth and corporate profits are everywhere, and yet the people I’m writing about in this book, they’re not just being pushed out of the neighborhoods they grew up in — formerly Black working-class neighborhoods — they are increasingly being pushed out of housing altogether. And that is a trend we see across the nation.

...."One of the astonishing realities that I encountered in reporting this book over many years was the fact that private equity firms, Wall Street firms, they’re not just buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing stock. That is something that I think has become familiar for many of us. But that in itself is shocking and the tactics that are employed once they take over this housing is really startling.

...."One of the families in the book — Maurice and Natalia and their children — they end up in one of these apartment complexes owned by a private equity firm called Covenant Capital based in Nashville. And they are the victims of this automated eviction system where if you’re just a couple of days late on your rent, there’s no human to call and talk to. They tried to call. They only got [an] answering machine. Instead, an eviction is automatically filed against the tenant.

...."What was truly astonishing was that they’re also buying up the places where families and individuals are forced into once they are pushed into homelessness.

...."It’s just yet another example of how every single turn in these family stories, there are entire new business models designed to profit off their suffering and, I would argue, to ensure that their precarity continues.
...."When I finished the book, when I finished the reporting, I really thought, “It can’t get any worse.” Surely we as a nation will turn a corner soon and begin to meaningfully address this catastrophe of housing insecurity and homelessness.

"What we’re seeing under this administration is gasoline being poured on this crisis and not just where housing assistance and the way that homelessness is treated is concerned, but with these massive cuts to the safety net more generally with Medicaid cuts, with cuts to food stamps. The families who I wrote about in this book, they and the millions of people like them, their lives will become worse as a result of these budget cuts and the sort of continuation of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an organized abandonment.

...."We’re not talking about the working homeless on the one hand, and these people who are on the street on the other.

"This is better conceived, I would argue, as an entire spectrum of insecurity. Homelessness in America is a spectrum of insecurity. One day you could be in a hotel with your kids. The next night you might be in the car with them. A month from now you could be in a tent on the street. That is how quickly families and individuals can cycle through these conditions.

...."And so I really want to emphasize that this is not a distinct population. Those who we see on the street in a tent or in these encampments, they are just the tip of the iceberg of homelessness in America. And yes, the people I’m writing about in this book are those who comprise the much, much bigger portion of the iceberg that is under the water surface that is not just invisible, but that has been actively rendered invisible.

"If we just criminalize homelessness and we don’t address homelessness at its true root source — which is an unavailability and a lack of access, again, to housing that people can afford — then that entire world that’s under the surface is going to continue to spill out into the open. 

...."There are so many low-hanging-fruit policy solutions that can ease people suffering immediately, that can both keep them in the homes they already have and that can get them into new homes that they don’t yet have much easier, much quicker.

...."We’ve allowed for [housing] to be hoarded up...But we don’t call that by its proper name, which is price-gouging — price-gouging amid a national emergency. We just call that supply and demand economics.

"And I think until we encounter housing in this country with fresh eyes, until we are shocked out of the complacency of continuing to treat housing this way, this crisis will just continue to spiral. The true scale and severity of homelessness is, to put a number on it, actually six times greater than the official figures. So we’re talking about 4 million people right now in this country who have been deprived of housing.

...."It’s to say, let’s no longer kid ourselves that these nibble-around-the-edges solutions — a few tiny homes over here, 20 percent units at 70 percent, 80 percent AMI [Area Median Income] over there — that this is meaningfully addressing this crisis at scale. Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in most desperate need of a place to live — I think that that is misguided. I think we do need all [the] solutions on the table. We don’t have the luxury right now of having this kind of Manichaean vision of, it’s either the market or government intervention.

"I think we need it all, but I do think that we need to be clear-eyed about the true scale and severity so that we can say, and this is what I believe: Public housing redone, public housing done right — which many refer to as social housing — which would be not, again, hundreds of thousands but millions of safe, dignified, affordable housing units owned by the public, owned by the government, built on government-owned land. That is really the only way we are going to get out of this catastrophe.

...."[B]efore we can fix the crisis, we have to feel the crisis.

Are Poor People Disgusting?

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

"In its magnificent equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street and stealing bread." - Anatole France  

Poor people are disgusting, they may even smell bad. And never mind the mental illness and addiction! You can barely stand to be in the same room with them and be comfortable! That's what's become of poverty in the US. Incidentally, poverty, like pulling an all-nighter, reduces IQ--so they're dumb too!

The disgusting poverty is supposedly the result of poor individual choices by the poor themselves. But the truth is our current beggar-on-every-corner economy is the result of a series of public policy decisions that drove masses of people out of their homes, out of care, and into the street. In the '70s Nixon stopped the federal government building affordable housing, and in the 80's the Reagan administration cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75% as he cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half (and, with his successor, raised payroll taxes eightfold). The local homeless charity, "Loaves and Fishes" began in the '80s. The US hasn't had such a homeless population as it currently has since the Great Depression.

As governor, Reagan also closed California's asylums, sending the inmates out to the street. This movement to evict the mentally ill poor is bipartisan too. JFK had a policy to close the big federal asylums and replace them with smaller transitional housing that would prevent the abuse isolated asylums experienced, and integrate the mentally ill back into the community. Congress approved closing the asylums but neglected to fund the transitional housing. Then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it the most shameful episode in all his years as a public servant.

The majority of the homeless are just too poor to afford rent, not mentally ill or addicted, but homelessness poverty also induces its own form of PTSD, so their mental condition is not always optimum. Homelessness is often attributed to too few houses, and blamed on zoning restrictions, but in the USA, there are more vacant homes than homeless, five times as many in San Francisco. The problem isn't too much regulation, it's the heartless distribution of the fruits of our civilization.

Writer Mark Kreidler describes how even the current meager support the poor receive now is diminishing. During the pandemic, "federal policies directed stimulus payments to households, enhanced and extended unemployment insurance, expanded both the Child Tax Credit and food and housing assistance programs, and made health care more accessible. As a result, the U.S. experienced a historic reduction in poverty rates, both overall and for children, despite a crisis that shuttered businesses and put millions out of work."

So...it's possible for public policy to address homelessness, just as it addressed air pollution in Southern California. But as long as the public views poverty as exclusively the result of some individual's bad judgment, it's unlikely public policy will change, no matter how important such policy is. 

Meanwhile, a technician who worked on affordable housing told me he was disgusted with the way the poor treated their housing. "They trashed it," was his comment after he returned to maintain it. 

But poor people are not that concerned with material things--its why they're poor--and the public funding for maintenance in their housing is notoriously skimpy. One could blame the poor for not taking care of their material surroundings, but failure to provide adequate funding for anticipated maintenance is a kind of covert sabotage. It also confirms that "disgusting" observation to do that.

The public's disgust also shows up when mixed-income neighborhoods are proposed. Four- or eight-plexes among the mansions! Are you kidding! The income monoculture of suburban sprawl is the rule, now, because respectable people can't live adjacent to the poor. The idea of poverty as a virtue, practiced by countless generations of monks, has been abandoned.

But poor people have something to contribute. They are typically generous--one reason they're poor. In fact, my poor in-laws would literally give you the shirt off their back, even if it was their last shirt. We definitely need such generosity rather than the scrooge-ified public policy we now have, and we certainly need to perceive the people who are traumatized as human beings. It's what the Good Samaritan did, and it's the least we can do. Pursuing profit, or advantage, at any cost has led us to the current dog-eat-dog economy, and the suffering of the poor.

 

Virtue Signalling is what Democrats are good at

That's "signaling," not "providing concrete benefits to society at large."

 Hoisted from Naked Capitalism's comments section:

Yesterday, I learned that we opened the DNC Summer meeting in Minnesota with a land acknowledgement. That American settlers had stolen the land of the native tribes in Minnesota, the Dakota, who had lived in happy harmony with nature for thousands of years. This was literally the very first thing done at that meeting – almost like an opening prayer or Pledge of Allegiance was done in my youth.

Since I no longer take anything done or said by this party at face value – the lying, dissembling, exaggerating, distorting, virtue-signalling, etc has become too much and affected the lives of so many around me – I did a little research.

The woman chosen to do this land acknowledgement was named Lindy Sowmick. Although she mentioned the Dakota tribe in passing – I did a bit of research and noted that she was from the Chippewa-Saginaw tribe which is basically in Michigan. The way this Chippewa tribe is referred to in some quarters today is the Ojibwe. I learned a lot about the Ojibwe from the website of the actual Minnesota Historical Society –

https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/native-americans/ojibwe-people

The Ojibwe were apparently one of the most populous tribes in North America all over the Northeastern Seaboard hundreds and thousands of years before there were any European settlers. Again, this woman, Mrs Sowmick, was a member of a branch of this tribe. I will reprint below the first paragraph of the website from the Minnesota Historical Society –

The ancestors of the Ojibwe lived throughout the northeastern part of North America and along the Atlantic Coast. Due to a combination of prophecies and tribal warfare, around 1,500 years ago the Ojibwe people left their homes along the ocean and began a slow migration westward that lasted for many centuries.

Upon further research on multiple other websites, one learns that the Ojibwe were actually one of the most violent of tribes in North America. They were propelled by some kind of apocalyptic religious animus – described in the website above as “prophecies” – and it was the Ojibwe themselves that drove the Dakota out of their ancestral home and into the Northern Great Plains – centuries and centuries before there ever was a European settler to be seen. This woman, highlighted by the DNC, is actually a member of the actual tribe that displaced the Dakota from Minnesota.

The sad fact for the Democratic Party who continue to make this land acknowledgement an issue is that land displacement, war and forced moving is a part of human history in every corner of this planet. It is in our DNA. Maybe, just maybe, one day we will evolve and not engage in this behavior. But having judgmental and virtue signalling about it centuries after it happened – and then having a member of the perpetrating tribe be the one doing the scolding is the very definition of lunacy.

When the Democrats start paying to attention to real issues affecting real people in this country, this Dem will start paying attention again. Until then – it is a better show than the clowns in the circus. And that is tragic. We really need some kind of counterweight – but that is certainly not to be had with this group.