Category Archives: Attacks on the Working Class

In Defense of Smokers

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smoking

As a doctor, I’m well aware of the negative health effects of smoking. Studies show a life time of smoking subtracts an average of ten years from your life expectancy. I’m also aware of the considerable health costs of treating smoking-related illnesses, such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease and stroke. Other studies suggest that non-smokers actually generate higher health care costs because they live ten years longer. This research receives limited publicity. The Center for Disease Control prudently chooses not to promote the cost savings associated with premature death.

Owing to a chronic sinus condition, I’m also painfully aware of the effects of second hand smoke. Prior to the public ban on smoking, I had no choice but to avoid public areas (restaurants, bars, theaters and even airplanes) where smoking was likely to occur.

The Stigmatization of Smokers

However, as an organizer and civil libertarian, I’m also extremely wary the increasing stigmatization of smokers – especially when I read that employers are using “smoker status” as a justification for not hiring people. In this regard, I think the right wing may be justified in labeling liberals who lobby for smoking bans as “green fascists.” In an era were corporate and government interests are looking for every possible opportunity to pit working Americans against one another, it’s counterproductive to be hypercritical of lifestyle choices.

Most progressives know better than to stigmatize the unemployed and homeless. Yet many of us don’t give a second thought about villainizing smokers, alcoholics, fat people – and, might I add, gun owners. All four are popular targets right now. I blame this on liberals’ willingness to embrace what is essentially conservative ideology – the need to take “personal responsibility” for our lives.

The Cult of Personal Responsibility

Taking “personal responsibility” simply ain’t going to cut it right now. Not for millions of unemployed Americans, nor the million plus homeless, nor for thousands of families facing imminent foreclosure and/or eviction. And singling out designated groups for bad lifestyle choices distracts us from the real problem in the US – a concerted attack by Wall Street and our corporate-controlled President and Congress on working people.

Decades of epidemiological research (see prior blog on Dr Stephen Bezruchka) show that lifestyle choices account for only 10% of the causation of illness. If we’re really serious about improving Americans’ abysmal health status (near the bottom for industrial countries), it’s time to address the real cause of poor health. Study after study shows a direct link between their extreme income disparity and Americans’ high rate of both acute and chronic illness.

It’s time to focus on the real problem – the corporate deregulation and tax cuts responsible for extreme income equality in the US. Instead of scapegoating smokers and fat people.

photo credit: cszar via photopin cc

Useless Eaters: Stigmatizing Sick People

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concentration camp

In western countries, I see a frightening tendency to make sick people personally responsible for being ill. We are all bombarded with constant media messaging that anyone can stay healthy if they eat the right foods, exercise, and manage their stress levels. Meanwhile media pundits who demonize people on disability benefits for being lazy and unwilling to work.

I find all this vaguely reminiscent of Hitler’s “useless eater” policies of the 1930s. Hitler’s definition of a “useless eater” was a German who consumed resources without participating in production. Included in this category were tens of thousands of individuals with chronic physical or mental illness and physical and intellectual handicaps – who would be the first inmates in Nazi concentration camps.

Internalizing this pressure to be and appear well, people blame themselves if they become ill. This attitude is strongly reinforced by the constant TV ads that bombard us for cough and cold remedies that enable people to attend work with colds and even quite serious illnesses, such as bronchitis and the “flu.”

The pressure on kids to attend school or daycare when they’re sick – because their parents can’t afford to stay home with them – is a public health disaster. Sick kids in the classroom expose a lot of other kids, who go on to infect their families. Many children suffer one respiratory after another, a perfect set up for asthma (which is reaching epidemic proportions) and permanent lung disease.

Human Beings Get Sick

Surely it’s healthier and more humane and community-minded to accept that sickness is fundamental to the human condition. Epidemiological studies show that only 10% of illness is accounted for by lifestyle factors (including smoking). Other studies show that people who take time off recover faster and cope better with other life stresses.

38% of US Workers Have No Paid Sick Leave

Advice that sick people stay home and look after themselves is easy in most civilized countries (like New Zealand) owing to national laws requiring that employers provide workers paid sick and parental leave. The US isn’t one of them. Thirty-eight percent  of US workers have no paid sick leave.

There are no federal laws requiring American employers to provide paid sick leave. Only Connecticut, and a few cities (New York, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle, Newark, Tacoma, and Jersey City) have them. Even more disgusting ten states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin — have enacted preemption bills that blocking cities and towns from passing paid sick leave legislation.

At present only California and Vermont have laws requiring employers to provide paid parental leave. So I guess working parents with sick kids are just out of luck.

The Campaign for Paid Sick Days

Just to be clear here. None of these cities and states have mandated paid sick leave because they were feeling kind and charitable. These laws were enacted because local activists fought for them. You won’t here about the Paid Sick Days for All Coalition on the six o’clock news. The corporate media wants you to believe the war is over and the good guys lost (to quote Leonard Cohen).

The war against corporate fascism ain’t over by a long shot. People can get get involved with the Paid Sick Days for All through their website: http://paidsickdaysforall.org/

photo credit: Rob Sheridan via photopin cc

Income Inequality: The Real Cause of Poor Health

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epigenetics

Contrary to popular belief, the primary determinant of your lifelong health status and life expectancy has nothing to do with your weight, fitness level and whether you smoke. According UW epidemiologist Dr Stephen Bezruchka, the most important determinant of your adult health status is your mother’s income level when you were born. Lifestyle factors (including smoking) only account for 10% of illness.

More than fifty years of epidemiological research bear this out. Yet it’s only in the last decade scientists have learned why this is – thanks to the new science of epigenetics. The term refers to changes in gene expression caused by external influences.

The stress of poverty causes an increase in maternal stress hormones, which causes variations in the way genetic code is transcripted into proteins and enzymes. These, in turn, can predispose the fetus to insulin resistance, obesity and immune problems, as well as emotional instability and mental illnesses.

The Link Between Income Inequality and Poor Health

The most important research finding, according to Bezruchka, is a more pronounced effect in societies plagued by income inequality. Study after study bears this out. In other words, a poor person’s health will be worse in a society with a wide gap between its rich and poor residents.

The US, which has the most extreme inequality, is near the bottom of the charts for indicators that measure a nation’s overall health. In life expectancy (according to the CIA), the US ranks 50th, just behind Guam. In infant mortality, it ranks 174th, between Croatia and the Faroe Islands.

A Mindset Driven By Social Service Cuts

In Sick and Sicker, Dr Susan Rosenthal notes a 30 year trend for policy makers – both conservative and liberal – to make sick people “take responsibility” for their illnesses. Epidemiological studies – as long as scientists have been doing them – have always shown a correlation between poverty and poor health. Even in Dicken’s time, it was taken for granted that the undernourished poor people living in cold, damp, overcrowded tenements were far more prone to illness than their middle class counterparts.

Rosenthal believes this shift to a “blame the victim” mentality has been deliberate – to justify aggressive social service cutbacks (by both Republicans and neoliberal Democrats like Clinton and Obama) that came into fashion with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

The Role of Oppression and Exploitation in Illness

Although the link between poverty and inequality is unequivocal, epidemiologists have yet to explain why the effect is poor pronounced with extreme income inequality. Bezruchka puts it down to people in egalitarian societies looking after one another. I like Rosenthal’s explanation better. She relates it to high levels of oppression and exploitation in societies with extreme income disparity.

She points out that minimum wage workers aren’t just poor. They also work in exploitive, arbitrary and often punitive job settings which they feel powerless to change. Enduring this massive stress on a daily basis takes an enormous toll on the human body and psyche.

photo credit: AJC1 via photopin cc

Has the Left Abandoned the Working Class?

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working class

Liberals and progressives frequently bemoan the absence of blue collar workers in their meetings and protests. It’s pretty hard to organize a movement large enough to take the streets with only 20% of the population. Estimating the size of the US working class is difficult. According to the Department of Labor, roughly 60% of Americans work for an hourly wage. Approximately 2/3  of them work for less than a minimum wage worker earned in 1968. Add roughly 20% to those figures, the true proportion of Americans who are either temporarily or permanently unemployed.

Traditionally the unemployed and working poor opt out of politics, though roughly half will vote every four years during presidential election years. Those who do vote mainly choose right wing fundamentalists who enact policies (such as cutting unemployment benefits, scrapping public services, and gutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) that are harmful to their economic interests,.

As Wilhelm Reich notes in his 1933 Mass Psychology of Fascism, fascism and reactionary politics have always exerted a powerful attraction for men (and some women) from authoritarian working class families. Karl Rove and the spin doctors behind Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Fox News all know this and cleverly play on these sentiments. They are also masters at painting liberals and progressives as politically correct intellectuals whose main goal in life is to moralize and dictate lifestyle choices for low-income Americans.

The late Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, feels the organized left plays into the hand of right wing demagogues. Based on my own working class background, I agree. Because progressives fail to recognize the firmly entrenched US class divisions, they always end up on the wrong side of lifestyle campaigns. By jumping onto the anti-smoking, anti-obesity and anti-gun bandwagon, they only solidify their reputation as the politically correct lifestyle police.

The US Class Divide: the Real Culture War

The corporate media likes to depict the US as a profoundly polarized nation consisting of red and blue states. Red states are supposedly populated by highly religious, family-centered conservatives, and blue ones by social libertines who value community welfare over individual liberty. The concept, which total misrepresents the broad diversity of American society, is yet another example of mind-bending propaganda designed to keep us from uniting against our real enemy: the corporate state.

I agree with Bageant that the real cultural divide is between the college educated and the 80% who don’t attend college. Owing to limited social contact between these two groups, many educated Americans fail to appreciate the existence of discrete working class culture, with its own distinct values and language. Spin doctors like Karl Rove know all about working class culture. Why else would he remake George W Bush into a plain talking simpleton who refused to read books?

What many on the Left also fail to recognize is that it’s not just the police and slick ideological propaganda that keep the capitalists in power. These two forces are aided by an army of middle class “helping professionals” – teachers, lawyers, religious leaders, social workers, doctors, psychologists, etc – who play a crucial role in instructing the working class in appropriate and politically correct behavior.

This dynamic frequently gives blue collar Americans the sense that educated professionals are demeaning them – particularly when they moralize about smoking, junk food, changing lightbulbs and the evils of guns.

Courting the Working Class

Can progressives and liberals win the working class back from the New Right? I believe they can, but only if they’re genuine in their desire to do so.

They will definitely need a totally new approach to organizing that prioritizes the nitty gritty hardships faced by low income Americans. People struggling with joblessness, homelessness and/or starvation wages will find it really hard to get excited about climate change and electoral reform.

Moreover, low income and unemployed activists are going to have real time survival needs that more well-off activists will be forced to address. In the 1930s, coalitions that incorporated the unemployed formed welfare committees to help fellow activists with food, clothing, child care and even temporary accommodation.

Progressives will also need to be far more sensitive to the cultural differences associated with social class. In the early feminist movement we did this by conducting meetings in fishbowls. Low income and minority women began the meeting at the inside of the fishbowl, while more affluent educated women sat in the outer circle and observed and listened.

Finally progressives need to take a hard look at their association with “lifestyle” campaigns that low income workers view as personal freedom issues. They will also need to reexamine their dogmatic stance around non-violence. Non-violent resistance is an alien concept in most working class communities. This relates in part to authoritarian family life and, particularly in minority communities, constant exposure to police violence.

photo credit: Tymtoi via photopin cc

Deer Hunting with Jesus

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deer hunting with jesus

Deer Hunting with Jesus

by Joe Bageant

Book Review

Deer Hunting With Jesus is a graphic account of the abandonment of the white working class by the American left. And how this left the door wide open for right wing fundamentalists to claim their allegiance.

The book’s format is largely autobiographical, as the (now deceased) college-educated journalist Bageant describes his return to his working class roots in Winchester Virginia. He’s dismayed by the deterioration of living standards. The people he grew up with in the fifties and sixties no longer have any job security, nor input into their pay or working conditions, nor employer-sponsored health or workers compensation benefits. Yet instead of being angry with the factory that exploits and demeans them on the daily basis, his former schoolmates have been conditioned to deflect this anger onto educated liberals.

According to Bageant, class warfare is very real in the US. Unfortunately it isn’t between workers and the employers who exploit and demean them. It’s between the educated and uneducated. The goal of Deer Hunting With Jesus is to examine exactly how the white working poor of the rural south and Texas have come to internalize key values of the gangster capitalist class. For example

  • Labor unions are bad because they have priced Americans out of jobs.
  • Entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, food stamps) are handouts that encourage laziness.
  • The rest of the world envies us (these are people who are one paycheck away from the street) and wants to steal our freedom.
  • Wars are good because countries get out of line and need to be put in their place.
  • Wall Street should take over Social Security because they’re better at managing money than bureaucrats.

The Advantages of a Cheap, Unquestioning, Compliant Work Force

The conservative PR specialists who spawned Fox News and talk radio personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have been extremely skilled in exploiting the fear and ignorance of this demographic. An ignorance, according to Bageant, that Republicans have deliberately created by systematically dismantling the public education system. There’s nothing the corporate elite likes better than a cheap, unquestioning, compliant labor force that pays high rents and medical bills.

According to Bageant, approximately half of all Americans are illiterate, semi-literate or functionally literate. He breaks down the statistics as follows:

  • Approximately 30% of Americans can’t read at all.
  • Another 10% can’t read well enough to fill out a job application or understand food labels.
  • Another 12.5% can’t read well enough to understand a business contract.

Liberals Feel Uncomfortable Around the Working Class

Redirecting blue collar anger against liberals has been incredibly easy, as the working poor have far more contact with rich Republican business leaders and slum lords – in small town churches, taverns, and fraternal organizations like the Elks. Liberals feel uncomfortable around them and shun them socially.

Their only contact with liberals is when they go to a doctor, lawyer, social worker, or parent teacher conference. Where they are often talked down to and insulted. Unintentionally of course. Most educated people are unaware that they do this. Based on my own working class background, I can confirm how common this is.

The Scots-Irish Roots of Fundamentalism

The highlights of the book are the chapters in which Bageant discusses the Calvinist Scots-Irish heritage of what he describes as “Middle America” and the major blunder liberal Democrats made in leaping on the gun control wagon.

From the early 1700s, America has always fostered two parallel belief systems, the Yankee liberalism that characterized the New England colonies and the fundamentalist Calvinism that would come to characterize the southern colonies.

How Democrats Bungled the Gun Control Issue

Given my personal opposition to gun control, this chapter was my favorite. According to Bageant the only good call the Republicans every made was to side against the gun control lobby. Unlike the Democrats, they understand the deep reverence for guns and meat hunting that is passed down over generations in rural communities. While urban liberals with no experience with guns – and who never have to take the bus alone after a graveyard shift – typically decide they know what’s best for everyone.

This section includes detailed analysis of Congressional Budget Office research about the decline of gun violence and women’s use of firearms to protect themselves against sexual assault.

1968 Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey was totally mainstream and pro-Vietnam war. It’s really sad how radical his views on gun control sound in 2014:

“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

Link to Bageant’s website for other great books and articles: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/

Squatting 101

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squatting

(Another post based on my research for A Rebel Comes of Age – with specific advice on how to stop your bank from foreclosing on you. A new ruling in US bankruptcy court means that roughly half the foreclosures which have occurred since 2008 are illegal.)

Squatting is becoming increasingly common with the worsening recession and continuing foreclosures and evictions. The foreclosure crisis has many US cities with whole blocks and neighborhoods of abandoned homes (which are quickly stripped of their plumbing and electrical fixtures). The problem turns out to be extremely expensive, both due to plummeting property values and tax take and higher crime rates and demand for (police and fire) services (see). Thus it’s no surprise that the city of San Diego recently sued Bank of America to stop foreclosures in their city. Prior to their recent bankruptcy proceedings, Detroit was paying people to move into abandoned homes.

The simplest form of squatting is remaining in your home when the bank or mortgage company tries to foreclose on your property. Owing to the recent scandal over illegal foreclosures, mortgagees who miss payments now have a range of legal options they can pursue (see * below).

Grassroots Remedies

Take Back the Land is a Miami-based social justice groups formed in 2006 with local action groups in New York, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Toledo, Portland, Rochester, Washington DC, Atlanta and other cities. Where they can use legal means, these local groups often organize “live-ins,” moving dozens of community activists into foreclosed homes to block evictions. In several cities, Take Back the Land activists work to rehouse homeless families in abandoned foreclosed homes. Volunteers break into the houses, clean, paint, make repairs and change the locks. Then they help move homeless families into them. More often than not, getting off the streets enables homeless parents to keep and find jobs, making it possible to pay rent and move into their own place.

Hands-Off Approach by Police and Banks

For the most part neither city police nor the banks that own the homes interfere. In Miami, for example, the city takes the position that it’s the responsibility of the bank to initiate eviction proceedings. The banks who own the homes seem even less keen to eject squatter than the police. In most states, this requires initiation of formal eviction proceedings in court. Moreover banks know full well that perpetually vacant homes eventually become worthless, due to vandalism, and have to be demolished (at additional cost to the owner).

Meanwhile neighbors concerned about their property values are ecstatic to see foreclosed homes occupied and fixed up (even by squatters), as abandoned property is a magnet  for vandalism, prostitution, drug and gang activity and fires (see and)

In addition to the good work of Take Back the Land and affiliate groups, in many places homeless families are occupying foreclosed properties on their own.

The Law of Adverse Position

Things get really interesting when homeless families occupy abandoned property for five years or more (longer in some states) and attempt to claim title (ownership) under Adverse Possession laws claim title (ownership) under Adverse Possession laws. It has also opened up a lucrative market for ambitious entrepreneurs who fix up abandoned properties and rent them out to tenants. In December 2010 Mark Guerette, the owner of Saving Florida Homes, Inc pleaded no contest second degree fraud for renting out 100 foreclosed properties.

It turns out that Gurette notified all the banks who owned the vacant the homes that he was claiming them under adverse possession – and only received a response from two of them. Owing to the banks’ disinterest, the state of Florida couldn’t really charge him with trespassing. They could only charge him with fraud by finding tenants willing to testify that he had misled them. All his rental agreements included an addendum explaining that he was occupying the property via “adverse possession.” So he ended up with a slap on the wrist – two years probation and a court order not to file any “adverse possession” claims for two years.

The 1862 Homestead Act

The legal principle of “adverse possession” – the origin of the expression “possession is nine tenths of the law” – is recognized in most cultures. In the US, its basis in law dates back to the Homestead Act Abraham Lincoln signed into law in May 1862. The Act stipulated that anyone “improving” unoccupied land could fill out an application and file for a deed of title after five years. The law was abolished in 1976, except in Alaska which continued a state version of the Homestead Act until 1986.

Nevertheless common law and most states provide for a person to obtain land through use. For example, your neighbor puts a driveway between your homes to enable him to get to the rear of his property. In doing so he takes a strip of your property six feet wide. If you do nothing, your neighbor could end up owning that part of your property. In failing to challenge your neighbor with a lawsuit, you technically abandon the rights to your property. This is the foundation of adverse possession. One feature that makes squatting on foreclosure home so attractive is that it falls under civil law, rather than criminal, law. Unless you break in or damage the property in some way, the police can’t file criminal charges. Moreover the rightful homeowner has to go through a formal eviction, which can be very expensive, to get rid of squatters.

In Florida, Take Back the Land and individual squatters are utilizing an 1869 statute that says if a person takes a property (and pays property tax) and the owner does not claim the property for seven years, the squatter gets to keep the property. With the damage done to vacant homes by vandals, improving the property usually means fixing the fences, cutting the grass and repairing broken windows and doors. Requirements differ in other states, although all require you to occupy the property openly and make improvements to it. California, Nevada and Iowa are the most favorable states for squatting as they only require you to occupy property (and pay property tax) for five years before applying for a deed of title.

* Legal remedies against foreclosure:

1. MERS foreclosures

A US bankruptcy court and many states have ruled that roughly half of US mortgages are illegal and that tens of thousands of foreclosures have been fraudulently executed by Wells Fargo, J P Morgan Chase, Bank of America (and other banks), Fannie Mae.

Prior to the 2008 meltdown, mortgages were traded and changed hands so frequently that banks simply registered them with the Mortgage Electronic Recording Service (MERS), rather than executing a title transfer. State lending laws specify that only that actual owner of a mortgage can initiate foreclosure action. In many cases banks are filing fraudulent court documents alleging that they own the loans, when they are merely servicing them on behalf of the lender.

Home owners threatened with foreclosure need to immediately do a Securitization Audit to determine who actually owns the mortgage and deed (and is legally entitled to foreclose).

2. Predatory mortgage loans

Mortgagees victimized by predatory mortgage loans (tricked into accepting mortgages they can’t possibly repay) can request Forensic Loan Document Review. There are federal laws that protect against predatory lending, which you can use to force the bank to negotiate.

3. Fraudulent mortgage charges

Also Bank of America was caught in a related scam in which they were adding backdated insurance charges to mortgage payments to push mortgagees who missed payments into foreclosure. This means it’s essential to check your mortgage statement for unexplained charges.

4. Chapter 13 bankruptcy

Families may be able to save their homes from foreclosure by filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

photo credit: gruntzooki via photopin cc

***

Rebel cover

In A Rebel Comes of Age, seventeen-year-old Angela Jones and four other homeless teenagers occupy a vacant commercial building owned by Bank of America. The adventure turns deadly serious when the bank obtains a court order evicting them. Ange faces the most serious crisis of her life when the other residents decide to use firearms against the police SWAT team.

$3.99 ebook available (in all formats) from Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/361351

Teen Homelessness: An American Disgrace

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(Sharing some of my research for my new novel A Rebel Comes of Age.)

In the US, children under 18 represent one-third of the US homeless population. 2.8 million American children have at least one episode of homelessness every year, while 1.35 million are permanently homeless.

Sadly it’s not a new problem. Seattle first became concerned about their homeless teens in the 1990s. In 1999, shortly before moving to New Zealand, I worked in a community clinic with a special outreach program for homeless teenagers.

Prior to the 2008 economic meltdown, approximately ten percent of homeless teens had access to state and city-run shelters. Over the last five years, chronic state and city budget deficits have forced  most of them to close.

US Teen Homelessness Rivals the Third World

In third world countries, homeless children are called “street kids.” The US government prefers to call them “unaccompanied minors.” Giving it a fancy name on it doesn’t hide the fact that rate of homeless American children per capita is worse than some third world countries.

Among countries who keep a count of homeless children under 18, India has the highest rate of street children per capita, with 1 homeless child per 61 residents. Egypt is next with 1 per 110, then Pakistan (1 per 120), Kenya (1 per 133), Russia (1 per 141), and Congo (1 per 148).

The per capita rate of child homelessness in the US is 1 per 245 residents. This is worse than the Philippines (1 per 360), Honduras (1 per 370), Jamaica (1 per 419), Uruguay (1 per 1,000), and Morocco (1 per 1066). Germany, in contrast, has 1 homeless child per 4,100 residents.

Why American Teens Become Homeless

Approximately fifty percent of homeless teenagers wind up on the streets due to conflict with their parents. Another twenty percent are there due to a breakdown of their foster care placement. Others are homeless because their parents are homeless.

Of teenagers made homeless by family conflict, forty percent are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual teens whose parents refuse to accept their sexuality (25% of LGBT teens are rejected by their parents). Another large proportion are victims of physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse. Forty percent of homeless teenagers report being beaten. Twenty-five percent report a history of sexual abuse. Forty percent have parents who are mentally ill or who have substance abuse problems. Ten percent have run away because they’re pregnant. Some leave home because of alcohol and drug problems of their own.

Many homeless teens work at minimum wage jobs that don’t pay enough for an apartment. However faced with a (true) unemployment rate over 20%, most face long term unemployment.

Good links regarding teen homelessness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_children

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/teen-angst/201101/homeless-teens

http://globalgeopolitics.net/wordpress/2011/03/31/u-s-budget-cuts-threaten-handful-of-beds-for-homeless-youth/

http://www.shelterhouse.on.ca/article/youth-homelessness-147.asp

http://www.dosomething.org/actnow/tipsandtools/background-11-causes-teen-homelessness

photo credit: Tanya Dawn via photopin cc

***

Rebel cover

In A Rebel Comes of Age, seventeen-year-old Angela Jones and four other homeless teenagers occupy a vacant commercial building owned by Bank of America. The adventure turns deadly serious when the bank obtains a court order evicting them. Ange faces the most serious crisis of her life when the other residents decide to use firearms against the police SWAT team.

$3.99 ebook available (in all formats) from Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/361351

Corporate Predators Invade San Francisco

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san francisco

Guest blog by Steven Miller

 (This is the 5th of 6 guest posts in which Miller discusses the corporate vultures descending on the Bay Area)

San Francisco’s Invasion by Corporate Predators – Part V

These are the best of times…. or so it appears. San Francisco is succeeding Detroit as the pre-imminent manufacturing city in America… except it does not manufacture tangible products. This development is amazing, since the city is isolated on a peninsula and never developed a large manufacturing base in the Industrial Era. For decades a Western center of finance, San Francisco is becoming the center of the high-tech industry, which produces intangible digital products, an extension of Silicon Valley 50 miles south.

The city’s population is over 800,000, the highest in history, as tech workers flood the city. Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group notes that well over 100 of his 391 member companies “either have headquarters or a strong physical presence in San Francisco”. (15)

The economy of the Bay Area has reached pre-2008 levels, but with 200,000 fewer jobs. The difference is in the greater use of electronic technology, which inevitably means laborless production.  (16)

In this respect, the economies of San Francisco and Detroit are moving in the same direction. This trend, reflected throughout the US and the world in general, gives the lie to glib pronouncements by politicians that they will create more jobs. The hard reality is that there will be fewer and fewer jobs because technology needs ever fewer production workers.

Electronic technology is now so productive that it no longer requires people work 40 hours a week. Thus corporations are engineering Temp World right before our eyes. Part-time workers, permatemps, precariats, contingent workforce, outside contractors, flexible contract workers, personal entrepreneurs – the names change, but a new model of work is being imposed. (17)

One of the city’s vaunted hi-tech start-ups is Task Rabbit, where someone posts a job on line – anything from moving a couch to creating a website – and a mob of desperate workers, many with advanced degrees, compete to place the lowest bid. This is the hi-tech version of the day laborer shape-up that happens every morning as construction workers, mostly without papers, battle each other to work for contractors. This trend reflects capitalism’s latest production model of outsourcing production through chains of sub-contractors.

At the other end of the pole, well-off techies have suddenly discovered the wonders of capitalism and wax profound about the libertarian virtues of a society where everyone free-lances. Though they believe they are creating the new glamorous world of work, they are simply establishing the visionary model of capitalist work in the electronic era, articulated in the 1994 Fortune Magazine article “The End of the Job”:

“As a way of organizing work, the traditional job is becoming a social artefact, created in the 19th century and well suited to the demands of a newly industrial world, but poorly adapted to a fast-moving, information-based economy. Its demise confronts everyone with unfamiliar risks — as well as rich opportunities.”  (18)

Laborless production generates the polarization of wealth, the polarization of the job market and the polarization of society. Techies can afford to pay super-high rents. Immediately after the Melt Down, a massive wave of evictions swept the country. Many of these have been shown to be completely illegal. Now a new wave of evictions is being implemented across the city, leading to the eviction of working class families across the city. Evictions of entire buildings for purposes of sale are up 170% since 2010. (19)

Rebecca Solnit describes the Google buses that roam the San Francisco, picking up tech workers to carry them to Silicon Valley, “Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us. (20)

The new evictions really reflect the penetration of speculation through the economy. Wall Street’s new campaign is to turn rental homes into cash cows! The banksters caused the 2008 Meltdown by bundling predatory mortgages together as “a security” that could be bet on, either for or against. Now they are securitizing rents themselves to serve as fodder for the new amped up Casino Economy. When the next crash hits, will Americans again be so gullible to accept the “too big to fail” line once again?

Dave Ransom reports on how this is going down in the San Francisco Bay Area:

“Oakland-based Waypoint Homes, for instance, calls itself “a next generation real-estate company.” It holds title to more than a thousand homes. And it is attracting serious capital to buy several thousand more—$2 billion from Silicon Valley venture capitalists and real-estate investors.

 “Waypoint buys foreclosed homes from banks or in auctions on the courthouse steps, generally at a steep discount. After fixing them up, it rents them out for a good deal less than the original mortgage payment.

 “That sounds good until you realize that, if the banks had offered the families living in the homes the same deal they offered Waypoint, those families could probably have avoided foreclosure entirely.

 “This spring, the Obama administration announced a plan to sell foreclosed homes owned by the government’s housing agencies—Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA.

 “But the hedge funds and private-equity firms are pressuring the administration to offer them cheap financing and guarantee they will be bidding on lots of as many as a thousand homes at a time.

 “Who currently holds the mortgages to these homes? We the People do—the 99%. Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the FHA—all government backed and bailed out by the taxpayers—hold half the country’s mortgages, dumped there by the banks when the housing bubble burst.  (21)

Thom Hartman describes the same phenomenon nationally in his book The Crash of 2016:

“Among the firms and big banks buying up America’s real estate is the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. The Blackstone Group alone has bought nearly 40,000 houses across America, spending $7.5 billion in the process.

“Blackstone, for example, bought 1,400 homes in Atlanta in one day, and owns nearly 2,000 houses in the Charlotte, North Carolina metro area.

“So why are Blackstone and other Wall Street firms buying up foreclosed homes all across the country? It’s simple. By renting these homes back to Americans, and securitizing America’s home-rental market, they can bundle up rental payments the same way they used to bundle mortgage payments, and sell them to investors.”

“The predators are again up to their old tricks. Nothing has changed.” (22)

This is madness! The speculative section of capitalism is in the driver’s seat, but the only solution they can offer to any problem is… more speculation. They use carbon futures to speculate on the very atmosphere, and intend to make a profit all the way through Global Warming and the end of human society, as we know it.

References and Resources

15)  Patrick May, “Is it now the ‘Silicon Bay Area”? Oakland Tribune. 11-13-2013

16)  Caroline Said. “S.F. Bay Area economy thriving despite challenges”. 3-17-2012

17)  NPR Staff. “A ‘Permatemp’ Economy: The Idea Of The Expendable Employee”. January 28, 2013

18)  William Bridges. “The End of the Job”. Fortune. September 19, 1994

19)  SF Chronicle. City Insider. 12-29-13

20)  Heather Knight. City Insider, SF Chronicle, 12-15-2013

21)  Peoples’ Tribune, October, 2013

22)  Thom Hartman. “Are the Bankers Now Setting Up the Crash of 2016?” 12-3-2013

To be continued.

***

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

Originally posted at Daily Censored

photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

What Really Happened in Detroit

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Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the 4th of 6 posts in which Miller describes how Detroit residents and auto industry pensioners were deliberately swindled by Wall Street, with the help of the state and federal government.)

What Really Happened in Detroit

With Detroit’s financial difficulties, the banksters recognized the opportunity to take the next step forward. At its peak in the Industrial Era, the city’s auto plants produced half of the world’s cars with 350,000 workers. Today the few factories that remain produce even more cars with a workforce of only 20,000. Their job is to mind the robots that actually do the manufacturing.

Wall Street and the state apparatus combined to push the city into bankruptcy so they could go after public worker pensions nationally. Across the US there are more than 22 million public workers, about half of them teachers. (10) The financial industry quickly ensnared public worker pensions in predatory debt. Then their political agents loudly proclaimed that local government could no longer function due to these debts. Detroit, like all city governments also owes huge amounts to the banks, the result of various predatory loans. However, there is never a discussion about not paying these contractual obligations, even though there is abundant evidence that they are grounded in criminality. (11)

From 2004 to 2006, 75 percent of mortgages issued in Detroit were subprime. By 2012, banks had foreclosed on 100,000 homes. This trashed the city’s real estate by 30 percent and caused the flight of almost a quarter million people. These two factors drove the tax base severely downward.

Under both Republican and Democratic governors, the Michigan state government cut $700 million in state revenue sharing. Michigan, however, boasts the largest corporate subsidies per capita in the country – a total of $6.2 billion. (12) Detroit also gives more than $20 million a year in subsidies to local corporations for elite downtown projects.

Then the state jumped in to employ coercion against the people. This took the form of an Emergency Manager, imposed by the Michigan governor, with complete powers over the city’s government, including breaking contracts at will and selling off public property. In 2013, the EM closed over 30 schools as “too expensive”, and then he used the money to build a new ice rink for the Detroit Redwings hockey team. The EM is a modern form of fascism; his dictatorial policies are backed up by the police. Detroit residents lost the civil right to vote.

While city operating expenses fell, the financial costs of debt servicing shot up. The public policy organization, Demos, wrote in 2013, “Detroit’s financial expenses have increased significantly, and that is a direct result of the complex financial deals Wall Street banks urged on the city over the last several years, even though its precarious cash flow position meant these deals posed a great threat to the city.” (13)

The Financial Times reports that Detroit will eventually pay nearly double the principal — in other words, Detroit is effectively paying 100 percent interest. (14) So we see that predatory lending against homeowners begets predatory lending against cities. The city’s, debt servicing could rise from 28% to 65% of the city’s annual budget, effectively making it an ATM for the financial industry.

In December, a federal judge ruled the pension rights, guaranteed by Michigan’s state constitution, were simply a “contractual relation”, rather than a right, and held that federal bankruptcy law, as applied to corporations, determines city bankruptcies, even though few US cities have ever gone bankrupt. This means that the interests of hedge funds and banks have priority over the interests of retired city workers, who must already make due with pensions that average only $19,000.

The betting is that city workers’ pensions will be cut by 84%. At the height of the economic Meltdown, alpha financier and speculator, Lawrence Summers, was asked why the banks used public money to pay exorbitant executive salaries. “A contract is a contract”, he bellowed. Obviously this rule of law no longer applies to public worker contracts.

Just as international banks are demanding that Greece sells off its ports, transport systems, tourist attractions, beaches and other assets in the public domain, so Detroit is now planning to sell the bridge and tunnels to Canada, the Joe Louis Boxing Arena, and the tremendous collection of art in the Detroit Institute of Art. This crime is not too different from the Nazi rape of art from across Europe, nor the US organized destruction of the Iraq Museum after they took Baghdad in 2003.

But it’s all so legit! These items will be bought by billionaires and banks with credit, which the city will then send to the banks to pay off the debt. Detroit becomes a simple pass-through account. This is naked expropriation of the wealth of the public. These are the worst of times.

References and Resources

10)  “How Many Government Employees Are There?”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2466363/posts

 11)  Matt Taibbi. “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia”. 6-21-12

 12)  http://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/wall-street-plunders-detroit/

 13)  Wallace Turbeville. “The Detroit Bankruptcy. 11-20-2013

 14)  Sender and Foley. “Details of Detroit’s Troubles Come to Light”, Financial Times, 7-25-2013

To be continued.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

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Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

Originally posted at Daily Censored

Obama’s Privatization Agenda

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Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the 3rd of 6 guest posts in which Miller describes how Obama is re-engineering society on behalf of the ruling elite.)

Part III – Obama’s Privatization Agenda

From Obama’s State of the Union Address:

“So, tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country. And to make sure taxpayers don’t shoulder the whole burden, I’m also proposing a Partnership to Rebuild America that attracts private capital to upgrade what our businesses need most: modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children.”  (9)

This statement is a call for privatization that follows the speculative agenda described previously. Supposedly “to save taxpayer’s money”, the President offers corporations ownership of the public infrastructure that was formerly built by and for the public. Infrastructure includes roads and bridges, also schools and universities, the electrical grid, water and sewers, parks and ports, airports and dams. Obama even proposes to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA –  see Republicans Veer Towards Socialism), Roosevelt’s signature project that electrified the South. His plans open the door to the full seizure and privatization of public resources as corporate private property. What was originally built for free public access will increasingly be available only to those who can afford the fees.

Since the financial Meltdown of 2008, the federal government has been “nationalizing” the levers of control of society in the interests of the capitalist class. The Bailout began with the proclamation that “banks are now agents of the government”. It is moot to discuss whether the banks took over the government or the government took over the banks. They are merging together. Mussolini, the theoretician of fascism, held that fascism was the merger of the corporations and the state.

Obama quickly intervened in Detroit to reorganize the auto industry, though he refuses to intervene today to protect the city government or pensions. The federal government is reorganizing both public education and health care. The NSA revelations show that the federal government has also nationalized everyone’s information.

Since 2001, the Department of Homeland Security, financed at an average of some $30 billion a year, has privatized many government functions and outsourced a huge number of police activities to corporations. As Occupy demonstrated to all, DHS has virtually federalized the police.

It is important to understand the state and its powers. The state – including the army, the courts and the police – is distinct from the government. The government collects taxes and decides how to spend public money. This is essentially the administration of things. The state’s role is guaranteed by the rule of law to use coercion and force to protect the property of the ruling class and to guarantee its rule. Hence the state is principally about the control of people. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the maneuvers and powers of capitalism today.

No longer under public accountability or control, the state apparatus today plays a major role in engineering how society will be transformed for the ruling class. Just as in other periods of US history, the state operates to implement the policies of the dominant block of capitalists. Currently this means the state will use its powers of force to facilitate the privatization of everything tangible.

References and Resources

9)  www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2013

To be continued.

photo credit: SS&SS via photopin cc

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Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

Originally posted at Daily Censored