Tag Archives: socialism

Political Rants

Why there’s a housing crisis and what we can do

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I should start out by saying that I have never been unhoused. There’s a good reason for that – I am a CIS-gender white male who grew up in a middle class / upper working class family. (In other words, dad didn’t have any college but made a decent living during a time when white men with no degree could do okay, not great.) The American economy is set up for people like me, and I benefited from my place of advantage.

That means that, even when I was broke, there was a home I could go to. That home had equity, and when my parents passed away, some of that equity was passed along to me. Poor Americans, Americans of color, non CIS gender American largely do not enjoy this level of privilege. When they run into money trouble, it’s for real, and a lot of them go without food, medicine, or a roof over their heads as a result. In a country as wealthy as this one, that’s worse than a scandal; that’s a crime. What can we do about this?

If it works in Austria, why not here?

We have public housing in America. It’s not much to write home about, though, and it’s been under attack for decades. In my home town, a fair number of the units have been bulldozed. They were substandard in a lot of ways, built on undesirable patches of land, some of them close to brown fields where lead smelting was done a century or more ago, leaving poisonous residue that persists to this day. It’s not that different elsewhere, and public housing tends to reflect the high level of contempt that wealthier Americans feel towards the less fortunate.

As Americans, we tend to get cynical about government’s ability to change things for the better. It’s only fair to point out that other nations have provided for housing rights much more effectively, and they are not countries that have anywhere near the resources we have. One good example is Austria, where socialists put an exceptional public housing system in place in the 1920s that somehow survived WWII and is still rolling. There are others, but I think the key is to treat housing as a right, not a privilege, and to direct public investment towards building livable communities, not just units.

The problem is the same damn one it always is

Of course, the housing crisis in America is a product of the craven for-profit industry that has grown up around real estate and rental properties. Just as a general principle, anything that is a necessity for a decent life should not be a commodity. People should be able to get the food, water, housing, fresh air, clothing, and health care they need to thrive. These necessities should not be contingent on your ability to earn large amounts of cash. People should not be dependent upon good fortune to keep a roof over our heads.

It’s not a question of not having enough money. Of course we have the money to solve this problem. We spend enormous amounts of money on military hardware alone, largely because doing so lifts the political fortunes of members of congress. It does nothing to keep “us” safe. What would keep more of “us” safe is investing that money into sustainable housing. The only real obstacle to giving people what they need is the blinkered way we tend to think about what others deserve. As Heather McGhee pointed out much more elegantly in her book The Sum of Us, white people would rather screw themselves than share resources with black people.

How about this – nobody gets a second home until everyone has a first one.

Zero dark bullshit

Everyone on MSNBC is fist pumping over the CIA’s killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian cleric who was Bin Laden’s right-hand man and later head of Al Qaeda. They’re pulling out the John Brennans, the Richard Engels, the John Kirbys. I will have more to say on this next week, but these people are no better than the Republicans on foreign policy. Al-Zawahiri was a horrendous person, but by sheer body count over the past thirty years alone, we make him look like a piker.

luv u,

jp

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Political Rants

Only money.

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Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Sometimes I think my head is going to explode. Every get that way? It sometimes happens over stupid shit, like earlier this week when the MS Office install stopped working on my two-year-old PC, and Bill Gates’ automated tech support tried to trick me into buying a subscription to Office 365 rather than just reinstalling my Office 2016 once-and-done version. Hate when that happens, don’t you?

That’s not what really made my head explode this week. The true culprit was our ridiculous political culture – you know, the one that whines incessantly about how expensive Medicare For All will be (i.e. trillions of dollars less than what we’re spending now) but then turns around and drops two trillion dollars on saving Trump’s political bacon (they wanted to spend six trillion). Suddenly, all this money appeared out of nowhere.

And like the financial crisis, Congress’s piece is just the down payment. As David Dayen explained on Majority Report this past week, the $425 billion fund managed by Steve Mnuchin (the foreclosure king) will serve as initial capital in a Federal Reserve program that will direct more than ten times that amount towards select businesses – big banks, etc. – in the form of low-interest credit. Dayen refers to it as a money cannon, and he’s not wrong. There will be oversight in the form of an inspector general and an oversight board, but the review will be after the fact. It’s deja vu, all over again.

Sure, presumably every worker/taxpayer in America will get some kind of check. But the point is the bailout – the prole checks are just for window dressing. The bishops of austerity in the Senate are already whining about expanded unemployment benefits being too generous to people who are not working, as if there’s some moral hazard in paying people not to spread the Coronavirus. I’m not hearing them complain about trillions in public money being dropped on private enterprise, which will turn around and enrich themselves rather than use it for productive purposes, like hiring people. I’ve heard some vague hand-waving about the American people having a stake in the beneficiary industries, but this isn’t going to happen. Like the Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, there are very few strings attached to this money.

If we hand trillions of dollars out to private companies, we should own those companies. If we own those companies, we should put their workers in charge of managing them. If capitalism requires the government to resuscitate it every ten or so years with massive injections of socialism, we should start to rethink our system and, perhaps, pursue a vision of society that doesn’t entail crash-and-burn collapses every time something goes wrong … a vision that would emphasize social cohesion and a more robust approach to preparedness, involving – I don’t know – an exponentially larger number of, say, ICU beds, respirators, freaking PPE, for when the next plague comes strolling along.

We determine what’s possible. It’s just a question of political will.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Plague times.

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Greetings from my corner of our national COVID-19 quarantine. As someone who is not unaccustomed to a certain amount of social isolation, I can say with confidence that this new normal has even me a bit more than creeped out. When I was in my teens and twenties, I wasn’t a big believer in psychology, but perhaps the only real advantage of advancing age is that it gives you an opportunity to discover the things you were wrong about earlier on – for me, one of those items was the fact that psychology is a thing that affects me. So, while my life is not all that different from the way it was before this crisis, I feel a lot different … and not in a good way.

Part of what I find disturbing about this pandemic scare is the degree to which so many people in my community are acting out of fear. I don’t mean to single central New York out in any way – similar effects are being seen all over the country. But when I go to grocery stores now, in particular, the evidence of panic buying is all around. I went to the supermarket at 7:30 a.m. last Saturday – half an hour into their business day – and there were gaping holes throughout the inventory. Because it’s kind of a white-dominant bedroom community, the missing items read like Ozzy and Harriet’s shopping list: iceberg lettuce, white bread, cans of tuna fish, jars of tomato sauce, canned soup, frozen vegetables, etc. Of course, paper products were cleared out entirely … 30 minutes into the business day!

Trump's empty America.

Weirdly, it didn’t seem like there were all that many people in the supermarket. And people didn’t seem frenzied, and they didn’t appear to be buying any more than I would have expected to see in their carts on an ordinary shopping day. Strangers were even interacting with me, in a friendly way, which was encouraging. And yet … the shelves were bare, as if Visigoths had marauded through the place a half hour earlier. Like the Coronavirus itself, panicked citizens seem like an invisible menace; you seldom actually see it, but you can see its effects. Then, of course, there are the follow-on effects: when people know their neighbors are buying everything in sight, they then go to the store and stock up before the goods are all gone. Selfishness starts to rule the day as people compete for consumer items suddenly in short supply. This is what late-stage capitalism looks like: very similar to the capitalists’ own distorted stereotype of socialist privation – empty shelves, desperate consumers, valueless scrip.

Of course, now that capitalism is in crisis (businesses shutting down, the stock market crashing), it’s time again for socialism! Trump and the Republicans, along with corporate Democrats, are reaching for massive state intervention in the economy, cutting billions of dollars in checks to individuals, back-stopping banks with enormous credit guarantees, dumping public cash into enormous, well-connected private corporations. All of the television austerians have come to their collectivist Jesus, much like they did in 2008-09. (Elect a Democrat, and trust me, they will be deficit hawks once more.)

So, no, you’re not hallucinating. This is all actually happening. Please stay safe, wash your hands, etc., and don’t freak out. We rely on each other to keep our heads – that may be the most effective thing we can do right now.

luv u,

jp