We have bad policies for combating homelessness and poverty for one reason: because the very wealthy need the very poor to keep everyone else in line.
The Right Policies
During my usual daily searches through the news for things to be worried about, I came across this letter to the editor from Jake Trimble in the Salt Lake City Tribune titled “Latest abatement shows Salt Lake City is plagued by bad homeless policy.”
Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.