U.S. Supreme Court, in Recent Homelessness Decision, Tells Poor People "Just Disappear"
How long will we let the rich rule over us?
The above Guardian article almost reads like satire, except unfortunately it’s as serious as a heart attack. The Supreme Court ruling reported on in this article will now force satirists to have to escalate their hyperbole in order for their satire to be perceived as obvious satire. Perhaps a satirist could succeed by writing something such as,
“Supreme Court rules that towns may humanely slaughter homeless people and allow luxury restaurants to cook them for upper class patrons to enjoy truly remarkable cuisine.”
Frankly, however, I’m not so sure even this would be sufficiently hyperbolic before too long.
If ever there was more evidence needed that we live in a dictatorship of the rich, this recent Supreme Court ruling does the job.
Imagine what would happen if we did NOT live in a dictatorship of the rich. Imagine what would happen if we lived in a genuine democracy (as I describe here) in which social decisions were made by the kind of people who are the vast majority, people who value mutual aid and equality and fairness. Imagine if, at one of their decision-making meetings somebody—let’s call him Billy Gates—got up and said,
Here’s an idea. How about if we spend almost a trillion dollars each year to pay for military weapons and to hire members of the armed forces so we can have military bases all over the world to keep very rich people in power everywhere and to suppress ordinary people anywhere who are fighting to make society more equal and democratic, and how about if we only build luxury housing here so as to make developers rich, and how about if we then tell people who can’t afford to buy or rent one of these luxury homes that they can’t live anywhere and will be fined if they sleep in a tent anywhere and arrested if they don’t pay the fine? Wouldn’t that be a great idea?
How long do you think it would be before the good people at that meeting told Billy Gates to get lost?
Obviously the problem today is that at the actual meetings where the actual social decisions are made today, the only people in the room are Billy Gateses.
Portland heats a former sports complex that was called Veterans Memorial Coliseum. It formally disallowed veterans to supervise veteran-housing there, though there are some small rooms, showers, laundry facilities, etc. How Portland has fallen since the time of Mayor Bud, who had a battle of the bands in this building for his inauguration.
Portland is a dystopian example of slap-green-paint-and-call-it-progressive. The primary gated community, before I left, was Dignity Village, run by formerly houseless. I do not know if Dignity Village is still there. I know of Dignity because some residents volunteered with Re-Thinking Psychiatry, at a workshop where Mad in America and MindFreedom and others were able to present.