On the Streets
Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from VietnamThe tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to homelessness is what the average person sees on Newport’s streets – mostly men, some women, seeking a public or private building’s overhang to get out of the rain.
Over the weekend, a tweet from Ro Khanna alerted me to a favorite Trump shenanigan-- a roll back to an Obama housing desegregation rule. The very first time the name "Donald J. Trump" appeared in the New York Times, a thrill for the young publicity hound, was in connection to a government law suit in which he and his crooked, racist father were charged with violating a civil rights act in regard to housing.
Words, and spin, and the Mad Men and Mad Women of this perverse consumerism and cultural wasteland tied to Predatory Capitalism, Celebrity Culture and Americans who have perpetual ennui because of their perpetual dumb-downing, perpetual swallow of exceptionism as a core value of the American Project To Take Over the World.
The United States economy is organized such that all commodities, including both weapons and housing, drive the lion’s share of profits upward, into the pockets of a wealthy elite class, at the expense of the masses of working people who generate those profits through their labor power. The functioning of this system in the interest of a tiny few at the expense of the many is made equally apparent by the orchestration of war against Venezuela by the U.S. ruling class and the orchestration of a massive housing crisis within U.S. borders by wealthy developers.
I was at a city hall meeting in Beaverton, Oregon, the other day when a few questions I had for the presenters dropped jaws. We’ll get to that later, the jaw-dropping effect I and those of my ilk have when we end up in the controlled boardrooms and chambers of the controllers – bureaucrats, public-private clubs like Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, and both political operatives and those who liken themselves as the great planners of the world moving communities and housing and public commons around a giant chessboard to make things better for and more efficient in spite of us.
The weekend edition of the Financial Times dated April 7/8 featured a story in the House and Home section under the title ‘Barcelona hits the Brakes.’ The story describes the negative effect of last October’s Catalan independence referendum on Barcelona’s real estate market. The Times cites data from the Spanish property website Idealista. During the summer of 2017 (Q3 2017) properties in the city gained an impressive 018 percent compared to the previous year.
A lot of conspiracy theories have been floating around online about the tragic Grenfell Tower fire: I’m not really buying any of them. This horrible, terrible event looks less like ‘conspiracy’ and more a simpler case of mismanagement, apathy and criminal negligence. However, this article by Joseph Downing (Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)) for […]
Grenfell Tower: how did it happen? Who is responsible?
