Help. I've Had Too Much To Think.

My class meets for more or less the last time in the morning. They'll show up next week to talk about their papers, do an eval, and leave early. I'm hoping some of them come to our Camp4Unity June 8-9. No more sweeps. No more jails. No more deaths. No more lies. It's fucking poetry isn't it? Poetry by consensus. Amazing really. Just part of why I love RCOP.

But more about that later. I'm having them write 3-4 pages about what they learned. I thought that maybe if I'm having them do it, I should too.

The best thing about this class, oddly, isn't the $2,000. It's the opportunity to rethink and to deepen how I see my work. It's strange to see it put that way. My work. More than twenty years of being with homeless people and obsessed with homelessness. Every once in a while, some idiot comments here that blogging is easy and that I really haven't ever done anything to end homelessness. Like run a transitional housing program or something like that I suppose. Give me a break.

Anyway. Without stopping to think once in a while, things just sort of go on, and you keep doing what you've been doing as if nothing around you has changed. If you do some of your thinking in public, it's even better. Then you get the experience of saying things most people aren't and wondering whether you've secretly become insane, and everybody but you knows.

Last year, I taught the Ten Year Plan paradigm against the more structural approach offered by people like Peter Marcuse and Todd Depastino. I pretty much blew my own mind. My outrage grew like the Grinch's heart. It got bigger and bigger until it busted out of the old frame. The same thing happened this year. I added Timothy Gibson, and had the sweeps to illustrate first hand what happens when the winners in the global economy come up against the problem of surplus people.

The sweeps would have put me over the top whether I was teaching the class or not. My friend Anitra once made me laugh by calling me the Malcolm X of homelessness. Now I'm starting to think she might be right.

And that sort of scares me.

Each time, there's new stuff that comes out of the same texts. The highlight for me again was Marcuse's 1988 Neutralizing Homelessness. Last year, I was blown away with the correspondence between his list of Four Tactics to Pretend to Address Homelessness and the Ten Year Plan paradigm. This year, it was his argument that modern homelessness is mostly about permanently surplus people.

Marcuse says homeless people and poverty class people of color in general are the "surplus of the surplus," and have been written off as waste that needn't be maintained. When there is some anticipation that an economically superfluous population will one day again be needed, he says, then housing and benefits, however paltry, will be provided. If not, well, it's pretty much to the wolves with you.

This is about more than a shift in the structure of the economy, he says. It's about a shift in power relations. The overall terms of labor are degraded when there's a huge permanent surplus pool down there on the bottom. Homelessness isn't about the system failing. It's about the system working perfectly.

While the waste needn't be maintained, it must nonetheless be contained. This year I also added readings from Bruce Western, the Kennedy School guy whose pioneering research on incarceration has documented the link between the war on drugs and the racialization of poverty. My friend Stephanie came to guest lecture and gave me shit for focusing on black males and having a white male's text when women of color are the fastest growing prison population and my good friend Silja's written a whole fucking book on this. This led to us ad-libbing some dialogue in character, where I was the dealer who rolled on my homey for a lighter sentence, and she was my unwitting but loyal girlfriend who got the book thrown at her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I look around the room at times like this to see what the students are thinking, and I see anger, disgust, shock, and outrage. It's what I'm feeling too. It's what we should all be feeling. The only reason we don't is that it's hidden in plain sight. Those of us with the privilege to be anesthetized by comfort can look the other way. We usually do. Despite this, I'm not giving up on the middle-class. We need each other, whether they realize it or not.

When you look at the criminalization of the poor in light of the globalization that Marcuse, Depastino, and Gibson all similarly discuss, you start writing songs like Burn It Down. Especially when Seattle has gone all "consistent and humane" on the homeless and is looking to build a new fucking jail by 2012 just for misdemeanants that almost nobody is talking about. The Ten Year Plan crowd has their Color of Homelessness report, but somehow they haven't made the connection. Odd, huh? Not really.

Depastino talks about how the deserving/undeserving poor frame leads to homeless policy where women and kids get into transitional shelter while single men, especially those of color, mostly get repression. This hit straight home for me this time.

It's getting late, and class is in the morning. Fortunately I don't have to do much. Wes and Anitra are coming.

Wes reminded me at City Hall a few weeks ago that he's been doing his column for twelve years and nine months, and Anitra came along to the editorial committee just three months after. We make each other laugh. They are old friends and it's going to be fun. Even better, I can rely on them to blow my students' minds. Smart pissed off people who can make you laugh are too rare. Everybody really ought to know several.

I find myself struggling with how to make the root globalization connections in the everyday work, and thinking through what this means. So long as homelessness is viewed as an isolated issue apart, we get neo-liberal Ten Year Plan palliatives that do more to obscure than fundamentally solve. For more than a year, I've struggled with the problem of connecting homelessness to broader economic vulnerability. Over the past few months the way has become more clear, but I'm not there yet.

On my mantle sits The Post-Fordism Reader, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, and Punishment & Inequality in America. I'm working on it. Somewhere in there is a way to make the connections that's clean, simple, and easy to grasp without getting lost in a bunch of psuedo-marxist rhetorical complication.

When so few people involved in homelessness talk about this stuff, it's easy to start feeling like I've crawled way out on some sort of crazy-ass limb where people like me go to be dismissed as "radical" and then die. For a guy who runs an organization as high profile and financially tenuous as Real Change, that can feel like a scary place to be.

My last fund raising pitch for the paper made the globalization connection, and I had to wonder if I was shooting myself and Real Change in the foot. "Is this too left," I asked our newsroom, "because I can't tell anymore."

I can't. I really can't. To me, it's just becoming the obvious truth that needs to be said.

Stigmatizing the Homeless

Just today, I was thinking about all the shit I say to reporters that almost never makes it into print. Here's one time that I can't complain. Robert Dobbs at Tacoma's Weekly Volcano reports on that city's failure to make progress on Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness goals (chronic homelessness up 27% since 2007) and the aggressive crackdown on visible poverty that has overtaken efforts to help.

Refreshingly, Tacoma calls their sweeps policy the Encampment Elimination Program. At least this smelly city to the south doesn't leave you guessing as to what they're about. For the first time in the history of print media, my core concern with the chronic homeless focus actually made it into someone's story. You'll never see this in the Seattle Times.

“The thing that I keep struggling to get my head around is how distant appearances and reality are when it comes to city policy around homelessness,” says Harris. “Everyone has embraced the rhetoric around ending homelessness, but I see very little of it in terms of what is coming to prevail. What this really comes down to is reducing visible homelessness. ” ...

“I don’t think people understand what the 10-year plan is all about,” he says. “Why would the (federal) administration that seems to be (the) most hostile to poor people in 70 years take on this task of solving homelessness? The answer is that it’s not really about solving the issue. Truth is, the chronic homeless make up a very small percentage of the overall population. This is really about visible homelessness. You have this federally backed strategy that is essentially a template for a very sophisticated propaganda model. It’s a way of reframing homelessness to focus on the most visible and dysfunctional and most easy to blame.”

That is one of the most damaging aspects of the 10-year plan, says Harris — it makes the homeless easy to dismiss. Once you stigmatize a population, “it’s pretty easy to do whatever you want to them.”

After decades of advocates stressing that homelessness has many faces and most people don't fit the stereotype, federal funding priorities and local development-driven imperatives to hide poverty have combined to make homelessness all about the drunks, addicts, and crazy people. And the major media is always willing to toe the city line: We're sick of their unsightly misery, and we don't have to tolerate it. They're service-resistant vectors of criminal activity. So screw them, in a compassionate Seattle sort of way.

Speaking of screwing homeless people, the Downtown Seattle Association's long-held dream of shutting down Seattle's public toilets may now come to pass. This has been on their agenda for at least two years, but Tom Rassmussen, citing the lack of evidence that this is really a problem, gave them no traction with City Council. Well, things change. The Department of Public Utilities has generated the report they need to make it into a problem, and they've got Sally Clark on board and a new, more compliant, council. The panhandling legislation can't be far away. See Sharon Chan's Seattle Times story, which also gets my problem with this right.

Tim Harris, executive director for homeless-activist newspaper Real Change, wants the city not only to keep the automated toilets, but also to add portable toilets. Removing toilets would force people to relieve themselves in streets and alleys, Harris said.

"If you don't provide alternatives and viable alternatives, then it's not fair to blame people for activities that they have little choice but to engage in," he said.

Apparently, the plan is to somehow get local businesses and government buildings to staff and more prominently feature the availability of their toilets. Yep. That's the plan. And it will cost just as much as keeping the ones we have.

I actually went into this whole conspiratorial rant about how they'll take the toilets away, and then when the whole downtown smells like a Belltown alley on a hot summer day and there's shit on every doorstep, we'll hear all about the filthy, disgusting, homeless people who are too lazy to even find their way to the bathroom.

But for some reason she didn't use that.

I had high hopes for the Seattle Metropolitan story on the Seattle sweeps that came out in their new April issue, but it turned out to be a rather bland overview and to offer little new.

McInturff said she was "moved" by the three hours of entirely one-sided testimony at January's public hearing. They may tweak the 48-hour notification, and rethink the $25 limitation on goods they're willing to store. Wow. Look at those big-ass crocodile tears running all down her face. They apparently chose not to hear the "throw this heinous piece of crap out, start over, and listen to us this time" theme.

Seattle Metro, having the luxury of magazine-style journalism, should have been the ones to do something in-depth. But instead they accepted the city's frame and pretty much went brain-dead from there, as is standard media practice. I'd link, but they kept it off their website.

Finally, my friend Silja Talvi got a great piece into the April In These Times that covers the Seattle sweeps issue as a stark example of national trends and linking it to the development boom. She calls it a homeless eradication program. Nice phrase. I'd like to see it stick. They didn't have the story online when I checked, but maybe they will sometime.

Your Valentines Day Date

Click image to enlarge.

The Prison Hockey Stick

I googled Bruce Western to see what I could find after my friend Silja Talvi mentioned him as one of the leading thinkers on the relationship between prisons and inequality. The chart above, which shows the more than 700% increase in incarceration in the US over the past three decades, comes from this site, which has numerous other depressing graphs and statistics that will shock and appall.

This year, Western left Princeton to join the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School, where he will direct the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. Western argues that sky-rocketing rates of incarceration, particularly among African-American males, exacerbate inequality by dramatically reducing the employment prospects and earning potential of the large numbers of those who have been imprisoned, particularly those who have had felonies. With large numbers of poorly educated men, and increasingly women, removed from the labor market, statistics on wages and unemployment are distorted to look much rosier than they actually are.

This is the structural unemployment issue that seems to be the big elephant in the room in American politics. Why doesn't anyone ever see the thing? All we ever do is describe its parts, and just barely at that.

Western says that the "tough on crime" incarceration strategy may well create more problems than it solves by increasing social inequality and thereby feeding the cycle of desperation and crime. Instead of continually feeding a growing prison-industrial complex, we might want to think about investing more in education, or job training.

What I find most interesting is the timing of the prison boom: the mid-seventies, just as the effects of deindustrialization are hitting American cities everywhere. This is also the time frame for the beginnings of mass homelessness and the growth of the shelter industry, the other strategy for managing large numbers of superfluous people. While it's no secret that there is a revolving door between the shelter and prison systems, it's surprising that more hasn't been said about these two populations and their relationship to the structural employment issue.

Maybe Fannie Mae will give the National Alliance to End Homelessness one of their big fat cooptation grants to study this important issue? Not.

The Dehumanized Others

My friend Silja Talvi, who is that rare breed of animal known as a successful alt-journalist, has written a book, and this afternoon we were able to have a few beers together while I was at "work." Silja has a shelf full of journalism awards and is a Senior Editor at In These Times. She's written, says her bio credit, for 75 publications, including The Nation and the Christian Science Monitor. Being a successful alt-journalist, I imagine, basically means you're getting published and paid enough to live somewhere above the poverty line. It ain't for wimps.

And no wimp is she. Her first book, which took three hellish years to write, is called Women Behind Bars and it's out this month on Seal Press. Silja looks at the disproportional growth of women's incarceration and the deep dysfunctionality of the U.S. prison system.

Some shocking facts about incarceration in this country.

• One in 32 Americans is under some sort of correctional supervision.
• One quarter of the world's prisoners are in US jails and prisons, although we are only 5% of the world's population.
• The US has more people in prison than any other nation, even China.
• In 2006, 2.24 million people were under incarceration in America, a 3% increase over the previous year.
• While women are stil only about 8% of those incarcerated, their numbers have climbed by 757% since 1977.

Silja's book documents the particularly horrifying treatment of women, who must cope with a system that has been designed with men in mind, within the overall awfulness of the US prison system itself. The interview will be in Real Change in another few weeks.

A few things stood out for me in particular. She spoke passionately about how the prison issue needs to connect to our own broad interests and the overall erosion of human and civil rights. We should care about how people are treated in prison because, ultimately, we're vulnerable too. Which is funny, because that's exactly what I've been saying about homelessness lately.

Two despised populations with an identical advocacy challenge. Interesting.

Silja visited several European prisons in the course of the book, and compared to what she found here at home, they were the very model of enlightenment. "Why," I asked, "is the US prison system such a horror show compared to that of other nations."

They do not, she said, generally have a culture in which people are seen as throw-ways. Here, on the other hand, poor people, black people, and others whom the system fails, are the flesh and blood equivalent of landfill trash. After we use them up we want them out of the way, We have, she said, a culture of dehumanization that is prodigiously ahead of the international curve.

Disposable people, especially disposable people who have been defined as criminals, have an extremely limited claim on our sympathies. Compassion, essentially, is an act of imagination, and we Americans have less and less of that all the time.

It's no coincidence that the shelter industry and the prison industry both grew exponentially over the decades of deindustrialization. The reality of structural unemployment in America — and its various containment mechanisms — is something that is far too seldom acknowledged.

Prisons, aided by the drug war, are one way of taking surplus bodies out of the economy and rendering them harmless while building an industry on top of their misery. There is an institutional logic to the ever-expanding prison state, just as there is a logic to an expanding human services empire in the service of "ending" homelessness.

The implications of a prison population that grows by 3% in a year should have us all terrified. Instead, we're oblivious and acting as though this is normal and desirable. It's not.

Silja will be reading from her book at the Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday, November 17, at 2 pm.