What the Most Powerful Country in the World Cannot Afford?

Outside the box

Technically, the United States is not the wealthiest country in the world per-capita. Those honours go to places like Luxembourg and a few oil-rich monarchies - but amongst the G20 we are the leader, most powerful, most influential and most envied. So imagine my surprise at OWS this week when a young man from Burma, otherwise know as Myanmar, and the 163rd poorest country on the planet according to the IMF, asked me, "why the most powerful country in the world had so many homeless people?" (Over 1.5 million people used a shelter last year - that's one in every 200 Americans.) I was dumbfounded. I had no answer. But it told me again why I am participating in the Occupy movement. Something is drastically wrong in America when Madoff clones control our national finance and we can't pay for society's basic needs. Photographer Eliud Martinez tells the OWS story powerfully here through black and white photography.

But this week I had another series of graphics tell me what we can't afford. It got down to the itty bitty things that I need to conduct my job search in the city. Here are a few:

1) NYC cannot afford to fix the Metrocard sales machines at Park and 28th Street to downtown for four days, so I can't buy a ticket.

2) My government subcontracted Back to Work program can't afford to refill a printer cartridge all week for the printer we use to print our resumes so we have to go elsewhere and pay.

3) The shelter I live in at 30th St. can't afford to fix the conveyor belt that carries bags through the x-ray machine meaning that bags must be hand searched - thus increasing the opportunity that weapons can enter the facility.

4) The same shelter also cannot afford to fix the one elevator that works forcing many disabled men to walk up eight flights of stairs. I am lucky here, I can walk.

These are just a few small things I encountered this week that my country cannot afford. And if these indeed are true, then it seems that we cannot afford to be spending billions fighting wars and bailing out corrupt financial institutions any longer. Long live OWS. Long live the occupants.

Homeless 101.5: All in Good Humour

Jack Nicholson

Living in Bellevue, the crazy house - even as a re-purposed homeless shelter, is one thing but letting it drive you crazy is quite another.. So it pays to keep a sense of humour on oneself at all times. Having a good laugh can make a whole crappy day go away. Poof. Gone. And so I use an old Quentin’ Tarantino trick to remember the little things that happen that I might otherwise forget. I had heard once that when asked how he could write prison lingo film dialog that Tarantino said he had been thrown into the drunk tank once, and so he just wrote down everything all his cellmates said. If I wrote down everything my roommates said at Bellevue, I’d never be able to stop writing, so I just write down the memorable stuff. Here’s some:

 “Nah, it’ll just make me feel like a cop”, responds one guy to another on the elevator when asked if he wanted a free donut. 

The Back to Work program is a government program that is supposed to prepare people to re-enter the workforce after unemployment, but what it seems to excel at is in making people wait. For instance, at the subcontractor CEC (Career Educational Consultants) that I attend, after punching in on a clock, people must wait to sign into their class (yes, that's like punching in by hand a second time), this can take an hour or more because the hallway is just jammed – and there really is no class – just a room full of banged up old computers that people who have never used a computer before try to use. And after signing in there, you can sign up again on a clipboard to see your case worker or a job consultant. This could take an hour more, or two. And then there’s the line to get your Metrocard, the card used on buses and subways – a half hour at least. And so the place is always SRO with people waiting. 


Phone rings, lady waiting in the crowd answers and then responds: “I’m at the zoo”, she says. And this oddly, all becomes normal.

“I kissed a white girl in rehab” – Says a guy on 8^th avenue to his buddy as I walk by on the way to the soup kitchen for lunch.

The other day the library gave me a little tiny library card with a hole in it for my keychain. Funny, homeless people don’t have keychains, I thought.

Back at Bellevue a conversation ensues in the room in which the word ‘tomorrow’ was used twice by the same guy – and almost, as if on cue, Marvin and I break into a chorus from the musical Annie, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You're always A day A way! ”, we sang in unrehearsed unison. It was friggin' hilarious.

"HA, HA, HA, Ha!", bellowed another roomie. "That's Belleview at its finest!".

So the other night at the Occupy camp was 'Kid's Night' - a night in which middle class parents brought their kids down to spend the night in a tent. Now, if that's not funny, I don't know what is. "Lookie Skip", those are hippies over there", said dad. "Just like grampa used to be".

The laughs never end around here. Wonder what Bloomberg had for dinner tonight?

#Occupy Bank of America!

From novelist and blogger John Rachel, a positively brilliant post on our current financial/military mess. I won't do a spoiler here. Just read it.


Bank of America Declares War on the United States!

Bank of America has declared war on our country. The recently announced transfer of $75 trillion in derivatives - much of which consists of toxic assets - has the potential for bankrupting the nation. If the President and his economic team, led by already criminally complicit Tim Geithner, allows this quiet coup d’état against the interests of the American people - of a magnitude that literally puts at risk our survival as a functioning nation, we will know where they really stand. President Obama says he is serious about challenging the corruption of Wall Street and the banksters. 

I have a suggestion. 

I say we redeploy the troops which are allegedly returning from Iraq. How many branches and offices are there in the Bank of America empire? I think 60,000 battle-hardened soldiers would do the trick.

Unoccupy Iraq.

Occupy Bank of America!


Touche’ John. I certainly could not have said it better.

Homeless 101.4: Dispatches from the Front

Sylvia's Wedding

As I blog and assess the travails of being truly homeless and try, against all odds, to beat a system that is designed to make participants fail (Try getting out of poverty with just $200 in food stamps and cash of $45 a month from a system you helped build), I wrote the following letter to my good friend Sylvia today.  Sylvia and I go back to our first year of college (me on far left in photo - click it) as we were both art students just getting a grip on what it was we wanted to do with our lives. Over the last few weeks she has written me with care and concern over my current circumstance. So to Sylvia I said:

Dear Sylvia;

This environment (the shelter) is absolutely dire. I'm just trying to keep it as real as possible by writing about it and getting reactions from readers. The general consensus is that I am not crazy, but telling a story that needs to be told.

All of my roommates are ex-cons, one with 25 years in for murder and now on parole, but nobody is guilty in prison are they? They have all become institutionalised and now work within the system. It is an absolute crime that non-criminals like myself are housed with ex-convicts - it can only teach a person how to act according to the environment.

This is the system I protest. I have paid over a half a million in taxes in my life and the first time I need to use social services, I get this? Treated like a criminal. I am not bitter, but distrustful now, yes. I am monitored 24 hrs a day. There are guards in every building I inhabit - even my Back to Work program. I must account for every hour of my day (curfew at 10pm and out of the shelter at 8am every day - Back to Work program from 9-5)) - or, they kill my social programs ($200 a month food stamps and $45 a month cash assistance). Yippee!

I am working my ass off to get a job but I guarantee you, nobody has ever gotten an executive advertising gig out of this environment. I will be the first for sure :)

You are right. Write your congressperson about it :) Or protest on a level that works for you (what I'm doing). 

Our country is broke, out of international prestige and can't even care for it's own people. We have no business being in the 'nation building' business in Iraq and Afghanistan when we can't even support our own. The high speed trains, internet and national health care in Korea (and Europe) would absolutely shock you - more futuristic than Star Wars. Makes us look like 1800s cowboys. To get health insurance in Germany (required coverage for a work permit) all I did was fill out an Internet form and pay 60 Euro ($100) a month - no pre-conditions or med check.

Hilary Clinton even said last week that the nations who will rule the future will do it with economic might and not military power. We spend 800 billion a year on military (48% of the world's military spending) whilst China is building infrastructure, high speed rail and apartments as fast as they can - doing what they can, building at home for the people. Their military spending is just 10% of the world's - what it should be. They have a space program. We don't anymore. Figure it out.

My situation is merely an illustration of America - and not a very good one.

:David

And with that letter sent I busied myself about getting a job again, sending emails and maintaining my other blogs which serve as references to my work. And then in my email, I came across this from Chris Hedges, one of the patron saints of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It let me know that the things I was feeling were not uncommon.

Chris Hedges

“What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?”


Sylvia's note to me was in reference to my living in the shelter. "You've got to get out of that environment", she said. At the Starbucks where I work on my computer the girl next to me is studying psychology. Just by chance her computer screen had the title "Sensory Adaptation". This refers to the idea that the senses become less receptive to the same stimuli. Meaning for me, that the longer I stay in the shelter, the less odd it will seem to me - the less reaction I will have to treatment that is so blatantly, obviously wrong, the more I will adapt - like a victim falling in love with his kidnapper. That's why I need to work my way out. Quickly.

Homeless 101.3: "Are you bitter yet?"



Hugh MacLeod

 I was asked this one day by the boys in my room at the shelter. "Are you bitter yet?", Guy said. They had seen me come home from a less than good day in a fairly bitchy mood. And I joked with them back, “Bitter, no. Jaded for sure”. But on that day rule #1 of homeless 101 was solidified. Don’t trust anyone. Douglas,the man with Heritage Health and Housing and the man who picked me up initially at the airport had turned his card being a good but senseless administrator and screwed me out of $100 a month. $100 of my money. Never mind how he did it – explaining the ins and outs of this fucked-up system is even way too tedious for this blog and its dedicated readership. The point here is that he had a choice, and he could have done something that helped someone, yes, in this case me. But instead, he behaved like too many cogs in too many clattering social machines behave and did something that served him and his organization well, but not the people well.

I hope he enjoys the $100 in loan money he denied me from my government. Bet he had a cold one on me this weekend. Asshole. But assholes are in no short supply in these waters. In my second week, two sweaters were stolen from on top of my locker. We are told not to leave things there, but I had made a mistake. The sweaters had become damp in a rain. Am I bitter yet? Not yet. I worry about becoming institutionalized to the point that I say I am bitter though. Tonight at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration a man came up to me and said he had become a follower of this blog. He called the work being done here, “Path breaking”. I was taken aback a bit so I queried him some on what he meant. “Path breaking?”, I said. “I had someone else tell me that this is the first blog to address homelessness in an articulate and lighthearted manner. But I couldn’t believe that no one had ever done this before”. “No one has”, he returned. “What you are doing is needed. It’s fresh. It’s honest. It’s path breaking.”

Another woman who visits me at Zuccotti, a psychiatrist, has told me a similar thing. She wants to get me together with a professor friend of hers at Columbia on the homeless subject and see if we can do a New York Times story together. I would like that. So I’m not bitter quite yet. Taking whatever this is by the horns. Owning it. Writing it. Not dwelling on it but creating through it is a platform I could have never ordered. But a platform I would be terribly remiss in not addressing. There are people to be helped here. And there’s something artistic about seeing and experiencing something for the first time. You see it as you will never see it again. Henry Miller said it this way: "Lifes becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." And so that’s all I do. That and live.

One of my favorite signs at the demonstration says, “The beginning is near”. I like that. I hope it is correct. Because I’m not bitter yet. Pissed off sometimes. But not quite yet bitter. Yet.