What I Learned by Giving a Homeless Woman Shelter in My Home

Hard Times USA  

Medium / By Gus Catalano

What I Learned by Giving a Homeless Woman Shelter in My Home

'I think people who have been through some period of homelessness are stronger emotionally.'

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Annette Shaff/Shutterstock.com

November 28, 2013  |  

 

 

I never thought I would do a thing like this. We generally have a bad perception of homeless people. I’ve had my fair share throughout the US, Canada, India and Europe. From drunken abusive yelling, following me several blocks and asking me for drugs and to people with missing fingers and teeth tapping my driver’s window surrounding the car. I generally don’t give money to panhandlers anymore after some have rejected food from me when standing in front of a burger joint. I only give money to people selling Real Change and homeless shelters.

To keep her anonymity, I’ll refer to her as Emerald. I met Emerald near a local coop coffee shop, after some friendly conversation I found that she was homeless and needed a place to stay for the night. She had been sleeping at her friend’s storage shelter’s cold concrete floor since she couldn’t sleep in her beat-up car comfortably in the winter.

I agreed to let her stay.

You are probably yelling at me in your head, “what the hell were you thinking? aren't you afraid you’re going to get stabbed / robbed / raped / [insert your nightmare here]?” (That was the reaction of some of the few people I told)

Yea I was afraid of this too. However, I’ve dealt with enough sketchy bad people in my life to have a good filter right away for someone trying to get something from me with bad intentions. It’s a combination of body language, speech and what they are saying. I felt that she was telling the truth, and she was. Here I am alive, well and with all my possessions.

Emerald fell into what is considered temporary homelessness. This is more common in America than we would like to actually believe. Here is a prime example (story was stolen from somewhere else I think).

She had accidentally moved into a cheap shared room with someone she considered to be sexually abusive and threatening. She told me that after giving a hefty deposit, rent and moving in, the guy became a pervert and started to masturbate in front of her without any warning or consent, knowing she was dating someone. I could go into the gritty details, but you get the idea. She didn’t want to stay there, let alone leave her stuff here.

Ah! You’re thinking, she is dating someone, why doesn’t she stay with them? Her partner was also homeless temporarily staying at a friend’s cramped space and they didn’t really have room.

Why can’t she afford something else? She couldn’t, like most low-wage workers in America, she didn’t exactly have that much savings for a rainy day. I let her stay in my spare room with a spare bed, on the following conditions: No guests and can’t be here when I’m not home. Sounds fair right?

She started saving up money to find a cheap efficiency or studio to rent with her significant other. Things seemed to be going well, she could still get to/from work, look presentable, eat and sleep in a warm place.

Then a few days later, she lost her job. I could tell she started going into a downward spiral of depression, like anybody else would in a situation like this. She had been having trouble keeping a job for more than a few months, and was trying to save up money to get back to college to finish a Nursing degree.

On top of that now her car needed new brakes since the rotor was being scratched, talk about bad luck. With a whole ~$300 to her name, she can’t exactly blow half of it to pay someone to fix them. She eventually did it over the course of a few days with help for about $50.

Her future looked pretty bleak, she would spend part of the time she was with me venting about her current situation, previous jobs, and her past (I’m leaving out details on purpose). It was a bit heart breaking to see a near-complete stranger cry in front of you as she mentally accepted her current situation. To be honest, I don’t think I would have handled her situation as well as she did, I probably would have had a mental breakdown or suicidal thoughts. I think people who have been through some period of homelessness are stronger emotionally than most of people.

Take a short moment and really think about if you were to lose the shelter you’ve always had, became homeless and the emotions that would be going through your head.

Being homeless in the streets, means dealing with the fact that nobody can or is willing to help you have a warm shelter to sleep in and playing with the idea in your head that everyone around you is against you, every night, and every single waking minute. It’s a very dehumanizing, bleak outlook at other people around you. It’s no wonder many turn to alcohol, marijuana and harder drugs like LSD or much worse ones like Heroin to cope with this.

She’s been living with me for almost two weeks and she has finally mustered up enough money with her significant other to temporarily rent a really cheap hotel (~$100 a week if I remember right) while they get back on their feet. Now, please don’t misunderstand her as a freeloading couch-surfer. She offered to cook, clean and do errands for me while she was here. I refused all of them, since I wanted her to focus on improving her situation.

Now like most of us, we’ll probably be enjoying a nice thanksgiving in a warm home, with overwhelming amount of food that we probably won’t be able to finish. People in her situation won’t. Except her, as a parting gift, she’ll get to enjoy a nice thanksgiving dinner out of my pocket.

Sometimes, if we open our doors and hearts to strangers in need we would realize that they are not weak, lazy, bad or [insert stereotype here]. They are in fact stronger than us in many ways.

To end on a happier note, just remember
“Be excellent to each other. ”

And please help out at your local homeless shelter or services.

Certain Problems Need Socialist Solutions

A Quarterly of Politics and Culture

Certain Problems Need Socialist Solutions

 

By Maria Svart - October 3, 2012 

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, held on September 10, 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

I’m told that Michael Harrington once wistfully commented to colleagues that he had written sixteen books, and on the dust jacket of the sixteenth, the publisher had put, “By the author of The Other America.” It is entirely fitting that Mike should be best remembered for his first work. It influenced President Kennedy, and President Johnson sent Mike a pen from the signing of the Economic Opportunity Act, the War on Poverty. The book has sold well over a million copies.

We should remember, however, that Mike’s other fifteen books were about socialism. Unlike many on the left, Mike was not an impossibilist. He believed that through union organization and an expanded safety net, the lives of everyday people—both the poor and the middle class—could be vastly improved, even under capitalism. Indeed, Mike-the-Socialist was far more optimistic about this than many liberals are today.

Nonetheless, in a subsequent essay, “Poverty and the Eighties,” Mike concluded: “There was progress; there could be more progress; the poor need not always be with us. But it will take a political movement much more imaginative and militant than those in existence in 1980 to bring that progress about.”

What happened? Why, from 1962 to the present, has that movement not come about? Indeed, everything now seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Last July an Associated Press survey of economists predicted that the poverty rate in 2012 would rise to the same level it was in 1965, the year after President Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act.


When Mike was writing The Other America, the United States was entering a period of prosperity and rising standards of living that many people now think of as the good ol’ days. The great economic boost from the Second World War had not yet crested. In addition, there was a stimulus program: $35 billion a month (in today’s dollars) for the Vietnam War. Of course, many people were left out of the rapid rise of family income—the elderly, people of color, often women, and those in impoverished regions such as Appalachia. But it seemed altogether reasonable then, and more important, non-threatening, to suggest that those left out be given a chance to get in. Rising prosperity would cover the costs. Government need only promote equal opportunity, and the income would take care of itself.

But in the United States, nothing is ever straightforward.

DEPENDING ON which numbers you stressed, poverty in the early 1960s was either a mainly white problem or a mainly non-white problem. (Non-white is the Census Bureau’s phrase.) In 1964, there were seven million white families in poverty and two million non-white families. Clearly, a white problem. But while the incidence of poverty for the whole population was 20 percent, it was 44 percent for non-white families. Clearly, a non-white problem.

You and I know that poverty is poverty. But because white poverty was better hidden and less visible, and because the major social movement from the mid-fifties on was the civil rights movement, poverty began to be viewed as something pertaining to brown people, and anti-poverty measures were often seen as what the government did to help black people. Needless to say, this view was helped along by powerful economic and political actors.

The civil rights movement rightly equated equal opportunity with integration, in schools, neighborhoods, and jobs. The movement sought access to what until then had been, in effect, affirmative action for white Americans. But for many whites, equal opportunity was one thing, and integration was something entirely different.

The negative perceptions of integration were borne of racism and hysteria, but some industries learned to profit from that hysteria. In housing, the white working class had benefitted from postwar government mortgage support and other programs, and home ownership became one of its main forms of savings. The real estate industry’s criminal practice of blockbusting (to deliberately spark white flight) and the bank’s thieving practice of redlining (to automatically deny loans to certain communities) meant that housing integration often did result in reduced home values.

In the labor market, people of color had long been relegated to the worst jobs and concentrated in sectors that were deliberately excluded from some legal labor protections. Professionals—doctors and lawyers—pass on their money and status by sending their children to graduate school. Skilled tradesmen couldn’t do that. Instead, white tradesmen got their children (at least the boys) into the union apprenticeship program, which transferred their skill to the next generation. Was it cronyism and unfair? Indeed, it was. Did the demand to open a limited number of apprenticeships to all comers cause some union members to feel that a benefit was being taken from them? Indeed, it did. And was this necessary integration a perfect opportunity for the Right to exploit? Indeed, it was. The white backlash against civil rights and, with it, the War on Poverty was rapidly in the making.

Starting in the 1970s things got worse. The economic growth rate began what is now five decades of stagnation. Higher-wage, unionized, industrial jobs vanished as the Midwest became the Rust Belt. The U.S. balance of trade took a nose dive. Wall Street deregulation facilitated the rapid transfer of wealth from workers and homeowners to bankers. Today, the threat to the middle class is widely understood. But while working people felt the effects quickly, it took almost two decades for that perception to register in the public mind. During that period, many white middle-class people began to feel that their problems were being ignored, especially by liberals and Democrats who continued to advocate for the poor.

Right-wing organizations and the Republicans, by virtue of their vociferous opposition to anti-poverty measures, were thereby able to pose as the champions of the white middle class, without actually doing anything to help them—just the opposite.

In his introduction to the 1993 edition of The Other America, Irving Howe noted that poverty remains. “This is not the result of some decree of nature…nor the result of the ‘laziness’ of the poor,” he said. “It is due to social neglect and cynicism. It is also due to a failure of political will.” To this we must add that it is also due to a mass social base, mobilized in outright opposition, with well-funded political backing and ideological infrastructure.

WHAT ARE we to make of this, as we look for ways to continue Mike’s legacy of combating poverty? In his essay “Poverty in the Seventies,” Mike said, “if we solve the problem of the Other America, we will have learned how to solve the problems of all of America.” In this case and at this time, the converse is also true. If, and only if, we can solve the problems of all of America can we solve the problems of the poor.

The broader the problems we attempt to solve, the broader the base will be for progressive social change overall. This means that instead of thinking of poverty as a distinct and static category, defined by income, we need to think instead of the process—of impoverishment. This process effects far larger numbers than are officially poor.

Impoverishment is people losing—their jobs, their homes, their health care, their pensions, their chance to go to college or send their kids. It has no upper or lower limits. Impoverishment doesn’t even have to occur; just living under the ongoing threat of it can ruin your life. Impoverishment is what is happening to the middle class. Impoverishment allows us to talk about poverty with the middle class. And it is what will allow us to build that democratic, majoritarian movement we need to overcome poverty.

This means that we should educate about race-based inequalities and be explicit about racial justice, and at the same time fight for greater security for all people. Increasing Social Security benefits, raising unemployment compensation, universal paid sick leave, moratoria on evictions and student loans, single-payer health care, investing in child and elder care, a living income for those unable to work, a massive green energy public works program, targeting the jobs to address the communities hardest hit by the recession, raising the minimum wage, and enforcing strong union rights to protect every workers’ rights, no matter their citizenship status or industry. This is not a shopping list. It is a new kind of comprehensive, universal social safety net program, if it is truly implemented for all. Actually, it isn’t new at all. President Roosevelt thought of most of it, but the Democrats have forgotten.
At the same time, we need to remember that there was a reason that Mike worked so tirelessly to build an explicitly socialist organization. We must stress that there are certain problems to which only socialists, and socialism, have solutions.

Let me give you an example. “Skilled Work, Without the Worker” ran a recent New York Times headline, describing the new generation of industrial robots that surpass human dexterity and speed. We see mechanization in self-service cashier machines at the grocery store, but I’m talking about robots that assemble electric razors so rapidly that they have to be enclosed in glass cases to protect the human workers who service them. FoxConn, the brutal Chinese company that assembles Apple products (among others), plans to install over a million such robots. Speaking of his current one million workers, the Chairman of Foxconn said, “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.” In addition to assembling goods, such robots are packing goods and farm products for shipment faster than people can. They retrieve orders from warehouse shelves almost as fast as an Olympic sprinter, and they do it twenty-four hours a day, every day, with no coffee break.

This is just starting to happen, but even without the next generation of robots fully in place, the UN International Labor Organization reports that half of the world’s work force can’t find a regular full-time job. The fact is, we have reached the point where the satisfaction of material human needs no longer requires that every adult on the planet work a forty-hour week. The jobs are not coming back.

This gives us a choice. We can go the capitalist route in which the new technology leads to unemployment and poverty, or we can go the socialist route where we all stay in school longer, work a shorter week, take longer vacations, and retire sooner. Those are the choices.

“But,” you say, “why can’t we just work less and take longer vacations under capitalism?” My response is: “don’t ask me, just ask any capitalist.” They will explain why it isn’t possible, and hire an army of lobbyists to stop it, and an army of professors to teach your kids that it is a silly idea, and an army of media commentators to repeat their message.

Of course it’s possible, but they won’t allow it! Capitalism is suicidal! Mike knew it, Dissent knows it, the Democratic Socialists of America know it. The future must be socialist!

Maria Svart is the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America.

What is Democratic Socialism?

The Young Democratic Socialists (YDS)

The Youth Section of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

What is Democratic Socialism

Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs and not to make profits for an elite few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed, toward greater economic and social democracy, so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives. Democracy and socialism go hand and hand. All over the world, wherever the idea of democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well—everywhere but in the United States. This is due to misrepresentations of socialism that have been popularized by the business community in this country.

Democratic socialists do not want society to be taken over by an all-powerful government bureaucracy. In addition, we don’t want private business bureaucracies to control our society either. Instead, we want social and economic decisions to be made by those whom they most affect. We believe that the workers and the communities that are most affected by economic institutions should own and control them.

Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-run cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers’ and community representatives. Democratic Socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries may be best run as cooperatives. Democratic Socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for various consumer goods.

Many people assume that in a socialist society people will lose their incentive to work. We strongly disagree. The incentive to workmay, in fact, be strengthened in a socialist society because workers will become the owners of their place of employment and will have a stake in its productivity. People enjoy their work if they find it meaningful and if it enhances their lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we recognize that unappealing jobs will long remain. These tasks should be spread among as many people as possible rather than distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they currently are under capitalism. In addition, this undesirable work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work within the economy.

To realize our goals and move toward socialism in the U.S. we need a new generation of leaders. Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, young people have played a critical role in American politics. They have been a tremendous force for both political and cultural change in this country: in limiting the U.S.’s options in the war in Vietnam, in forcing corporations to divest from the racist South African regime, in reforming universities, and in bringing issues of sexual orientation and gender discrimination to public attention. Though none of these struggles were fought by young people alone, they all featured youth as leaders in multi-generational progressive coalitions. Young people are greatly needed in today’s struggles as well: to gain universal health care coverage, to build stronger labor unions, to strengthen and universalize welfare benefits, and to hold multinational corporations responsible for their actions. Through the socialist movement and the Democratic Socialists of America you can help build a progressive majority and become part of the solution to social and economic injustice here and abroad.

The Plot to Destroy America -- and What We Can Do to Stop

           

 

Twelve Books / By Thom Hartmann          

      

Thom Hartmann: The Plot to Destroy America -- and What We Can Do to Stop It

         

How to stop the looters from taking the reins of power and pillaging the nation into collapse -- an excerpt from the new book, "The Crash of 2016."

 

 

November 11, 2013  |  

 

 

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The following is an excerpt from Thom Hartmann's new book, THE CRASH OF 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It (Twelve Books, 2013). 

 

There are very few Americans still alive who heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March 1933, address the nation as he was being sworn into office. Which is why many Americans today believe that when FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was talking about World War II. But Roosevelt said that long before Hitler had even fully consolidated his own power in Germany.

 

Instead, the fear—and the war—was here in America. He was speaking of the Great Depression.

The week of his inauguration, every state in the country closed their banks. The federal government couldn’t make its own payroll. A quarter of working-​age Americans were unemployed— some measurements put it at a third— and unemployment in minority communities was off the scale.

 

While Herbert Hoover, when campaigning against Roosevelt in 1932, had denied there was hunger in America, and said, “Even our hoboes are well fed,” the truth was that the single largest “occupation” at the time among Americans was “scavenger”: people following food trucks and trains, catching the bits that fell off, or doing what we today call “Dumpster diving.”

 

It was so widespread that farmers guarded their farms with shotguns. Every night when restaurants dumped their uneaten food in trash cans in back or side alleys, crowds gathered to pick through, and often fight over, the leftovers.

 

Roosevelt spoke bluntly about that situation in Great Depression America.

 

“Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.”

 

Dissatisfaction with our economic and political systems had reached such a height that machine guns guarded the Capitol and White House. “Hoovervilles”— tent cities of homeless people—had sprung up in every city of America. Bankers and the wealthy elite traveled with elaborate and heavily armed security details, and it was no longer safe for John D. Rockefeller to repeat his earlier publicity stunt of going out onto a New York City street to hand out shiny new dimes to beggars.

This was America during the last Great Crash, a crash that within a decade led to a world war killing more than 60 million people.

 

Eighty years later, we are well into the next Great Crash, which future generations will call the Crash of 2016. And this one could be even worse than the last one.

 

There are remarkable similarities between the coming Crash of 2016 and the last Great Crash, which began on Black Tuesday in 1929.

 

In fact, there are similarities between both these crashes, and the other two crashes in American history that both led to horrific wars. The first was the economic disaster of the late 1660s to the early 1770s that led Britain to pass (among other things) the Tea Act in 1773, sparking the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War. The second was the Great Panic of 1857, which preceded the Civil War.

 

It was roughly eighty years from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, and eighty years from the Civil War to the Great Depression and World War II. And here we are, eighty years after that great disaster. It takes about eighty years for those who remember to thoroughly die out.

We have to see these similarities, to hear their stories, and to get a handle on how to move around them if we hope to mitigate the damages of the Crash of 2016.

 

The Great Forgetting

 

For one, each Great Crash is separated by four generations (there’s those eighty years).

Arnold Toynbee and others, over the millennia, have pointed out that when the generation that remembers the last Great War has died out, a nation is set on course—some would say doomed—to have another war. While the horrors of war are forgotten, the monuments and “heroes” of war are everywhere.

 

The same is true of the death of the last person remembering a Great Crash.

 

Daniel Quinn popularized the phrase “the Great Forgetting,” and it’s true not only of civilizations but of generations as well. Our memories— as a culture—are largely defined by the practical memories of those who participate in media and government, mostly people from their thirties to their sixties. So, at the most, we as a popular culture remember fifty or so years of history at a slice.

My grandfather was a socialist, my dad a Republican. I’m a progressive.

 

My grandfather, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, had no recollection of a crisis during a previous “socialist” time, and so at one time thought the Soviet experiment might even work out well. My dad, born in 1929, had no memory of a crisis during the administration of a Republican; in fact, his experience of Eisenhower’s presidency had been that of a Great Prosperity. And, born in the 1950s, I don’t remember the battles or challenges that my dad saw FDR face.

 

There are great cycles to all of history, including American history. And this cycle rolls forward as each new generation comes to power without personal memory of the mistakes previous generations made, and without memory of the solutions previous generations employed.

 

Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe suggested, in their seminal 1997 book The Fourth Turning, that the United States would, in the first decades of the twenty-​first century, once again enter the catastrophic phase of a historic cycle that happens every fourth generation (roughly every eighty years): an economic collapse followed by a great war.

 

It was a bold prediction, given the Clinton Prosperity in the late 1990s. But it was prophetic.

Less than a decade later, in the fall of 2006, the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis—the part of the larger Fed that compiles housing statistics—noted that housing starts dropped 14.6 percent that month, bringing the total for the twelve-​month federal budget year of October‑to‑October to a 27 percent crash. To make matters worse, building permits were also in free fall, having dropped 28 percent year‑to‑year at that point.

 

This was the housing bubble bursting, which triggered the financial crisis of 2007–08.

 

The Great Forgetting had again descended on the nation, and eighty years after Black Tuesday 1929, the United States was in two full-​scale wars and constructing a massive worldwide war machine built on Predator drones.

 

In his First Inaugural Address in January 2009, a young President Barack Obama spoke, just as FDR had four generations earlier, to a nation again gripped by an economic crisis.

 

It was a balmy 42 degrees in Washington, DC, the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in nearly eighty years earlier in the midst of a Great Depression.

 

But as if the political and economic world had grown colder and harder, it was only 28 degrees on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day, with those on the National Mall exhaling white wisps into the freezing air.

 

I stood about a hundred feet from President Obama as he was sworn in. Just behind him, George W. Bush rolled his eyes and made silly, exaggerated “flipper” applause motions through much of the speech. Dick Cheney, in a wheelchair and covered with a blanket, barely twitched. Their wives sat behind them.

 

To my left were the assembled members of Congress and the Supreme Court, in front of me the new president, and to my right was the international press corps. In front of the president were nearly two million people, an ocean of humanity that stretched from the Capitol, where we stood on a second-​floor balcony, down the National Mall to and beyond where the Washington Memorial pierced the sky.

 

He began by talking about how the words dictated by the Constitution to swear a new president into office had “been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.”

 

It was the perfect oratorical device, because that very month over 800,000 Americans had lost their jobs, and over a half million had come to the brink of losing their homes. The stock market had crashed, banks were in a crisis worldwide, and two foreign wars were sucking us dry and devastating our image around the world.

 

“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood,” President Obama said. “Our nation is at war against a far-​reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

 

“Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

 

“These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” Obama continued. “Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.”

 

The cycle had come around again. While the last Great Crash is preserved in our history books, newspaper archives, and old film reels, very few people alive actually remember it, thus setting it up to happen again.

 

But just as Roosevelt had done in his first inaugural by saying, “The people of the United States have not failed,” President Obama inspired hope on that day of crisis.

 

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time,” he said. “But know this, America: They will be met.”

 

Those final four words brought an eruption of applause from many of the members of Congress, and a roar from the three million people stretching down the National Mall all the way to the Washington Monument. Reporters near me leaned forward in rapt attention.

 

Sounding like a modern-​day Franklin Roosevelt, President Obama pressed on.

 

“The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.

 

“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.

 

“We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.

 

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

“All this we can do. All this we will do.”

 

The reality, however, remained the same. There were few still alive, when Obama was sworn in, who remembered Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression.

 

And, thus, as soon as his speech was over, the president’s hopeful and idealistic rhetoric ran headfirst into the Great Forgetting, guaranteeing the Crash of 2016.

 

But what, exactly, is it that we collectively forget every fourth generation that repeatedly threatens the survival of the United States?

 

 

The Economic Royalists

 

 

After the last Great Crash, FDR understood he was up against more than an economic crisis. He was also up against a counterrevolution, which had caused the Great Crash and was unabashedly seeking to reclaim the power of our government and economy that they’d held for over a decade. They were America’s plutocracy—the wealthy bankers and industrialists who put their own personal enrichment ahead of the well-being of the nation with disastrous results.

 

In his First Inaugural in 1933, FDR alluded to the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” who had “failed.”

 

He told the nation, “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.”

 

He added, “True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money.

 

“Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence.

 

“They know only the rules of a generation of self-​seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

 

Roosevelt understood that while genuine kings and theocrats had been pushed to the fringes of the world in the century and a half since the American Revolution, the forces of plutocracy—economic rule by the very wealthy—hadn’t really gone anywhere. And they’d been running amok during the previous decade.

 

By 1936, Roosevelt had a name for them: the “Economic Royalists.” Eight years later, against the backdrop of World War II, FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, referred to these plutocratic forces as “Fascists.”

 

During our Revolution, they were called “Loyalists” and “Tories. ”In the early days of our new nation, they eventually called themselves “Federalists” and were led by America’s second president, John Adams, and our first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

 

Early on, they were rather benign; the real cancer came as the nation became richer.

By the last half of the nineteenth century, during the Gilded Age in America, the newspapers called them the “Robber Barons.”

 

Today, these forces of the very wealthy are often simply referred to as “the 1 percent” (even though they actually represent a much smaller number than that—a tiny fraction of the top 1 percent of Americans, economically).

 

Regardless of their name, their rise to power has always been a harbinger of impending collapse.

Their greed made the War of Independence inevitable. They pulled the strings of both the North and South during the Civil War. And they provoked the stock market crash of 1929 triggering the Great Depression. In fact, our history is one of constant struggle against this cultural infection.

 

And while iconic figures and people’s movements have arisen throughout history to confront these Royalists, there always comes a crack in the struggle when the Great Forgetting takes hold. And the Economic Royalists jump into this opening to take the reins of power and pillage the nation into collapse.

 

American history proves this point.

 

From the book THE CRASH OF 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It. Copyright (c) 2013 by Thom Hartmann. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

 

 

Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is The Last Hours of Humanity.

Public Banking in Costa Rica: A Remarkable Little-known Model

Public Banking in Costa Rica

A Remarkable Little-known Model

by Ellen Hodgson Brown / November 11th, 2013

In Costa Rica, publicly-owned banks have been available for so long and work so well that people take for granted that any country that knows how to run an economy has a public banking option. Costa Ricans are amazed to hear there is only one public depository bank in the United States (the Bank of North Dakota), and few people have private access to it.

So says political activist Scott Bidstrup, who writes:

For the last decade, I have resided in Costa Rica, where we have had a “Public Option” for the last 64 years.

There are 29 licensed banks, mutual associations and credit unions in Costa Rica, of which four were established as national, publicly-owned banks in 1949. They have remained open and in public hands ever since—in spite of enormous pressure by the I.M.F. [International Monetary Fund] and the U.S. to privatize them along with other public assets. The Costa Ricans have resisted that pressure—because the value of a public banking option has become abundantly clear to everyone in this country.

During the last three decades, countless private banks, mutual associations (a kind of Savings and Loan) and credit unions have come and gone, and depositors in them have inevitably lost most of the value of their accounts.

But the four state banks, which compete fiercely with each other, just go on and on. Because they are stable and none have failed in 31 years, most Costa Ricans have moved the bulk of their money into them.  Those four banks now account for fully 80% of all retail deposits in Costa Rica, and the 25 private institutions share among themselves the rest.

According to a 2003 report by the World Bank, the public sector banks dominating Costa Rica’s onshore banking system include three state-owned commercial banks (Banco Nacional, Banco de Costa Rica, and Banco Crédito Agrícola de Cartago) and a special-charter bank called Banco Popular,  which in principle is owned by all Costa Rican workers. These banks accounted for 75 percent of total banking deposits in 2003.

In Competition Policies in Emerging Economies: Lessons and Challenges from Central America and Mexico (2008), Claudia Schatan writes that Costa Rica nationalized all of its banks and imposed a monopoly on deposits in 1949. Effectively, only state-owned banks existed in the country after that.  The monopoly was loosened in the 1980s and was eliminated in 1995. But the extensive network of branches developed by the public banks and the existence of an unlimited state guarantee on their deposits has made Costa Rica the only country in the region in which public banking clearly predominates.
Scott Bidstrup comments:

By 1980, the Costa Rican economy had grown to the point where it was by far the richest nation in Latin America in per-capita terms. It was so much richer than its neighbors that Latin American economic statistics were routinely quoted with and without Costa Rica included. Growth rates were in the double digits for a generation and a half.  And the prosperity was broadly shared. Costa Rica’s middle class – nonexistent before 1949 – became the dominant part of the economy during this period.  Poverty was all but abolished, favelas [shanty towns] disappeared, and the economy was booming.

This was not because Costa Rica had natural resources or other natural advantages over its neighbors. To the contrary, says Bidstrup:

At the conclusion of the civil war of 1948 (which was brought on by the desperate social conditions of the masses), Costa Rica was desperately poor, the poorest nation in the hemisphere, as it had been since the Spanish Conquest.

The winner of the 1948 civil war, José “Pepe” Figueres, now a national hero, realized that it would happen again if nothing was done to relieve the crushing poverty and deprivation of the rural population.  He formulated a plan in which the public sector would be financed by profits from state-owned enterprises, and the private sector would be financed by state banking.

A large number of state-owned capitalist enterprises were founded. Their profits were returned to the national treasury, and they financed dozens of major infrastructure projects.  At one point, more than 240 state-owned corporations were providing so much money that Costa Rica was building infrastructure like mad and financing it largely with cash. Yet it still had the lowest taxes in the region, and it could still afford to spend 30% of its national income on health and education.

A provision of the Figueres constitution guaranteed a job to anyone who wanted one. At one point, 42% of the working population of Costa Rica was working for the government directly or in one of the state-owned corporations.  Most of the rest of the economy not involved in the coffee trade was working for small mom-and-pop companies that were suppliers to the larger state-owned firms—and it was state banking, offering credit on favorable terms, that made the founding and growth of those small firms possible.  Had they been forced to rely on private-sector banking, few of them would have been able to obtain the financing needed to become established and prosperous.  State banking was key to the private sector growth. Lending policy was government policy and was designed to facilitate national development, not bankers’ wallets. Virtually everything the country needed was locally produced.  Toilets, window glass, cement, rebar, roofing materials, window and door joinery, wire and cable, all were made by state-owned capitalist enterprises, most of them quite profitable. Costa Rica was the dominant player regionally in most consumer products and was on the move internationally.

Needless to say, this good example did not sit well with foreign business interests. It earned Figueres two coup attempts and one attempted assassination.  He responded by abolishing the military (except for the Coast Guard), leaving even more revenues for social services and infrastructure.
When attempted coups and assassination failed, says Bidstrup, Costa Rica was brought down with a form of economic warfare called the “currency crisis” of 1982. Over just a few months, the cost of financing its external debt went from 3% to extremely high variable rates (27% at one point).

As a result, along with every other Latin American country, Costa Rica was facing default. Bidstrup writes:

That’s when the IMF and World Bank came to town.
Privatize everything in sight, we were told.  We had little choice, so we did.  End your employment guarantee, we were told.  So we did.  Open your markets to foreign competition, we were told.  So we did.  Most of the former state-owned firms were sold off, mostly to foreign corporations.  Many ended up shut down in a short time by foreigners who didn’t know how to run them, and unemployment appeared (and with it, poverty and crime) for the first time in a decade.

Many of the local firms went broke or sold out quickly in the face of ruinous foreign competition.  Very little of Costa Rica’s manufacturing economy is still locally owned. And so now, instead of earning forex [foreign exchange] through exporting locally produced goods and retaining profits locally, these firms are now forex liabilities, expatriating their profits and earning relatively little through exports.  Costa Ricans now darkly joke that their economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States.

The dire effects of the IMF’s austerity measures were confirmed in a 1993 book excerpt by Karen Hansen-Kuhn titled Structural Adjustment in Costa Rica: Sapping the Economy. She noted that Costa Rica stood out in Central America because of its near half-century history of stable democracy and well-functioning government, featuring the region’s largest middle class and the absence of both an army and a guerrilla movement. Eliminating the military allowed the government to support a Scandinavian-type social-welfare system that still provides free health care and education, and has helped produce the lowest infant mortality rate and highest average life expectancy in all of Central America.

In the 1970s, however, the country fell into debt when coffee and other commodity prices suddenly fell, and oil prices shot up. To get the dollars to buy oil, Costa Rica had to resort to foreign borrowing; and in 1980, the U.S. Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker raised interest rates to unprecedented levels.

In The Gods of Money (2009), William Engdahl fills in the back story. In 1971, Richard Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, causing it to drop precipitously in international markets. In 1972, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Nixon had a clandestine meeting with the Shah of Iran. In 1973, a group of powerful financiers and politicians met secretly in Sweden and discussed effectively “backing” the dollar with oil. An arrangement was then finalized in which the oil-producing countries of OPEC would sell their oil only in U.S. dollars.  The quid pro quo was military protection and a strategic boost in oil prices.  The dollars would wind up in Wall Street and London banks, where they would fund the burgeoning U.S. debt. In 1974, an oil embargo conveniently caused the price of oil to quadruple.  Countries without sufficient dollar reserves had to borrow from Wall Street and London banks to buy the oil they needed.  Increased costs then drove up prices worldwide.
By late 1981, says Hansen-Kuhn, Costa Rica had one of the world’s highest levels of debt per capita, with debt-service payments amounting to 60 percent of export earnings. When the government had to choose between defending its stellar social-service system or bowing to its creditors, it chose the social services. It suspended debt payments to nearly all its creditors, predominately commercial banks. But that left it without foreign exchange. That was when it resorted to borrowing from the World Bank and IMF, which imposed “austerity measures” as a required condition. The result was to increase poverty levels dramatically.

Bidstrup writes of subsequent developments:

Indebted to the IMF, the Costa Rican government had to sell off its state-owned enterprises, depriving it of most of its revenue, and the country has since been forced to eat its seed corn. No major infrastructure projects have been conceived and built to completion out of tax revenues, and maintenance of existing infrastructure built during that era must wait in line for funding, with predictable results.
About every year, there has been a closure of one of the private banks or major savings coöps.  In every case, there has been a corruption or embezzlement scandal, proving the old saying that the best way to rob a bank is to own one.  This is why about 80% of retail deposits in Costa Rica are now held by the four state banks.  They’re trusted.
Costa Rica still has a robust economy, and is much less affected by the vicissitudes of rising and falling international economic tides than enterprises in neighboring countries, because local businesses can get money when they need it.  During the credit freezeup of 2009, things went on in Costa Rica pretty much as normal. Yes, there was a contraction in the economy, mostly as a result of a huge drop in foreign tourism, but it would have been far worse if local business had not been able to obtain financing when it was needed.  It was available because most lending activity is set by government policy, not by a local banker’s fear index.

Stability of the local economy is one of the reasons that Costa Rica has never had much difficulty in attracting direct foreign investment, and is still the leader in the region in that regard.  And it is clear to me that state banking is one of the principal reasons why.

The value and importance of a public banking sector to the overall stability and health of an economy has been well proven by the Costa Rican experience.  Meanwhile, our neighbors, with their fully privatized banking systems have, de facto, encouraged people to keep their money in Mattress First National, and as a result, the financial sectors in neighboring countries have not prospered.  Here, they have—because most money is kept in banks that carry the full faith and credit of the Republic of Costa Rica, so the money is in the banks and available for lending.  While our neighbors’ financial systems lurch from crisis to crisis, and suffer frequent resulting bank failures, the Costa Rican public system just keeps chugging along.  And so does the Costa Rican economy.

He concludes:

My dream scenario for any third world country wishing to develop, is to do exactly what Costa Rica did so successfully for so many years. Invest in the Holy Trinity of national development—health, education and infrastructure.  Pay for it with the earnings of state capitalist enterprises that are profitable because they are protected from ruinous foreign competition; and help out local private enterprise get started and grow, and become major exporters, with stable state-owned banks that prioritize national development over making bankers rich.  It worked well for Costa Rica for a generation and a half.  It can work for any other country as well.  Including the United States.

The new Happy Planet Index, which rates countries based on how many long and happy lives they produce per unit of environmental output, has ranked Costa Rica #1 globally.  The Costa Rican model is particularly instructive at a time when US citizens are groaning under the twin burdens of taxes and increased health insurance costs. Like the Costa Ricans, we could reduce taxes while increasing social services and rebuilding infrastructure, if we were to allow the government to make some money itself; and a giant first step would be for it to establish some publicly-owned banks.

Ellen Brown is an attorney in Los Angeles and the author of 11 books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth about Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how a private banking cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Read other articles by Ellen, or visit Ellen's website.

This article was posted on Monday, November 11th, 2013 at 7:44pm and is filed under Banks/Banking, Costa Rica.

Op-Ed Columnist

Obamacare: The Rest of the Story

By BILL KELLER

Published: October 13, 2013 

Unless you’ve been bamboozled by the frantic fictions of the right wing, you know that the Affordable Care Act, familiarly known as Obamacare, has begun to accomplish its first goal: enrolling millions of uninsured Americans, many of whom have been living one medical emergency away from the poorhouse. You realize those computer failures that have hampered sign-ups in the early days — to the smug delight of the critics — confirm that there is enormous popular demand. You have probably figured out that the real mission of the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable. 

 

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Bill Keller

What you may not know is that the Affordable Care Act is also beginning, with little fanfare, to accomplish its second great goal: to promote reforms to our overpriced, underperforming health care system. Irony of ironies, the people who ought to be most vigorously applauding this success story are Republicans, because it is being done not by government decree but almost entirely with market incentives. 

Using mainly the marketplace clout of Medicare and some seed money, the new law has spurred innovation and efficiency. And while those new insurance exchanges that are now lurching into business will touch roughly 1 in 10 Americans (the rest of us are already covered by private employer plans or by government programs like Medicare), these systemic reforms potentially touch every patient, every taxpayer. 

“This is the 90 percent of the story that doesn’t make the headlines,” said Sam Glick, who follows health care reform for the Oliver Wyman consulting firm. 

Since the Affordable Care Act was signed three years ago, more than 370 innovative medical practices, called accountable care organizations, have sprung up across the country, with 150 more in the works. At these centers, Medicare or private insurers reward doctors financially when their patients require fewer hospital stays, emergency room visits and surgeries — exactly the opposite of what doctors have traditionally been paid to do. The more money the organization saves, the more money its participating providers share. And the best way to save costs (which is, happily, also the best way to keep patients alive) is to catch problems before they explode into emergencies. 

Thus the accountable care organizations have become the Silicon Valley of preventive care, laboratories of invention driven by the entrepreneurial energy of start-ups. 

These organizations have invested heavily in information technology so they can crunch patient records to identify those most at risk, those who are overdue for checkups, those who have not been filling their prescriptions and presumably have not been taking their meds. They then deploy new medical SWAT teams — including not just doctors but health coaches, care coordinators, nurse practitioners — to intervene and encourage patients to live healthier lives. 

Advocates of these reforms like to say that they are transforming medicine from the treatment of disease to the treatment of patients — and ultimately the treatment of populations. 

At Cornerstone Health Care, a 250-doctor organization in North Carolina, patients with a history of congestive heart failure get a daily phone call from a nurse asking them to step on a scale and report their weight, the best early indicator of an impending emergency. The next stage, Grace Terrell, the president of Cornerstone, told me, will be to give these patients scales that automatically transmit their weight directly to the nurse. (“If the N.S.A. is Big Brother, we’re Big Mother,” Terrell says of the weight surveillance program.) Diabetes patients are invited in for low-cost pedicures. Why? Because diabetics are notoriously vulnerable to infections that lead to amputation, and a common cause of those infections is ingrown toenails. (Both of these practices were pioneered by CareMore, a California-based company that runs clinics for Medicare patients and that has become a major role model since Obamacare.) 

The Heritage Provider Network, a huge accountable care organization in California, offers Medicare patients free dance lessons, healthy cooking classes and casino excursions that feature “brain power” activities on the bus. The Greater Buffalo United Accountable Healthcare Network, a new, seven-doctor practice in upstate New York, is building a gym and a teaching kitchen for its patients, who are mostly inner-city minorities. 

“Most doctors were on treadmills,” plodding through their routines, said Raul Vazquez, the chief executive of the Buffalo venture. Now they’re reinventing health care for the inner city with an invigorated sense of mission. 

This is not the heroic medicine that turns surgeons into gods and emergency rooms into Hollywood material. Don’t expect to see a toenail-clipping episode on “Grey’s Anatomy.” But these services address the embarrassing fact, reiterated in study after study after study, that Americans pay much more for medical care than other developed countries, with no better results. 

Obamacare addresses this problem by going, as Willie Sutton famously advised, where the money is. It concentrates resources on the unhealthiest. According to Kaiser Health News, the sickest 1 percent of patients account for 21 percent of health care costs; 5 percent account for half of the total costs. 

“There are organizations that are bringing emergency room visits down by 15 to 20 percent,” Glick said. “Hospital admissions, you see numbers like 20 and 30 percent. That can make a huge difference not only in the cost of care but also in the quality of care.” 

The best sign that these innovations are beginning to go viral is that they have caught the attention of some giant businesses. Drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS are now partnering with hospitals or accountable care organizations to give patients convenient points of access and to coordinate treatment. Companies that spend heavily on employee health care plans are learning the best lessons of the Obamacare laboratory. Walmart, the country’s biggest private employer, will fly workers who need transplants or heart or spinal surgery to premier facilities like the Mayo or Cleveland Clinics to assure that their problems get fixed right the first time, avoiding costly readmissions. 

Obamacare has also had some important indirect consequences. According to Catherine Dower of the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California at San Francisco, since the Affordable Care Act states have become more aggressive about challenging some of the protectionist laws that prevent well-qualified medical professionals — pharmacists, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, emergency medical technicians — from offering some kinds of primary care. California just passed a law that will allow pharmacists to check your blood pressure and cholesterol level and to dispense prescription birth control and antismoking drugs. Letting pharmacists perform services that don’t require seven years of medical training makes those services cheaper and more convenient, increasing the chances consumers will take better care of themselves. 

Dower said that while the formal doctor lobby continues to resist this as a threat to the M.D. cartel, many physicians have embraced it, recognizing that outsourcing some of these services leaves them more time to do what only doctors can do. And with an estimated 29 million new clients expected to join the ranks of the insured, there is a lot of work to share. 

The emerging system is far from perfect. As Elisabeth Rosenthal reported in The Times on Sunday, Congress buckled to drug company lobbying and refused to let Medicare use its purchasing power to bring down obscenely inflated drug prices. And like any upheaval, the reform of health care will produce some losers. Not all of the new organizations will make a go of it. Since hospitals account for about a third of our health care bill, they are a particular target of cost-cutters; some will fail to adapt and will go out of business. Taking costs out of the system means taking money out of somebody’s pockets. This is what the business world calls “creative destruction.” 

Grace Terrell of Cornerstone said that of its 250 doctors, “20 percent are still, ‘Down with Obamacare,’ though even they like the private-enterprise approach; 30 percent really get it; and the others are moving faster than the market. We may ultimately fail, but we’re pretty far ahead of the curve.” 

One reason you may not have heard much about this part of the Obamacare story is that it is numbingly complicated. (Stephen M. Davidson of Boston University has written a concise and accessible guide to the law and its consequences.) But I suspect another reason is partisan spite. The Democrats were passionately in favor of enrolling the uninsured, but many would have preferred a government-run program, or at least a public option. What Obamacare has wrought is the kind of market-driven reformation that Republicans pretend to believe in. Which makes you wonder how much of their opposition rests on the merits, and how much is just a loathing for anything associated with Barack Obama.