Un-fucking-believable! The homeless are our most vulnerable demographic. Many are Veterans, many are drug addicts and mentally ill, and many are people who just have no money. In a society that has produced people like Trump, Musk, and other autocrats, who basically serve no purpose in society, this is sick. If each billionaire in the US (approx. 750), were hit with a “good deed tax” of 1 billion dollars, we could probably provide acceptable housing for all of our homeless. Time to eat the rich!
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“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges , beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France
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One day, back when I worked in the Big City, I passed a naked man on my way from the bus stop to my office. He was tossing the last of his clothing onto the awning of a Starbucks and, in the moment, it struck me that mental health can be a fragile thing. A series of unfortunate events and that could be me. One of his shoes stayed on that awning for months afterward reminding me of that thought every time I passed.
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Yep. Too much inflation and they crank up the interest rate to force some of 'em into unemployment. It cools inflation right off because suddenly a lot of people don’t have any money to spend. I graduated from college in the 1980’s into a 10% national unemployment rate. The state (Michigan) unemployment rate was 17% and some cities were over 30% (see Michael Moore’s Roger and Me). The level of misery generated never seems to weigh in on any of these decisions.
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Not only do they fail to have any compassion, they act like it’s the fault of those who are jobless when the unemployment rate is set as a matter of policy. If we are going to set the interest rate in such a way that not everyone can even be employed then I think we owe those people something - kindness at the very least. And what about people who lack the cognitive ability to learn a job that has value to society? I hope that one day we can agree that every individual has a right to: dignity, a place to sleep, health care, education, and food. The question I’m always asking is what does our society do about people who are unable or unwilling to learn a job that has some value to the society. The answer to that is what determines whether we are civilized.
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The long and short of the issue is that justices shouldn’t be legislating from the bench. Laws against sleeping in public are laws passed by the representative government. If you don’t like them, convince your neighbors and change the . The notion that this is cruel and unusual punishment is a stretch even for this SF lefty … let’s not lean on justices to do our heavy lifting, but move the needle with well thought and legislated policy.
Some of these Justices consider themselves Christians. Looks like we’re fixing to find out how little that means for them.
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One of the school kids I mentioned above as living with her working parent and living in a car was a Katrina refugee from Mississippi. Oregon is a long way from home; I never did hear about why they came to Oregon.
They were there for a couple of months and moved on.
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Republicans spent a lot of time railing against “Activist Judges” legislating from the bench. Of course, they are perfectly fine with it when they are doing it.
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That has been apparent for quite some time.
I play banjo
One of the volunteer coordinators that I knew told me that there was a Katrina-displaced person in almost every zip code in the US. There was really no way to keep track of anything nor anyone with many established and pop up groups going down and trying to find ways to help. It was a bottom up response with no effort by the Bush administration to do anything more than photo ops. Bush actually used my tent for a photo op while I was at work re- inoculating children for school as clinic health records were lost. You can only imagine my disgust.
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Imagine how mental health care for all who need it would affect our rate of homelessness. Unless you are born healthy, able and insured you are SOL in this country. But I guess the really important thing is that the wealthiest among us can hide money and avoid taxes. They are the only people who matter.
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Trump may be going to jail for a month for gag order violations
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From your keyboard to FSM’s noodles.
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Wow! I had no idea.
Not a surprise.
I’m sure it was at epic levels I loathed him.
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Haul these over-privileged, White (looking at you Clarence), hypocrites to a theater and make them watch it.
Like non-stop for 8 hours.
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Oregon is unusual in that homeless people vastly outnumber churches: in the ballpark of 20,000 homeless and 4000 churches. Which means each congregation would have to adopt a whopping five people to solve the problem, with no churches left over to make sandwiches or gather up toiletry and feminine hygiene packages.
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Only a fraction of those churches do anything for the homeless anyway. It would be fine if the rest disappeared.
Anyone remember poorhouses (workhouses) where being poor was punished? It is difficult to find a job if you have no address or phone.
In the United States, poorhouses were most common during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were often situated on the grounds of a poor farm on which able-bodied residents were required to work. A poorhouse could even be part of the same economic complex as a prison farm and other penal or charitable public institutions. Poor farms were county- or town-run residences where paupers (mainly elderly and disabled people) were supported at public expense. They were generally under the direction of one or more elected or appointed “Superintendent[s] of the Poor.”
…
The poor farms declined in the U.S. after the Social Security Act took effect in 1935, with most disappearing completely by about 1950. Since the 1970s, funding for the care, well-being and safety of the poor and indigent is now split among county, state and federal resources. Poor farms have been replaced by subsidized housing such as public housing projects, Section 8 housing and homeless shelters.
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