Test: How you feel when you see some worn-out, unbathed haggard man or woman pushing a shopping cart with what are obviously all they own? When they stare at you or, worse, look away in shame? When they hang out at busy intersections with “homeless” signs? When they sleep on benches or on the street? Of the many fires that scorched (and continue to scorch) Los Angeles, it seems that the Skirball fire, off the 405 freeway, engulfing some of the most expensive homes in the city, started from a fire in a homeless encampment under a nearby freeway overpass. That irony was not lost on Angelinos. Los Angeles is one of the richest cities on earth.
Many homeless are stumbling addicts, more are mentally challenged and even more are the work-world’s elderly or castaways. Some have prison records that preclude employment. That huge income inequality “great American divide” – polarization on steroids – is the new definition of America. But I’d like to transfer that polarization from money to empathy/sympathy/caring. The real polarization: those who care about others and those who don’t.
The new values in America seem rather dramatically to eschew caring for the less fortunate. The same Alabama evangelicals who tried to elect racist predator-Roy Moore care more about the unborn than they do the living. Most of those white evangelicals also support free ownership of guns with few or no restrictions as well as the death penalty. Charity? Nope, they support the rich and the GOP. They want to cut programs for those who need them most.
But as the GOP shoves through a wildly unpopular tax-give-away of trillions of dollars to the richest segments of society, openly telling us that the resulting deficit will require massive cutbacks to social programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you have to ask yourself exactly what the United States has become. To the rest of the world, we are a rogue nation out-of-step with a modern world, baiting a nuclear power to attack and withdrawing from international influence and responsibilities that took us decades to achieve.
But what are we to ourselves? That is one hell of a question. And while so many “it’s mine, mine, mine” older voters fight to keep as much money and stuff as they can, their Y and Z generation children and grandchildren are, gratefully, aghast at such horrific – and frankly non-Christian – values. This “me, me, me” retrenchment of many middle aged and older voters is the product of fear, not one of a confident people striving for what is good, what is right.
I was quite surprised at a recent article in FastCompany.com (December 15th) that interviewed one of America’s greatest investors, private equity magnate Leo Hindery, who runs New York-based InterMedia Partners. A very rich man. But he is also aghast at the $2.5 trillion private equity marketplace. Fee-driven at all costs. Callous. Unconcerned about social consequences. Driven by fast profits and little else. “Hindery’s displeasure comes in large measure from seeing private equity change over time. When the field began to take off in the mid-1980s, he says, there was more of an inclination to acquire businesses and hold onto them for five to seven years, building them up along the way…
“For Hindery, the declining standards in private equity are one piece of a larger picture in which the leaders of corporate America have become increasingly focused on short-term profits at the expense of the greater good to society.
“When Hindery went to work for natural resources giant Utah International in the early 1970s, fresh out of business school at Stanford, he says he plunged into a world in which major CEOs ‘were patriots.’… ‘They believed in the value of their employees as assets,’ he says. ‘They believed in their responsibility to their communities and to their nation.’ Today, however, ‘I can’t make that generalization much anymore.’
“Hindery acknowledges that social impact investing is a force to be reckoned with, as more and more public pension funds, university endowments, and charitable foundations steer their investment dollars into those companies that are good stewards of the environment and their workers… But money managers and top corporate executives—the bulk of whose own compensation is typically linked to their company’s share price—are still often motivated by other concerns. At least for now, says Hindery, ‘greed is winning.’” FastCompany.com.
Nothing screams about that overall change in America’s values like that rapidly swelling mass of forgotten people: our homeless. So many images all around me that look like they came from The Great Depression of the 1930s.
And so I turn now to an official United Nation’s representative, an academic from Australia, Philip Alston, with this formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled throughout the United States to see for himself how the richest nation on earth dealt with its most economically deprived citizens. What he saw should make all Americans ashamed: “His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty… Of those, nine million have zero cash income – they do not receive a cent in sustenance.
“Alston’s epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of America’s reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.
“The Guardian [UK periodical] had unprecedented access to the UN envoy, following him as he crossed the country, attending all his main stops and witnessing the extreme poverty he is investigating firsthand.
“Think of it as payback time. As the UN special rapporteur himself put it: ‘Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time I’m in the US.’” TheGuardian.com, December 15th.
I live in Los Angeles, which like many US cities faces a homelessness crisis with a kicker: because of its milder weather, LA attracts homeless people who are able to survive a winter here that would be impossible in colder cities. So Professor Alston’s foray into my city was of particular interest. The December 16th Los Angeles Times explains: “The United Nations’ monitor on extreme poverty and human rights said Friday [12/15] that political will created the hundreds of encampments that he saw lining the streets of Los Angeles, adding that the country is rich enough to end homelessness.
“‘But we don’t want to put the money into it,’ special rapporteur Philip Alston, just off a two-week fact finding tour that included downtown L.A.’s skid row, said at a Washington, D.C., news conference. ‘We want to see homeless people as losers, a low form of life.’… Alston… also accused the Trump administration of promoting a ‘double whammy’ of tax reform and welfare cuts that he said will ‘make the U.S. the world champion of extreme inequality,’ exacerbating the homelessness crisis.
“‘The social safety net is riddled with holes,’ Alston said, adding that if the administration achieves its goals, ‘it will essentially be torn apart.’… Los Angeles is lagging behind other cities in attacking its homelessness problem, Alston said.
“In his written report, the monitor was particularly scathing about what he described as an over-reliance by Los Angeles and other cities on criminalization to ‘conceal’ homelessness. Los Angeles police made nearly 7,000 arrests of homeless people on skid row from 2011 to 2016, he said… Sitting in public places, panhandling or public urination — in cities like Los Angeles that provide almost no public toilets — triggers citations that quickly turn into misdemeanors, warrants, jailings and ‘unpayable’ fines and finally the stigma of a criminal conviction, he said.”
Hey, homeless people just are getting in the way of everybody else, right? How about this little story that appeared in the December 8th San Francisco Business Times: “The S.F. SPCA in the Mission District started using a security robot [pictured below] about a month ago in its parking lot and on the sidewalks around its campus, which takes up a whole city block at Florida and 16th Streets. [In first week in December], the city ordered the SPCA to keep its robot off the sidewalks or face a penalty of up to $1,000 per day for operating in the public right-of-way without a permit.
“The security robot is just the latest in a growing list of uses for robots around the city, from rental agents to food couriers. The robot surge could draw local government into more questions about its role in regulating the machines, especially if they operate in the public right-of-way.
“For the SPCA, the security robot, which they've dubbed K9, was a way to try dealing with the growing number of needles, car break-ins and crime that seemed to emanate from nearby tent encampments of homeless people along the sidewalks… ‘We weren’t able to use the sidewalks at all when there’s needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment,’ Jennifer Scarlett, the S.F. SPCA’s president, told the Business Times.” The S.P.C.A.?! Helpless animals deserve protection for sure, but how about a society for the prevention of cruelty to people too?
If I look really carefully at who we are and what we have become, I am really embarrassed by our purported realignment of values. What exactly does it take to bring back the best part of what once made America Great… instead of what populist Trump and his uncaring followers want?
I’m Peter Dekom, and there, but for the grace of God, go I.
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