Isn’t this the richest nation on earth? Doesn’t the big corporate media tell Americans we are the most humane country? How can so many Americans be left out on the cold street at night to suffer, without homes or shelter but with hunger, sickness and death in growing numbers year after year in a nation that preaches “justice and humane democracy?”
The answer is that homelessness serves as a tool of the “profit maximizers,” much like a cattle prod to keep working people working for the meagerist of wages and practically no benefits. “Profit maximizers” seek the maximum profit in the shortest period of time. This quarter’s earnings are basically all that count to an all shareholder “profit maximizer” board of directors. These boards of directors have complete control of our economy’s biggest corporations. These shareholder “profit maximizers” attack labor as though working people are simply line items on a profit and loss sheet.
During the 1960s and ’70s most goods were still produced in America. Labor unions had been able to obtain good wages and benefits for their workers through strikes and strong contract bargaining. Unions were plentiful, manufacturing was mostly unionized and workers were getting health insurance, retirement benefits and a living wage. Workers were able to afford vacations, homes and other middle-class amenities like sending their children to college for higher education so that they had a chance to rise above their parents blue-collar status.
Since America did virtually all its own manufacturing, which provided good union scale wages, existing households were more able to shelter their mentally and physically disabled family members. There were more jobs available to people with disabilities as well, but for those with more serious disabilities there were state and county Hospitals. These hospitals took on the full-time needs of the severely disabled, providing complete housing and care. As a result, in comparison to today, there were fewer disabled homeless people living on the street. Homelessness existed, but not to the large degree that exists today.
In the 1960s, there were leaders like Martin Luther King and John Kennedy who believed that everyone was important and that “we weren’t free until everyone was free”... from poverty and racism. Civil Rights leaders were able to rally huge public demonstrations and marches that demanded equal treatment and justice for all races and groups in America. The nation’s people believed that social progress was lifting poor Americans up out of poverty and that a “new frontier” was at hand. Young people joined Kennedy’s Peace Corps and eagerly went overseas to help poor people abroad build better living conditions and improve their health. Strikes, peace demonstrations and protest rallies were constant popular democratic change agents of reform that linked people and groups together in mutual solidarity and support.
But then came the 1980s and the big business Republicans took over with Ronald Reagan. Under his two-term presidential reign, labor unions like the Air Traffic Control Workers Union were destroyed and workers had their wages and benefits rolled back. Reagan encouraged manufacturers to produce abroad and China (still a communist dictatorship) was given favorite nation trading status. Manufacturing unions began to disappear as their jobs were outsourced to China and other third
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 11, 2005. Read the original PDF.