Free food for the homeless

The UK Times complains that Free food for the homeless lures people who are too lazy to cook and especially that

SOUP runs in London are being increasingly abused by people who are not poor, needy or homeless, according to research that claims there is now one for every two rough sleepers in the capital.

Research for Westminster City Council has found that many of the capital’s 65 soup runs, which provide good quality sandwiches and hot and cold drinks, are attracting people with homes from all over London, who regard them as a convenient, free catering service.

...

The report, which will be discussed on Monday at a conference organised by the council, is bound to reopen the fierce public debate on whether soup runs do more harm than good. The view of Westminster is that the over-provision of hand-outs in central London helps maintain a street lifestyle for people unwilling to come indoors. It also draws people out of accommodation and back into street culture.

Although the council has made several attempts in the past five years to deal with the problem by bringing support for homeless people off the street and into hostels, shelters and advice centres, it believes there is now an urgent need to revisit the issue.

...

Emphasis Mine

The simple solution of putting the homeless into hostels ignores the realities of life in hostels. The one, I know about, has a strict lockdown policy: if you are not inside by 9 p.m., then you have to spend the night outside even if a bed is available. And you have to leave by 7 a.m.. No food is provided: only a bed and a shower. For people coming out of jail, the regime of a hostel can be seen to be similar. There is also the violence in hostels. Men cooped up in confined spaces for long periods can explode at the smallest provocation. The only purpose of hostels is keep the homeless out of sight at night.

There was a vacant building next to the soup kitchen. A Real Estate agent moved in and started a media campaign to get the soup kitchen because land values were depressed by the homeless coming in for their one meal of the day. Eventually, the campaign worked and the land and rental values went up. This is the compassionate side of Capitalism.

The DSP has in its party program for the liberation of women:

Women will not be able to enjoy genuine economic equality with men as long as they are forced to bear the main burden of domestic work. This is a socially created problem that demands a social solution. This would include the socialisation of domestic services through the creation of a network of easily accessible, low-cost, high-quality public laundries, cafeterias and restaurants, house-cleaning services organised on an industrial basis, etc.

Emphasis Mine

Instead of forcing people off the streets by starving them, the socialist solution would be for neighbourhood cafeterias to feed anyone who shows up. This would be a good way to meet your neighbours and start to rebuild communities.

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In Defense of His Majesty

William Lind writes In Defense of His Majesty (Kaiser Wilhelm II) that:

... the unhappy fact is that Western civilization’s last chance of survival was probably a victory by the Central Powers in World War I. Their defeat let all the poisons of the French Revolution loose unchecked, which is the main reason that we now live in a moral and cultural cesspool.

Emphasis Mine

There are many quotes like this about the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. For people like Mr. Lind, they see these as aberrations from the 'true' Western Civilization (whatever that this is). Do they want to return to feudalism when birth determined your choices in life? When the Lord had control over your life from which you could not legally escape? And when you had no private property?

The French Revolution was when Western Civilization was born in its present form. This was when Capitalism beat the crap out of Feudalism. Yes, this was a Capitalist revolution against the decaying feudal system. This victory proved the superiority of Capitalism over other existing economic systems: slavery; feudalism; barbarism; and hydraulic societies.

With the French Revolution came the notion of a nation and therefore patriotism. Before the revolution, there was the King of France, people who spoke various dialects of French (mostly), but no Frenchmen. You would have been a Parisian or the serf of some member of the nobility. With the revolution, France and Frenchmen came into being. Your identity was no longer linked to another human being but as citizen of a country.

A citizen had inalienable rights: property, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, suffrage, contracts, etc. Your rights no longer depended on which family you were born into.

Yes, I agree with Mr. Lind and others "... that we now live in a moral and cultural cesspool." And this is a direct result of the victory result of Capitalism in the French Revolution.

The dominant morality and philosophy of any economic system is always that of the ruling class. So what we are is the "... moral and cultural cesspool" that the Capitalist ruling class has descended into. Think of the Kennedy clan who murder and rape almost with impunity. Think of Paris Hilton, Jenna and Barbara Bush, and their 'wild' ways.

The question for us is how do we keep the benefits of Capitalism while removing the moral corruption? For me, the answer is to remove the need for a ruling class and have the people control their own lives through a Communist society.

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The Fears of White People

Prof. Robert Jensen writes about The Fears of White People. He discusses four (4) possible fears:

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have is the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we are honest with ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have -- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow "they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more generally, but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear of the depravity that lives in our own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the barbaric things we have done to them?

A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism: The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people. Virtually every white person I know, including white people fighting for racial justice and including myself, carries some level of racism in our minds and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to eliminate it, but most of us know it is there. And because we are all supposed to be appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering racism with a new kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us and can see it? What if they can see through us? What if they can look past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don't really know how to treat them as equals? What if they know about us what we don't dare know about ourselves? What if they can see what we can't even voice?

Emphasis Mine

These comments are mainly for the middle-class whites. The material differences between the white poor and the non-white poor are minimal but nevertheless psychological important for the white poor for them to subscribe to some degree of racism. Even among the very poor, I see whites and non-whites getting on together because they realise that their survival depends on their solidarity against the richer people.

Although Prof. Jensen does not expand on it: white privilege is really class privilege. But this belies the fact that most whites are not rich. However, most of the rich are white. Yet white people are indoctrinated to defend this system of inequality as if they were defending their whiteness.

Prof. Jensen's last point is based on the fact that racism also depends on the non-whites believing they are inferior to whites. If they cease to believe in the superiority of whiteness, then what will they do?

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Jesus Was A Looter

Did you know that Jesus was a looter? So was King David! Chapter 12 of the Gospel of Matthew says:

1 At that time Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them. 2 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, "See, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath." 3 He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry, 4 how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering, which neither he nor his companions but only the priests could lawfully eat? 5 Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath and are innocent? 6 I say to you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 If you knew what this meant, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned these innocent men.

Not only was Jesus looting, he was trespassing, he was violating the Sabbath, and showing disrepect to the local poobahs. This Jesus and his cohorts were a crime wave.

Tim Wise writes Of Disasters, Natural and Otherwise:

Yet Congress took four days to come back from their vacation to arrange for an emergency aid bill. People who rushed back to work late one night not too long ago so they could save the life of Terry Schiavo--who couldn't even feel pain--because life is so precious to them, couldn't manage to hustle it back to D.C. for four days to help save the dying in New Orleans, who unlike Schiavo can indeed feel their own pain: every ache, every infection, every single bit of it. People who, unlike Schiavo are mostly poor and mostly black, and who provide less political capital one supposes for the so-called pro-life movement, than the persistently vegetative or the run-of the-mill fetus.

And even when they did return, they only allocated a little more than $10 billion to relief efforts. Ten billion dollars: merely a fraction of what our nation has spent to bomb and strafe and occupy Iraq, and a mere drop of piss in the ocean compared to what this nation forked over to bail out the Savings and Loan industry when it was looted by rich white guys.

Oh, and speaking of white people and looting.

To hear an awful lot of folks tell it--like several on forum boards like the one at nola.com--looting is a black thing, what with supposed gangs of armed men roaming the streets of the city, stealing big screen TVs and guns, all due to their savagery, their lack of values, their moral depravity. Apparently, in their world, white people don't loot. Not the S&L bandits, not Ken Lay and his buddies at Enron, not the crooks at Halliburton: never. Only the black and poor, and this they know because Fox News, and for that matter CNN, the networks and most every other media outlet told them so, by way of image after image of looters demonstrating a so-called break with civilized norms of behavior.

In the chat rooms you can spend only a few minutes before being assaulted by yet another bloodthirsty know-nothing, calling for the shooting of looters on sight. And not only those stealing so-called luxury items, but even food, water, diapers, medicine or clothes to replace the soaked and largely ruined rags remaining on their backs.

But anyone who can't understand why someone would break into a store and take things in the midst of this kind of tragedy clearly isn't trapped in the middle of it. They are the ones who had the means to get out of the flood zone before the hurricane hit. How nice for them.

Emphasis Mine

I suppose, if Jesus came back today, he would be shot on sight by some of those nice, white Christians.

The Main-Stream Media are merely reinforcing the message that property is more important than people. Rich people are entitled to their property while poor people are not entitled to their lives. There was some bloke called Amos who had a lot to say about this attitude.

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Katrina in black and white

Josh Mankiewicz concludes his comments about Katrina in black and white with:

Is what’s going on in New Orleans an issue of white and black— or it an issue of sort of the haves and the have-nots?

[Rep. Maxine Waters (Republican-Calif.)] thinks its both. "When you take a look at the television screen America is seeing the majority black people who are basically being treated like dogs. They don't see whites for the most part. They see blacks. And so people cannot help but raise the race issue."

...

The truth is that it’s hard to divorce race from class in America. They’re two issues we almost never discuss honestly— unless we can’t avoid it.

Emphasis Mine

Yes, that Marxist concept of class raises its ugly head again. In spite of all the propaganda that we live in a classless society, we see the deadly effects of class war on the poor. And the poor are losing badly. It is the bodies of the poor that are floating in the waters of New Orleans. It is the bodies of the poor that left by the roadside.

And mixed into the class issue is the issue of race. Racism is used by ruling class to divide the poor against each other. When blacks and whites fight each other, the capitalists can carry on screwing both.

This is why most of the news coverage is about race not class. If one race are seen to be getting preferential treatment, either in relief or in news coverage, then the anger and envy of the other races is stirred up against them. As long as racial hatred can be maintained, the ruling class are safe.

As Malcolm X once said:

You cannot have Capitalism without Racism.

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