Thanksgiving is almost over, the Christmas ads have been here a month, but homelessness will remain

What Thanksgiving is really about

I picked up my local paper this morning and it just added to the depressing mood these retail sales holidays put me in for a moment. Firstly, the actual news in the paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, would fit on a two-sided 8 by 11 if you cut all the ads out of it. It was almost too heavy for me to carry with all the other paper encouraging me to shop; a whole tree’s worth.

But the very first piece on the front page was so revolting and hypocritical I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to puke and tear it up at the same time. I felt a bit sorry for the author, Sam Whiting. He must feel terribly used given that the owners of the paper (the advertisers) make him churn out such sickening propaganda posing as a human-interest story.

It tells of a 73 year old woman who has been homeless and sleeping in her car that she parks under the lights at a CVS pharmacy parking lot. This woman who has worked all her life has to sleep sitting up as all her belongings are in the back of the vehicle. By the third morning, she was so miserable she “drove herself to Sunnyvale Community Services.” the Chronicle informs us; she is 73 years old.

So the piece sets the mood, how we are to feel compassion for this woman and will now show how other folks helped her, the paper’s role in all of this, and what we can do to avoid being homeless. The community agency directs the woman to the person who distributes the Chronicle Season of Sharing funds. This fund was started in 1986 and has “helped” 120,000 families in the past 25 years distributing over that time $11 million.

The article goes in to great detail about this 73-year old woman’s life. She married a carpenter, had a decent home and raised three kids. Then the author goes on to say that she lost the husband and the home due to divorce. Despite the gains women have made over the years, they still fare worse than men after divorce for many reasons that I won’t go in to here but one of them is that many women spent a great part of their lives raising children and maintaining the family. This unpaid labor includes skills that don’t command much respect or much of a paycheck in the world of the free market.

She then had a good job working for Raytheon, the company that makes, among other things, weapons of mass destruction but Raytheon ended up laying her off and she spent the next 20 years in various low-waged jobs, Kmart, at $7.25 an hour and Albertons, at $8.00. Her advice after all of this is to tell young people that they won’t make it if they don’t get a college education. I have some news for her; they won’t make it with one either.

The Chronicle likes stories like this. These mass consumption capitalist newspapers are the means by which they manipulate and exploit the basic decency and kindness in human nature as Sean explains in the previous blog. The vast majority of this paper is about the sales and how we need to buy, buy buy. Had this woman expressed anger at a system that allows a slumlord or corporation to evict a 73 year old woman on to the street and in to her car or had she savaged the system that didn’t provide her and millions like her a job and decent enough wages to live a secure life. Had she told the journalist that it is a disgusting and savage system that allowed her to be in this position, even if the journalist had followed up on it, the paper wouldn’t have given her, or him, the time of day. He would have lost his by-line status.

What society allows a slumlord or corporation to do this? The Chronicle publishes this detailed piece about this woman’s predicament, mentions she was evicted but says not one word condemning such an action. It’s obviously legal to do this to a human being. It should be illegal. Laws are made by politicians that are members of political parties that represent class interests. The people that make the laws in our society make laws that serve and protect the interests of bankers and investors, of capitalists. That’s why the California Constitution guarantees that moneylenders shall be paid. It doesn’t guarantee health care or a job or a roof over your head.

The Chronicle’s boast of $11 million is a pathetic joke, a pittance. It came about through the “generosity” of the Walter Haas family. Walter Haas was the President and CEO of Levi Strauss and the great nephew of the founder; now there’s a nasty bunch. He also owned the Oakland A’s baseball team. These people and other’s like them make millions exploiting working people and then hand over a few bucks to a charity as a tax gimmick and in order to portray themselves as caring and divert attention from their true role in the savagery the system inflicts on workers like this woman.

Laws don’t exist through divine intervention. If capitalists can make laws that protect their rights-------- their right to throw a 73 year-old woman on the street because their precious market couldn’t provide her with a decent job when she worked or a decent retirement in her later years, for example-------we can unmake those laws. We can make laws that defend our interests and not theirs. As we have written many times, Democrats will never do that, we need to build our own independent political alternative to make that happen.

The class that owns the Chronicle is composed of the many of the same people that have all the ads in it. Their explanation for why this horrible situation exists is that human nature is inherently greedy, individualistic and selfish, But as the previous blog explains; this is nonsense. At some point a generalized mass movement will develop in response to these brutal attacks on working people like this woman; she is one of millions. Such a movement when faced with an eviction like this would organize mass occupations and squatting of property and also mass defense of laws enacted through a party of our own and violated by slumlords and their banker friends.

This process, I believe, will develop, not in a straight line, but it will develop. A major reason for the delay is the role of the top leaders of organized Labor who have the resources to organize such a movement and build such a political force. But they too worship the market so they will not do so voluntarily, not without a grass root, rank and file movement that forces them.

The Chronicle piece is a fine piece of propaganda aimed at convincing us that this paper cares and to obscure the real reasons people like this woman end up as they do. So it occupies front page and three quarters of another page which includes a form we can fill out for our contributions.

On page six it has another story that many readers will miss. It is two short columns occupying about a 3” by 3” section. Bolivia’s circus animals, lions, tigers, and all other animals are being sent around the world to various reserves and sanctuaries in cooperation with Animal Defenders International. The reason for this is that Bolivia passed a law that prohibits the use of all animals in circuses, “domestic and wild”

This is from a government that the US big business media repeatedly refers to as “anti-American”. Bolivia is introducing some measures that place the wellbeing of the majority of the people, animals and the natural world over the rights of capital. That’s enough to make Bolivia anti-American in the eyes of the US government and its Wall Street clients.

We should think about that animal law and what a great law it is.