Heat and Homelessness Could Lead to a Wider Conversation

As we suffer this crazy weather that we are making normal, two top conversational topics are: it’s too hot, and more people are homeless.

Recently after Shell promised to help transition to renewable fuels, its CEO recanted, saying Shell would go all out to maximize oil and gas profits for the next decade.

That’s appalling. But why? Legally, a corporation exists solely to maximize shareholder profits. Unless it commits crimes (with serious penalties) or so disgusts enough people that profits suffer, the corporation’s duty is to ignore that stuff. It exists to maximize profit and insulate its owners from liability.

That’s our law. We take it for granted. But might there be something wrong with a system in which humans can organize an entity designed to run roughshod over everyone, give it immense power, and even call it human for the purpose of influencing our elected officials?

Homelessness is epidemic, nationally. Contributing causes include mental health, medical costs, drugs, war-sparked inflation, and insufficient low-income housing, because we haven’t built enough recently.

In a capitalist system, folks the system doesn’t currently need are refuse. We’ve modified our system to take some care of those folks, which a purely capitalist system wouldn’t; but right now there are just too many such people for our present systems to help. (Drug sales exacerbate the situation.)

Meanwhile, people eat highly-processed foods full of junk that harms us. Obesity and diabetes are epidemic. Industry has poisoned some of our air and water. It even turns out that fashion fabrics, either because of added substances, is extremely irritating to women’s skin, when cotton or wool mostly wouldn’t be. But profits trump health.

Yet voters harmed by these corporations fight regulations that would improve their health, believing that “big government” is the enemy.

No nation practices pure communism or pure capitalism. While most most capitalist nations are more humane to citizens than we, we have social security, equal rights acts, pensions, and the like. Meanwhile, major communist countries have found personal incentive a practical way to boost production and increase loyalty.

I haven’t seen socialism working anywhere, except maybe Kerala. But unchecked capitalism is worse. It uses workers and customers, rejecting those who can no longer work effectively or can’t afford products. They’re on the slag heap. That’s not ideological rhetoric. It’s what has happened, all through history. The system is built on human greed, and resists any steps to mute that greed.

At city council, folks complain about some homeless folks anger. Drugs are a vicious factor, but capitalism contributes. Developed nations with the biggest gaps between rich and poor experience just the sort of nasty resentment small business folk here complain of experiencing. By the way extensive studies have also shown that on days the temperature exceeds 85 degrees Fahrenheit, overall crime increases by 2.2% and violent crime by 5.7%. (None of this excuses bad conduct – by criminals, homeless folks, or city officials.)

In basically a long-term con job, corporations convinced people that capitalism was somehow essential to our democracy. I’d guess there is some relationship between fostering creativity in political ideas and doing so in economic ideas. But the catechism we’ve mostly bought into is: 1. Democracy is wonderful. 2. Capitalism and free enterprise are essential to meaningful democracy. 3. Therefore, any efforts to bridle free enterprise would, if adopted, destroy democracy.

That’s nonsense. But it’s why efforts at improvements earn angry shouts of “Communist!”

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 [The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 6 August, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website. A related radio commentary will air during the week both on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and on KRWG Radio.  6 August, Hiroshima. ]

[Thanks for reading! I hope this column wasn’t too disjointed. I really started two or three (one on the homelessness problem as discussed at city council, another on the heat and some folks’ persistent denial of climate change /global warming / global weirdness) and each kept leading straight to Rome (capitalism’s role in each of the problems, and others). The weather slowed me down so much that it felt too complicated to merge them, but I eventually took a shot at it. Unfortunately some specifics on each different issue got lost, to fit the available space for my Sunday column. So did a couple of paragraphs on what a wonderful innovation our democracy was in the late 18^th Century, the roles played in creating our feelings of specialness by infinite resources, a huge salty moat protecting us from serious invasion by anyone in Europe, and the frontier as both a real and a psychological pressure release, allowing innovative or mischievous or restless youth go be in their own new place and figure things out. We felt special, but we also were special because of the relative freshness and roughness of our surroundings and for just the reason that’s begun to scare faux patriots, that we were a nation of quite varied immigrants discovering how to get along together. ]

[Of course, our accomplishments as a young nation were sullied by, and perhaps required, our terrible treatment of the folks who lived here when we arrived, the tribes.]

[Further to two recent columns:

This week MMC finally announced that it’s reopening its mental ward, contracting with Peak to provide services MMC is contractually obligated to provide us.

Fortunately, “very soon” turned out to be true this time, even though actually MMC didn’t bother to call me back and repeat that when I was writing the column. Howevber, this could have and should have happened sooner; and I believe stronger and public pressure from the landlords, Las Cruces and Doña Ana County, would have helped with that. Further, it’s another example of the problem with corporations: it’s natural for the national corporation, Lifepoint, that owns MMC to maximize profits from it, and take such shortcuts as law, liability, and its patient landlords may allow.

Another column explored the effort by Gadsden Independent School District Supervisor Travis Dempsey (for obvious reasons) and County Manger Fernando Macias (for reasons as yet unascertained, at least by me – though I expect to get to ask him this coming week) to pressure Sheriff Kim Stewart into buying into a program requiring her to hire, have trained, and manage a set of school resource officers (not deputies, but with different duties and training) rather than meeting her objections. Dempsey and Commissioner Manny Sanchez each even gave out Stewart’s official contact info, inviting or u rging people to reach out to add to the pressure. (Few did, I understand.) I’d expected GISD to recognize how things have turned out and start exploring an alternative; but I’m told they’re still waiting for Stewart to join the party. I suspect it’ll be a long wait, as the county has no viable way to force her to take on this extra operation.