American Capitalism Has Produced its Most Remarkable Innovation Yet: Breadlines
Luke Savage
On January 22, 1992, America’s newspaper of record published a front-page report detailing the long lines still appearing in Moscow and other Russian cities as hungry citizens sought out bread. Several weeks earlier, the USSR had finally collapsed, and breadlines — much as they had during the Cold War — persisted as the de facto symbol of the country’s dysfunction and crippling economic inefficiency.
“In Russia, Long Lines for Plentiful Bread,” blared the New York Times headline, accompanied by a report from journalist Louis Uchitelle that detailed lengthy waits despite the country’s ample supplies of grain and flour. “The bottlenecks that make Muscovites and the residents of other major cities anxious about bread shortages,” wrote Uchitelle, “are not, so far, in the supplies of grain and flour. The problem instead lies in the methods used by the state-owned industry to make and distribute bread.”
Various inefficiencies were documented, among them an incentive structure that perplexingly encouraged retailers to throw out day-old stock and order less bread than they might have been able to sell. Distribution was reportedly poor because there weren’t enough trucks to move goods, and single-cashier service at the point of sale created massive bottlenecks. Thanks to the recent relaxation of price controls, the cost of bread was also soaring.
Only privatization and the introduction of market efficiency, the piece suggested, could possibly ameliorate the situation. What Uchitelle’s report described was a pointless cycle of waste and human indignity, underwritten by a system that remained so inflexible it was squandering surpluses and allowing citizens to go hungry.
The breadline has long been a potent symbol, but it’s also one that, for mainstream media and political institutions, can only manifest beyond America’s borders. When they happen in other countries, food shortages are framed as evidence of precapitalist backwardness. The American system, by contrast, is one of such relentless dynamism and efficiency that, while individual people might experience problems or hardships — hunger, poverty, unemployment — they are precluded from being an indictment of the model itself.
In light of this, it’s worth considering a recent Bloomberg report on the growing queues outside the nation’s food banks that begins by describing a lineup outside one Boston Red Cross facility that stretched the length of two football fields. It includes quotes like this one, from a forty-year-old disabled woman who is a mother forced to ration food for her two adolescent children. “They’re like ‘Mama, I want two pieces, I want three.’ They’re boys. They’re big. They want more.”
Scenes like this are all too common across America today, as food banks report record demand amid skyrocketing grocery prices. The US Census Bureau estimates that nearly twenty-five million people went hungry in April alone, thanks in part to the slashing of pandemic-era food stamp benefits.
Such queues are breadlines in all but name. Tens of millions presently do not have enough to eat in a country with a $25 trillion GDP, all while Congress debates the possibility of attaching new work requirements to an already inadequate and paternalistic food assistance program. Effectively, ordinary Americans are being hit with a three-punch combo of soaring food prices, benefit cuts, and fiscal policies explicitly designed to drive up unemployment.
As one commentator succinctly put it: “1) Too many people have jobs so the [Federal Reserve] raises rates to boost unemployment in the name of taming inflation. 2) People lose their jobs, making them need food stamps. 3) Politicians demand those same people get jobs to be eligible for food stamps, but the jobs are now harder to get.”
Want, cruelty, waste, it’s all here — the whole needless cycle symbolized by long lines outside of food banks in urban areas where there is more than enough to eat. God bless the free market.
(Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin. He is the author of ‘The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History’. Courtesy: Jacobin, an American socialist magazine.)
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The Death Penalty for Homelessness
Eve Ottenberg
You can measure the depth of a civilization by how it treats its poor, very young, elderly and mentally ill. By any such metric, ours here in the Exceptional Empire is barbaric. Take New York City mayor Eric Adams and his pronouncements on the homeless destitute. He made a name for himself with stunts like proclaiming he’ll incarcerate people for erratic behavior. Since lotsa homeless are erratic – they either started that way, which was partly how they lost shelter, or living rough eroded their good manners – they are the target population for being locked up. Not to be outdone, presidential candidate Donald “I’m the Real President” Trump swears he’ll ship the homeless to camps outside cities, so they’ll stop “blighting” urban areas. The equation between human beings and trash should cause all antifascist antennae to quiver.
Once upon a time, we had governments concerned about the root causes of poverty and leaders who sought to ameliorate it with good ideas like public housing. Well, after decades of hysterical, lousy press, public housing has received little new funding and the number of poor people it serves shrank pitiably from its heyday in the mid to late twentieth century. This means more people sleeping on sidewalks.
Look at New York City’s housing voucher program to counter homelessness. For some inexplicable bureaucratic reason, it’s ditching renters. The vouchers cover a big percentage of a person’s rent, in a city notorious for astronomical housing costs. “Few tools are as important as vouchers when it comes to addressing New York City’s swelling homelessness problem,” Mihir Zaveri reported in the New York Times April 5, “more than 26,000 households have used the program to find apartments since 2018.” So a city agency’s dysfunction, leading to kicking people out of the voucher program, is a disaster. Many of these luckless souls wind up dwelling in homeless shelters or on the streets. And that’s often lethal.
Over 815 homeless people have died in public places in New York since 2022, most recently and notably Jordan Neely, whose obstreperous destitution offended a fellow subway rider, Daniel Penny, who strangled Neely to death. Penny is white, Neely was Black, though ex-marine Penny claimed May 20 that he is not a white supremacist. The media and mayor Adams downplayed the viciousness of this crime, because, according to Adams, “there were serious mental health issues in play here.” What else would you expect from a former cop? When called to assist people cracking up, police routinely shoot and kill them. Adams unwittingly implies that the Nazi response to schizophrenics is acceptable: murder them.
Surprising no one, the far-right supports the killer. “An online fundraiser for his legal defense,” the Times reported May 19, “amassed more than $2.6 million in donations after it was promoted by conservative politicians.” The depth of hatred of the poor in the U.S. is truly shocking. People willingly contribute to those who heinously rid them of the dispossessed and blithely finance those who choke them to death. There’s one word for this: depravity. And it’s beyond depraved in our neighbor to the north, Canada, which touts state-assisted suicide as a solution to poverty in general and homelessness in particular.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports May 22 that unhoused seniors flood shelters that can’t accommodate their needs. “Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019,” the Post reported, and this year, the number of elderly homeless spiked. Indeed, seniors constitute the fastest growing cohort of the undomiciled. Quite a way to spend your sunset years, snoozing on the sidewalk, alongside the utterly helpless psychotic.
Adams wants to remove those who “appear mentally ill” from public. The purpose is not to treat them or salve their psychological wounds, in which case such removal would be acceptable, even laudable. But no, Adams’ purpose is to incarcerate them, so their shabby selves won’t offend the sensibilities of the well-to-do and mega-rich who regard city centers as their playgrounds. “Policies such as California Governor Gavin Newson’s CARE Court and numerous ‘anti-camping’ ordinances…allow for the removal and detention of people who are unhoused and deemed mentally ill,” according to Truthout May 6, “under threat of involuntary commitment or even conservatorship.” Supposedly compassionate, these policies fall far short of providing appropriate treatment for the insane or adequate housing for those who lack it.
The truly malignant aspect of this is the one that treats poverty as proof of dangerous and savage psychosis. Economic failure in this brutal late capitalist jungle becomes medical and criminal. A deadly combo. And if the homeless destitute manage to evade the cops who want to lock them up in tiny cages, they still face existential threats on the streets, most notably death from exposure or from violent criminals.
The death toll for the homeless destitute, reports the New York Times May 13 “in San Diego County had increased nearly 10 times in the last decade.” That’s the same in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Denver and Seattle. It turns out not having a roof over your head is fatal. There’s the cold in winter, extreme, climate-change-aggravated heat in summer and the inherent danger of living in public, now enhanced by vigilante fury, stoked by ambitious pols like mayor Adams.
The risks and wretchedness faced by the unhoused don’t count for much to a public inured to their plight by ideology and lies, a public that just wants homelessness to disappear. A public brainwashed by reactionary politicos and their media mouthpieces into thinking the only so-called solution is prison or booting these unsightly vagabonds out of cities and into camps. Housing stipends, vouchers, affordable apartments and the bureaucratic structure necessary to create these aren’t sexy. They don’t win fascist politicians votes. What does is public hysteria over penniless, oddly behaved people, then keeping that frenzy on a steady simmer. It’s called demagoguery.
Lucklessly for these very poor people, we live in the Age of the Demagogue. Most politicians will stoop to it whenever it brings them votes. But those who merit the title full-time are the worst hazard. They don’t want to solve problems and make powerless constituents’ lives better. They want to scream about them, whip up a public convulsion of hatred and ride that spasm of widespread rage to higher office. Not surprisingly, few seem to hold them to account. On the contrary, press outlets nod approval for vigilante justice against the crime of poverty.
“For years before Jordan Neely was killed in New York’s subway, the city had its eye on him,” wrote the New York Times May 13. “He was on a list informally know as the top 50, a roster of people who stand out for the severity of their troubles and their resistance to accepting help.” Thus even the “paper of record” excuses cold-blooded murder of the undomiciled poor. No doubt when the next fascist president breaks ground on concentration camps for those guilty of penury, that same news outlet will excuse it by noting that those incarcerated were a threat to polite society, that the police had their names on a list and that we’re better off without all those unsightly homeless people, anyway. Quite an economic system we got here. It strips millions of people of the means of survival, then blames and punishes them for their dispossession. If you call that civilization, you need to rethink your definition of the term.
(Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is ‘Roman Summer’. Courtesy: CounterPunch.)
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Aaron Dixon
In the dawn, early one morning I stepped out onto the porch just as the sun began to rise above the Sandia Mountains. And like a slow-motion picture, I saw a brown long-haired, young woman with her eyes closed, bent over her shopping cart pushing forward with a few of her worldly belongings inside. Like so many others in her predicament, she seemed exhausted and lost in despair. A second later, I turned to my left and caught the gaze of a brown skin man as he searched through my garbage bin. Our eyes met, for a split second and without saying a word and without changing expressions, he continued his search.
Every day I see the shopping cart pushers as I drive down the streets to run my daily errands. Some of them pushing fast as if they were in a hurry as if they had somewhere to go, some of them pushing slow with there blankets, and clothes and sleeping bags and whatever else they were able to stuff away for their daily survival.
Some of the carts are elaborate some tide together looking like boats with umbrellas fastened to the carts to protect themselves from the brutal Albuquerque sun which on somedays can reach up to 107 degrees.
Some of them I recognize like the short heavyset black women with her hair cut very short. Her back is curved in a bent-over position from hours and days and weeks and months and years of pushing her home on wheels. She always seems very clean and very neat and her cart is always very orderly. Sometimes I see her sitting on the curb to rest from the continued push to nowhere.
Sometimes you see couples walking briskly, pulling their suitcases and carrying their backpacks with the same looks as the others, a disconnected look, sometimes a zombie look.
In most parts of the city, you see the beggars at the intersections some with creative sighs, some asking for money for a bear or for some weed, mostly for a meal or some food for their kids, something, anything to keep them going until the next day. Some are clean some are not, some are young, some are old, and they are a rainbow of colors. I once saw a neatly dressed pregnant white woman under the freeway with a sigh hoping that someone would help her.
There are the homeless Native people, some looking like proud warriors, defiant despite their condition; they seemed to have adjusted to their fate better than others. I often times imagine them 200 years earlier before the conquest as proud people who once rode their horses reigning over the land.
If you want a clean, pristine sight, then you must go to the mountains. For all throughout the city, you will see this despair of the forgotten.
When I go home to the once lovely Seattle, I bare witness to the run-down tents filling up any open spaces or wooded areas. Many of the tents are on main streets next to or around the corner from the million-dollar condos that are going up like stalks reaching far into the sky as if to get away from what is below.
At first, these tents were out of site and not as numerous, now they have spread everywhere as the wealth has grown for the weird-looking Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates along with the others that make Seattle the richest city in America. You often see the techies and the elites who drive their BMWs and their hundred-thousand-dollar Teslas, oblivious to the growing army of the homeless.
Many of the homeless have been priced out of the housing market. Many have been gentrified out of homes and neighborhoods to make room for the white elites who build white sterile square characterless apartments and houses, building them in every inch of spare land that can be found.
The homeless, the tent occupiers, are pushed further north to once affluent nice quiet family-oriented neighborhoods, like Ballard and Queen Ann, looking for a place where they can rest their weary heads.
Yes, many of them are drug addicts and have turned into drug addicts as they try to mentally escape the hopeless conditions, they are in. The heroin, the fentanyl, the crack and the meth and the oxycodone are at epidemic proportions just as crack was during the crack epidemic that helped to destroy black families in the eighties and nineties.
The phalanx of liberal Mayors and their liberal puppet city officials have only paid lip service over the last thirty years as this epidemic has grown and multiplied. And the conservative greedy banks, developers and property owners, and managers contribute to homelessness.
You can see the deterioration of the city everywhere, many places have become dirty and dingy. The homeless mingled in with the addicts and beggars walked around like the walking dead as the garbage from the homeless fills the streets.
There is some effort by creative minds, building tiny one-room homes for families, and it seems that this has become the normal, tiny homes for tiny people while the rich live in majestic 4- or 6-bedroom homes for families of 2 or 3 while their summer homes sit empty.
In proud Oakland once our chocolate city the home of the revolution in the 60s, was just starting to come back to life. Picking itself up and cleaning itself off from the crack epidemic. Then the wealthy techies began to overflow from Silicon Valley and flood into the chocolate city after devastating San Francisco with their greed and materialism. Raising the cost of housing as they did in Frisco for the thousands of black and Latino families in this once proud city.
Now under the freeways are encampments with tents and cardboard homes, garbage piling up as people try to find a safe spot, try to create some type of shelter for them and their families, some kind of normalcy. Up the way in Berkeley, home of the free speech movement, the tents are on the front lawn of city hall. But it seems normalcy does not exist anymore. Now very thing us abnormal.
Riding on the Bart rapid transit train, you can see cardboard and little wooden hovels stretching for miles. San Francisco, San Mateo, Pale Alto, and San Jose, with the 4 fourth largest homeless populations In America, all have been devastated. In the east bay, the homeless are pushed north to Santa Rosa to Richmond to Valeo as they try to find little patches of bushes and trees where they can hopefully find a little privacy.
4 hours away in Lalla land, up on the hill, all can see the big, nice sign with the words Hollywood. But below is a horror picture. A small city of the homeless 60 to 70 thousand, has become a permanent fixture in Lalla land, add this to the tour after driving down from the Hollywood hills from the million-dollar mansions of the stars.
It’s like the apocalypse in the living collar. The walking dead in real life. Many living on the streets in alleys, in front of businesses the stench of urine in the air, the mentally ill, the drug addicts, the ex-felons, the lost, the unemployed, the hopeless, the hungry, and thrown in the families that lost their apartments because the monthly rent went up a few hundred dollars to satisfy some greedy owners and feverish landlords. Social services have set up shop as their workers fight a seemingly endless battle to stem the tide. There was an initiative passed to build some shelters or buildings. But where would they find a place to build for this population that needs so much more? The other neighborhoods full of liberals have made it clear not in our hoods.
But who cares, as long as the movies keep rolling and the stars keep getting 10 million a picture and as long as the Lakers and the Clippers and the Dodgers and the Rams keep on winning, and the big multimillion-dollar contracts are sighed, and the billion-dollar stadiums and arenas are built on the backs of the people while the billion-dollar owners use the teams like cash machines. As long as the big condos keep going up, Reo Drive stays open, and the money keeps flowing, flowing to the top to the elite. Who gives a damn about the peasants below?
(Aaron L. Dixon is an American activist and a former captain of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party for its initial four years. In 2006, he ran for the United States Senate in Washington state on the Green Party ticket. Courtesy: CounterPunch.)
