Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The homeless are a class apart, out American untouchables. It goes without saying that in America the homeless have no right to shelter. They also have no right to sleep, be seen in public, go to the bathroom or keep their jobs. In short, the gradual deprivation of rights for unhoused people, sped by iniquitous supreme court decisions, is leading inexorably to the homeless lacking the right to exist.
This is awful in itself and more so since even our phony statistics admit that there are more homeless people than ever. That’s because 22 percent of renters pay ALL their income on rent, according to Redfin, which means of the remaining 78 percent, millions and millions pay a humongous percentage of their money on rent. Indeed, 12.1 million Americans spend more than half their income thus, says the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The report also mentions that 22.4 million tenants spend over 30 percent of their wages on their leases, the amount commonly recommended as the highest decent limit for rent percentage of income.
The cause of this economic catastrophe is greed. Indeed, during the recent Los Angeles fires, the L.A. Tenants Union reported that “landlords are raising rental listings by more than 50 percent to profit from the fires. Penal Code 396 prohibits price-gouging during a state of emergency.” Other sources indicate 120 percent rental listings increases. So we are dealing with a class of people, the landlord class, who are, to put it nicely, amoral. Meanwhile, abetting their amorality is a housing crunch caused largely by the complete financialization of real estate, so that private investors snap up single family homes, not to live in, but to keep empty, as a place to park excess cash. Fifteen million homes sit vacant in America, while likely 3.3 million citizens lack a permanent address. These uninhabited abodes squeeze would-be buyers by boosting prices through the roof. So lots of those people must rent.
With many desperate would-be tenants out there, landlords can charge what they like, and they like a lot of rental income, even during a disaster. How probable do you think it is that any realtor will be punished for doubling rent in L.A.? My guess is that when the sun doesn’t rise, maybe those landlords will be penalized for gouging during an inferno. Meanwhile we need millions of affordable homes, not more exorbitantly priced apartments or investment properties.
The odds stack up against ordinary Americans, whose median family income increased from $10,000 per year in 1971 to $55,000 annually today, a 5.5 times gain, far surpassed by expenses shooting much higher. According to investor Fred Krueger on X December 29, since 1971 car prices increased 12 times, the cost of a house 14 times, the outlay for an ivy league college 29 times and, worst of all, the cost of healthcare zoomed up 37 times greater than it was in 1971.
Krueger has another lugubrious list. Since 1971, the cost of a gallon of gas has jumped eight times. A slice of pizza in NY also eight times. A Big Mac is up 11 times. Fine dining for two has shot up 10 times. In 1971, “A dental checkup cost $20. Today $200. Up 10x. A 2000 square foot house cost $27,000. Today $425,000. Up 14x. A 5-star hotel cost $60. Today $700. Up 11x…So salaries are up 4-9x, unless you are an investment banker. I couldn’t find any salary category that went up more than 10x…The bottom 5 percent are getting absolutely killed…It’s the same story in Europe or worse.”
So inflation bleeds the poor, and idiotic policies from Washington don’t help. Take sanctions on Russian energy. Joe “The Ruble Will Be Rubble – Ho! Ho!” Biden slapped tons of sanctions on Moscow, most notably on oil. Predictably, prices at U.S. pumps promptly shot into the stratosphere. Then the white house geniuses emptied the strategic petroleum reserve to counter this entirely foreseeable supposed catastrophe of voters stampeding away from Biden. But still, prices stayed stubbornly high, and the U.S. is now vulnerable to an energy crisis, but hey, that’s not Biden’s problem, because he’s now out the door – and he doesn’t care how much Americans have to pay for gas. So as a parting gift, he imposed MORE sanctions on Russian oil and, surprise! Prices soared. Immediately, and by several percentage points. CNBC reported January 10 that Brent gained 3.69 percent and U.S. crude oil jumped 3.58 percent. What if these prices keep ballooning?
Donald Trump can remove some sanctions, but this is not easy, since congressional knuckleheads are involved. The law, you see, was changed under Biden precisely for such a situation as this – to cripple a president who might want to end the idiotic economic warfare against non-NATO nations. (Don’t get me wrong – the U.S. wages economic combat against its NATO allies, too, but direct sanctions usually aim at Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, places like that.)
So in his last days in office, Biden put the screws to the American people, in addition to lying that he left the U.S. with no foreign wars. Hello? Gaza? Ukraine? Our imbecilic proxy war in Ukraine that cost us hundreds of billions of dollars while FEMA’s broke and hurricane victims in North Carolina sleep in tents for months on end? While L.A. burns and the newly homeless have no shelter and get little help from the feds because – oops! the dementia-addled maniac who just left the white house sent all the money to Kiev, and was too busy to work things out for the Gazans and the Israeli hostages, while Trump, even before in office, ended the carnage, for which Biden unsurprisingly took credit. The only credit he gets is for prolonging the iniquity.
The phrase the Biden presidency brings to mind is Hannah Arendt’s: the banality of evil. Right out the gate, from the first, insidious lie – which Biden may well have even believed – that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, to the slaughter that followed, it was as if a strange, wicked spell of lies had been cast over the west. “Unprovoked,” as Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud suggested, led to a narrative of falsehoods about Ukraine. Biden tried to pull something similar with Gaza, how his hands were tied, how he couldn’t get Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a hostage/ceasefire deal, when in fact that was Biden’s CHOICE, as Trump immediately proved by using the leverage the U.S. has always had over Jerusalem to get such a truce. So now the veil finally lifts. We see face to face. Washington has been wading through a necropolis of corpses since February 2022, through October 2023 to the present, something Biden either outright prevaricated about in his farewell speech or, pathetically, forgot.
The American people foot the bill. We can’t do that anymore. Many Americans are broke, sick of the propaganda miasma and just, well, can’t. We need to tend to our own problems, and we got plenty. We can’t afford 47 new military bases in Scandinavia. We can’t even afford the 800-plus military bases we pay for all over the globe and that are easy, stationary targets in the event of any major war. We’ve likely got millions of homeless, if the statistics lie, which they demonstrably do. And we’ve got over one hundred million more just scraping by. Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden made all that worse, by subsidizing slaughter abroad. Biden taking credit for peace or reducing poverty or debt serfdom would be laughable, if it weren’t such a sick joke.
