A Pandemic of Homelessness

It's that time of year. The big dark has descended upon the Pacific Northwest. Sunrise is after 7:00 AM. Sunset is 4:30 PM. 

Each year around mid-November, due to the dark mornings and dropping temperatures, I'll start replacing my weekend road runs with laps on the community center soccer pitch. 

Due to a lengthy recovery from COVID, I've been leery about recommitting to running. Last December I posted my best 5K time in years. It seemed as if I were on my way back. I followed that performance with close to a personal worst a couple months later at a leap year 5K; a performance that augured my falling ill with the coronavirus.

Slowly but surely my strength is returning. Demands at work are off the charts. So all restored vitality is being sucked up by the job. Nonetheless, with the chores of grocery shopping and laundry already expedited, and with Thanksgiving approaching, my holiday ritual for which is a long early morning run, I decided to head out to the playfield at 5 AM this morning.

I walked the steep hill up to the community center rather than run it, as I usually do. When I got to the artificial turf soccer field it was pitch black. No moonlight nor any streetlamp glow. I noticed big tarped piles dotting the perimeter. I figured it was machinery for turf maintenance. 

When I started running my square laps I could see that tarped piles were actually homeless bivouacs. Underneath the blue tarps were igloo-style camping tents. They lined the four sides of the pitch.

I've been coming to this community center soccer field for two decades, and I've never seen anything like this before. Clearly it is something that the city's parks department must have signed off on. I know from being on that field early in the morning that city workers service it regularly.

Homelessness was a huge problem prior to the pandemic, a glaring indictment of "as good as it gets" American neoliberalism and Trumpian "the greatest economy of all time" hokum. Now that problem is being mainlined. Cities are transferring homeless from barracks-style shelters to hotels in order to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. Seattle is considering buying a hotel for the homeless. 

Hopefully some sort of socialized housing safety net comes out of this pandemic, a basic right to something like a home in a tiny house village. 

After I finished jogging I walked to a nearby Safeway for some Emergen-C. On the south side of an east-west street opposite the Safeway is a little pocket city park, a patch of green grass and shade trees. It too was filled with tents of the homeless. On the sidewalk leading to the Safeway entrance homeless slept.

The longer the pandemic persists the more homelessness is going to be forced from the margins of our neoliberal society to its center.

It's Morning in America: BlueAnon vs. QAnon

It's Friday morning and Trump's hope for claiming a second term appear to be dashed by Biden pulling ahead in the Peach State. Surveying opinion, Scotsman Craig Murray seems most sensible to me:

I hope that those who consider themselves of the left enjoy their relief when the electoral process finally puts to bed the extraordinary populism of Trumpism, and returns the USA to the smoother control of the regular media and political classes and their billionaire controllers. Because anybody who believes any more than that is happening is a fool. I said that I did not blog about the US elections because of the appalling partisan nature of debate. The truth is the system threw up, again, two truly obnoxious candidates entirely antithetical to the real interests of ordinary people in the USA. Biden will do nothing to tackle the appalling wealth and resource inequality which is the most startling problem the country faces. He will hopefully resolve social tensions in the short term. But the cause of those social tensions is a system of gross exploitation of the middle and working classes which is not sustainable in the long term, and which was the root of the Trump political eruption.

Kamala Harris was of course the most right wing possible Vice-Presidential pick. Her advance into power, despite being entirely rejected in the Democratic primaries, is in itself a huge condemnation of the system. I believe I am right in saying that Harris’s Primary campaign was so disastrous she managed to obtain zero delegates at all to the Democratic National Convention. Zero, None. Absolute bottom of the pile. Rejected by Democratic voters as the candidate in toto. Attempting to confirm this zero delegate fact, I just looked up the Wikipedia page on her primary campaign, which turns out to be the most entirely false, hagiographic and manicured Wikipedia page I have ever seen, on any subject, which is saying a lot. Apparently her Presidential Primary bid was in fact a tour de force of brilliant debating and political strategy, recounted in enormous detail, not an abject failure resulting in no delegates. The extraordinarily dishonest Wikipedia page is not perhaps in itself hugely important, but it is emblematic of the sinister manipulation behind the scenes of Kamala Harris’s rise to power.

Let us put a note in our collective diaries to look again in two years and see whether the USA has entered a period of renewed social progress, or just reinvigorated its position as a violent threat to the world. I am looking forward to the period when Biden’s mainstream cheerleaders have to find something positive to say rather than just respond “But Trump is evil”. I predict most of the responses below will say nothing much more on analysis than “But Trump is evil.” Knock yourselves out.

I think World Socialist Web Site's Patrick Martin makes an important point when he says:

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

Trumpism isn't going to evaporate after Pennsylvania and Nevada are declared for Biden. The Republican Party is headed for a bloody bestial internal struggle. 

Will the Lincoln Project neocons return to the GOP to knife fight with faux working class hero Josh Hawley or will they continue to hole up in the Democratic Party with the likes of Abigail Spanberger? Either way both national parties have houses built on melting ice.

Last night ABC News' George Stephanopoulos had to remind his viewers that Russia seeks to divide us. It was the BlueAnon mantra recited right before a commercial break, a bang of the gong for the Democratic faithful, as Trump flag-wavers rallied in Phoenix and Las Vegas, a patriot here and there with an AR-15 slung over the shoulder.

It's morning in America: Russiagate vs. Pizzagate.

Wrong Again: No Blue Wave

UPDATE: It looks like Biden is going to hold on in a squeaker, 270-264. Give Biden Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. That's 270. Give Trump Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. That's 264.

****

At this point, the early morning after election day, the presidential race is too close to call. Biden needs the vote yet to be counted in Michigan and Pennsylvania to come in overwhelmingly Democratic, something that is distinctly possible since many of the outstanding ballots are from urban counties.

One thing though appears obvious: There was no blue wave. Texas didn't flip and Trump won Florida again. Republicans will likely maintain control in the Senate and even pick up seats in the House. The energized electorate was composed of more than just alarmed soccer moms; it included Trump loyalists as well.

The bottom line here is that the United States is a nation on its way down. How else to explain the inability of a well-funded opposition party to shellac an incumbent saddled with 13 million unemployed and over 200,000 dead from a pandemic?

It's difficult to rationalize. If Trump wins, the state polls in Pennsylvania will turn out to be even more inaccurate than they were four years ago -- a big blow to the mainstream media and the polling profession.

I'm not convinced that Biden has lost this. Trump's premature declaration of victory and call for a stop to the vote count is telling. As Republicans go to court it is unclear what arguments could justify halting the normal tabulation of election results.

On the other hand, maybe "the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary."