Right-wing extremists say homeless have it easy

It's hard to grasp the mind of today's right-wing scoundrel, and it's not like I want to anyway, because quite frankly I'm no longer that interested in their melodrama. The general rule is that the more a person complains about the government doing too much to help the disadvantaged, the less the complainant has to worry about becoming disadvantaged themselves.

I wish I could take off my listening ears (as Judge Judy would say) whenever the Potemkin populists of the Far Right start ranting about how the poor have it so easy - but I have a duty to keep a close watch on what they say, because their influence is far out of proportion to their numbers.

More evidence of this has surfaced lately in Los Angeles, where the city is caving to the demands of the Far Right by forcibly removing homeless and other desperately poor people from a 50-block area of downtown. This is being done for the purpose of gentrification - driving out the poor to make room for the rich. This year-old initiative is built on the discredited idea that going after small crimes or even things that previously wouldn't have been considered crimes at all will discourage larger crimes from coming to the area.

To put it in more worrisome terms, authorities have begun going after signs of disorder rather than actual criminal activity. They bust the homeless, not because homelessness is a criminal offense (which it isn't) but because it makes the neighborhood appear poor. These signs of disorder are really signs of poverty. Instead of tackling poverty, the city goes after the poor for being proof poverty exists. Furthermore, this policy has been used in many locales as a weak excuse for racial profiling.

Under L.A.'s policy, poor people in general - not just the homeless - have been stopped by cops just for walking down the street. The police's warrantless searches of area residents got so bad that earlier this year a judge ruled these searches unconstitutional.

Chasing the poor out of an entire 50-block area and conducting illegal searches every time they walk down their own street isn't enough to appease the Far Right intelligentsia (or more accurately, stupidsia). Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing stink tank that helped influence Rudolph Giuliani's totalitarian policies as New York City mayor, wrote a column that appeared in the ultraconservative New York Post the other day lamenting the fact that Los Angeles is still less harsh on the homeless than New York is.

That whiny article proves how out of touch the right-wing nobility is. In addition to praising current New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's right-wing policy of shutting down homeless encampments, the piece also attacks the '60s and '70s for allegedly being a time when "street people roamed American cities while advocates and officials told irate citizens that nothing could or should be done." Except it ain't so, smartypants. I grew up in a major urban area in the '70s, and I don't ever remember seeing a homeless person until the '80s when Reagan grabbed power. In every decade since, I've seen more and more homeless, as conservative public policies have become more common. I'm not saying there weren't any homeless people in the '70s, but their numbers sure did grow every time the Republicans had a good election cycle.

The only thing the article is right about is its mention of real estate values rising too fast. The rest of the piece is just the same tired old rah-rah extolling the supposed greatness of Giuliani's ironfisted policies. The writer acts as if soothing the minor irritations faced by the city's elite should take priority over the basic well-being of thousands of homeless.

We have to baby the privileged conservatives, I guess. Life for the elites has to be a continual hot tub massage, and the rest of the world has to wait on them.

(Source: http://www.alternet.org/rights/65481)