Karen Batts (that’s her on the right of the photo), 52, of Portland, Ore., was evicted from subsidized housing for not paying her rent (she owed $338). She moved into a parking garage, where she froze to death on Saturday, becoming Portland’s fourth person who is homeless to die on the streets just this year.
Ms. Batts had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
There are no words to describe this, other than to say: This should never happen. Ever.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced yesterday that the state is now able to match every person who has been verified as chronically homeless to permanent housing.
According to Journey Home:
One challenge we still face in our region is that on average, about 11 people per month are becoming chronically homeless in Greater Hartford. In addition, Journey Home has identified a number of people who appear likely to be chronically homeless, and thus, we are continuously working with our partner agencies on completing the documentation necessary to verify their chronic homelessness.
Dating Jesus 
That’s murder in my opinion. Negligent homicide maybe. But murder just the same.
And yet it’s going to be viewed with a shrug and a “Whattya gonna do?”
Neoliberalism demands that when a person’s marketable value ends, their life becomes disposable. It has become The American Way™.
We are stripped of our humanity and reduced to data, consumers and commodities. Without value to any of those markets, all that’s left is the trash heap.
Capitalism…what a concept.
I am to here to defend capitalism, though if I did give it much thought, I’d have to admit that I’ve most likely benefited from it, at someone else’s expense. But we are on a bad road to think that a mentally ill woman can be put out of her dwelling and left to freeze to death.
Capitalism, generally speaking, has not been such a bad thing. Even Marx admitted that.
However, the neoliberal monopoly finance Capitalism that has supplanted the moral capitalism of Keynes and FDR, the kind of Capitalism that embraces the politics of disposability where more and more human beings are considered excess, consigned to abandonment, the kind of Capitalism that governs every aspect of life in America, is immoral. It has destroyed all principles embodied in the social contract that was the basis for our founding principles…our Constitution. The narcissistic reasoning of neoliberalism has replaced the State as the center of politics and governance. The result is a culture of anxiety, insecurity, commodification and privatization that has replaced the hope and opportunity this nation fought for 200 years to protect. That culture has become so pervasive that the orthodoxies of the past can no longer offer any hope of relief.
It’s that loss of hope, that inability to see opportunity in the future, the desperation caused by the abandonment of the social contract that governed this nation for 200 years, is the reason Donald Trump is President-elect.
The new face of HUD?
Lord.
I think he gave Elizabeth Warren a hernia yesterday.
But it looks like he had a good time! It’s the simple pleasures that count.