[HPN] National Alliance to End Homelessness as Corporate Lapdog - reprint freely! FWD reprint freely! FWD

[Tom Boland]

FWD  24 Feb 2000  ANTI-COPYRIGHT

The author, Jeremy Weir Alderson <radio@lightlink.com>, aka Nobody,
grants permission to reproduce this article for noncommercial purposes.

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A View From Nowhere

Once, Twice, Three Times Bamboozled
by
Nobody

What unlikely thing do these businesses have in common:  Arthur Andersen
LLP, Bell Atlantic, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Bank of America, Goldman
Sachs and Company, GTE, Hertz Corp., IBM, Mortgage Bankers Association of
America, Republic Industries, Southwestern Bell, and U.S. West?  The
answer is that they all want to solve the problem of homelessness, or, at
least, that's what you might gather from the fact that they're all
contributors to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a
Washington-based advocacy group.
    	On the face of it, this might be perplexing.  Arthur Andersen is
a consulting firm notorious for helping local governments throw people off
welfare.  In Toronto, where they've got a contract, they've been accused
of employing a bureaucratic goon squad to deprive people of their benefits
for trumped up reasons like failure to provide documentation on what
happened to cars disposed of a decade earlier or failure to attend a
meeting deliberately scheduled for a distant, hard to get to location.
People have been arrested protesting Andersen's policies which, a
group of thirty Canadian activists --  including members of Homes Not
Bombs, Toronto Action for Social Change and the Ontario Coalition Against
Poverty -- recently called, "cruel and heartless."
	Similarly, mortgage bankers and corporate behemoths are hardly
known for their compassion for the poor.  And Wall Street goes crazy any
time there's a chance Americans will be better able to afford housing by
earning a living wage (they call this "inflationary pressure").  So what
gives?  Why would these firms, more associated with causing the
problem, be contributing to a group seeking a solution?  The
answer is that the National Alliance to End Homelessness is to
ending homelessness what the Wise Use Movement and the Global Climate
Coalition are to protecting the environment.  They're corporate shills
(who've also roped in a few unions), trying to convince us that oppression
is compassion.  I call this, "The Third Wave Of The Bamboozlement Of The
Proletariat."  It's a stage of capitalism that Marx never catalogued.
	The first wave, best exemplified by Ronald Reagan, was to convince
us that we were all going toward that shining city on the hill, the rising
tide would lift all boats (a Kennedy aphorism, so it's not just
Republicans), none of the truly needy would fall through the social safety
net and that sort of thing.  Of course, it wasn't true, and anyone this
bothered was addressed by the second wave, best exemplified by Clinton.
	The buzzword of the second wave (and the core promise of
Clinton's campaign in '92) was "change."  We were going to  change the
flaws in Reaganomics so that now everyone really would be better off. And,
unfortunately, the country still seems to be swallowing this line.  The
double-whammy of big-business mega-mergers and the evisceration of
individual rights that has characterized the Clinton administration
completely passes most people by.  But, still, there are more than a few
people who do notice the legions of homeless on the streets and wonder why
this is happening if the economy is so good.  Enter the Third Wave.
	The Third Wave is an attempt to convince people that yes, we
really are experiencing an economic miracle, but just a few people are
being left out.  Andrew Cuomo, the "compassionate" administration front
man for the Third Wave, speaks about "pockets" of poverty and how most of
the homeless can be "helped."  It's a deception.  The poorest 20% of
Americans have been losing economic ground for decades, while funds for
public housing have been slashed, and rents have been rising, fueled by
the boom times for some.  That's not a matter of "pockets," and it's not
a social work problem.  But the Third Wave is useful because it diverts
people from demanding what the demonstrators in Seattle demanded, a
restructuring of our economy so that everyone shares the wealth.  We can
keep the current system going, we're told, with just a few adjustments,
and keeping the system going is what the Third Wave is really all about.
	Before the most recent Homelessness Marathon this January, I
directed three questions to HUD.  I asked what it would mean to solve the
problem of homelessness; would current government programs solve that
problem, and, if so, by when; and if not, had HUD ever made ANY proposal
that would, in HUD's assessment, actually end homelessness?  Despite their
repeated promises to get back to me, HUD let the deadline for the
broadcast expire without answering, and even though I contacted them
again after the marathon and said I'd still be willing to air their
response, they still have failed to reply.  I suppose they just don't want
it nakedly exposed that, of course, they're not on their way to ending
homelessness, and that the real posture of this administration is to leave
hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, which brings me back to
the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
	The Alliance is touting their goal of ending homelessness "in ten
years."  I'm sure this timetable (how did they ever come up with it?) is
little comfort to, say, the mother of a five-year-old out on the streets.
Their implicit position is that homelessness isn't a
dead-canary-in-the-coal-mine emergency, symptomatic of something deeply
wrong with America, but a social condition we can tolerate, like some
national lawn that sooner or later we should get around to mowing. And if
during these high times for some, they say we can't end homelessness
quickly, what will they say if there's a recession?  Will they shrug their
shoulders and say now we need 100 years?
	Unlike the National Coalition for the Homeless, which wants
national health insurance, for example, the National Alliance never argues
for societal change.  For them, as for Andrew Cuomo, we can keep on as
we're going, pausing only to help a few unfortunates with drug treatment,
job training or literacy skills, not a revamped national budget, tax code
or legal system (e.g. one that gives economic rights to citizens and takes
citizens' rights away from corporations).
	Where the New York Coalition for the Homeless, in Times ads, asks
for contributions of up to $100, the National Alliance, in the same paper,
will ask for up to $1000 (just goes to show you what that big corporate
thinking will do).  It's a perfect little scam, really.  Not only will
they take an advocacy posture guaranteed to perpetuate the very problem
they say they want to solve, but they'll use their bamboozlement to drain
contributions away from more legitimate advocacy groups.
	But all of this is still small potatoes.  You can't really
understand the evil at the heart of the National Alliance until you take
a look at their stance toward slashing entitlements and throwing people
off of welfare, the very issue, of course, at the heart of what's wrong
with Andersen consulting, in particular, and laissez-faire capitalism in
general.
	In a September, 1998 position paper entitled "The Homelessness
and Welfare Refrom Initiative," (a "project" of theirs), the National
Alliance asserts that, "Sanctions, time limits, benefit cuts and low wages
may increase homelessness."  Well, as Cassandra said, "beware of Greeks
bearing gifts." This Trojan Horse phrasing might lead one to believe that
the Alliance sees a clear and present danger in welfare reform,
but that would be a misimpression.  Note the clever insertion of the word,
"may." Slashing funds going to the poor "may" cause homelessness, but then
again, it may not.
	We're not just talking about the
we-can-jumpstart-the-poor-with-a-kick-in-the-pants philosophical
pretext for slashing entitlements.  The Alliance's posture is far
more extreme than that.  Even low wages only "may" cause homelessness. And
cutting benefits may actually HELP end it, which is why an
entire section of their policy paper is entitled (in bold
capital letters), "THE VISION: WELFARE REFORM AS A TOOL TOWARD ENDING
HOMELESSNESS NOW."
	Once again, Cassandra had it right.  The Alliance suggests that "a
long-term commitment is required, to coordinate services in a holistic
manner while the worker is struggling to gain the ability to support her
family."  Note the use of that hip, well-intentioned catchword "holistic,"
the oh-so-politically-correct feminine pronoun "her" and the generally
sympathetic tone.  But what they're really advocating for is "information
gathering and capacity building" so we can deliver more "services," in an
ineffectual welfare bureaucracy worse than the one that was
supposedly reformed (something people might eventually catch on to, at
which point there'll surely be a Fourth Wave).
	Now it's easy to see why this approach is so popular with
corporate America.  It's easy to see what Arthur Andersen likes.
"Give people low wages and take away their benefits?  No problem," they
can say in their best imitation of populism.  "We've got programs for
that, lots of 'em, and we've even got some high-fallutin' do-gooders in
Washington 'splainin' how it all works out to the Feds."  Only it
doesn't all work out.  This isn't something that's been cooked up by
anybody who actually knows about poverty.  As the Toronto activists
pointed out, "while single people on welfare [in Toronto] struggle to get
by on $520 a month, top Andersen executives are cashing it at $575 an
hour."  This is a fake anti-homelessness plan put forward by people
whose real expertise is in amassing wealth at other people's expense.
	What makes the National Alliance different from the fake
environmental groups isn't just how neatly it's rhetoric dovetails with
the prevailing political palaver from both parties, but the immediate,
devastating consequences their protect-the-welfare-of-the-wealthy approach
will have on people -- in this case, people sleeping in the streets.
The Third Wave isn't about the rising tide that lifts all boats.  It's
about drowning anyone who can't swim.

END FORWARD



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