America’s disregard of the humanity of others was on full display June 27, with both presidential candidates doubling down on anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian rhetoric during the presidential debate, and the nation’s highest court ruling that towns can treat the most destitute as criminals.
These issues are intertwined, despite major media outlets treating them as completely unrelated. All tie to a capitalist-colonialist mindset that privileges power and money at the expense of the well-being of all humanity, and that implicate what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as America’s “triple-pronged sickness.”
U.S. culture and politics from its inception has relied on tall tales and mythology to justify its brutality. Our wars and foreign policy have, for the most part, a racist underpinning that echoes the colonialist racism of Europe. We rationalize our behavior in the world stage by claiming to defend democracy — a lie more often than not — while acceding to oligarchy snd racism at home.
King, in “Beyond Vietnam,” ( said “the role our nation has taken” as “the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments” — an argument that applies to our place on the world stage, but at home, as well.
He demanded “a radical revolution of values.,” a rapid “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Watching the multi-car pile up that was the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it was difficult not to mourn the fact that King’s Vietnam speech was made in 1967, 57 years ago. Both candidates presented immigration and immigrants as existential threats to the American way of life, and fought to see who could be more extreme on the issue, painting migrants as murderers and terrorists and pointing to their respective efforts and proposals to shut the border.
Jake Tapper, one of the CNN moderators, abetted this line of argument by framing immigration as a border crisis.
Both Biden and Trump also fought to proclaim themselves most hawkish on Israel’s war on Gaza, with Trump at one point accusing Biden of being a “bad Palestinian” and saying he would tell Israel to “finish the job” — i.e., to complete the genocide of Palestinians. Biden — again with an assist from a CNN moderator, this time Dana Bash — said nothing about the nearly 40,000 Palestinians murdered by the Israeli Defense Force, nothing about a corrupt Netanyahu government that speaks in genocidal terms, and instead blamed Hamas for the stalemate on a ceasefire.
The next morning, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that allowed the city to impose a ban on camping on public property. The city, and not the court, has the right to determine homelessness policy, said Justice Neil Gorsuch in his majority opinion.
The court, according to Amy Howe on ScotusBlog, (the details I refer to below come from her post), allowed a ban on “using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits.” The ordinances that make up the ban “simply bar camping on public property by everyone and do not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”
The cruelty of the ruling is hidden in the faux balance Gorsuch attempts to apply, presenting this as simply a ban on public camping and not a law targeting the housing status of those who are forced to sleep on the streets. This is nonsense, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor wrote that the majority argument elevates the needs of local governments and “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”
What Gorsuch fails to see — or sees and refuses to acknowledge or perhaps care about — is that housed people are unlikely to camp on the streets. The vast majority of those who feel it necessary to sleep on sidewalks or in parks do so because they have nowhere else to go. This was always about status and about shunting the poor and unhoused to the shadows, about criminalizing them, because that is how we deal with social issues in the United States. In this way, the houseless are internally displaced people, domestic migrants who lack access to housing or are running from violence — victims of an economic system that is expert at creating “waste product” as it generates incredible wealth for a select few.
This should be front and center in the election campaign, this question of what we can do to prevent men, women, and children from having to sleep on the streets or flee from violence and dysfunction. But no one — not President Joe Biden, not former President Donald Trump, and not Tapper nor Bash — thought to make the connection. No one asked why the migrant and homeless populations are growing, or had any interest in connecting American foreign policy or capitalism to the movement of people trying to escape violence or economic and environmental collapse at home or abroad.
We care little for who migrants are, how the homeless are (except when we can make political points) and what would cause them to travel dangerous paths to enter a nation that has repeatedly shown its disdain for them or to sleep rough (as the Brits say) when they likely would rather sleep in a warm bed in their own space. We care little for the larger currents, or how our policies create political dysfunction around the globe, how our economy — and the primacy of profit and property rights — rob individuals of their potential.
Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substance, hankkalet.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2024
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