Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
America has an entirely new type of slum we haven't seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them "tent cities" & roadsides lined with old RVs and cars"
Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights.
Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other "Third World" countries. At that time, four decades ago, the "slums" in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems.
But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven't seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them "tent cities," along with their more upscale neighbors: roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.
Instead of referring to their denizens as slum-dwellers, we call them the "homeless," and their numbers have grown so large in the past decade of our neoliberal experiment that they signal an undeniable national housing crisis.
America, in other words, is more and more resembling a Third World nation.
But why?
Homelessness and slums like these aren't an accident or act of G-d; they're the result of intentional policy decisions made by politicians. They reflect the confluence of multiple choices we've made as a nation over the past four decades, choices that were sold to us by the morbidly rich with the promise that their increases in wealth would "trickle down" to the rest of us even as they cut services and raised the retirement age to 67.
Historically, the wealth or poverty of a nation has first reflected its natural resource base. Countries with lots of stuff under or growing above the ground that can be exported or used as energy end up with lots of money and, broadly, a healthy society.
A nation sitting on billions of barrels of oil will generally have a wealthier populace (Saudi Arabia, UAE) than one living on scrub brush and desert (South Sudan).
The exception to this is the application of human labor and ingenuity to whatever natural resources may be available. Japan, for example, is a relatively resource-poor nation but has maximized arable land through terraced rice farming and used manufacturing -- importing raw materials and exporting finished goods -- to create wealth that's turned it into a First World nation.
America is both resource rich (from arable land to minerals and fuels) and was once the manufacturing floor of the world, producing extraordinary wealth across the land. By the 1950s we were the first large nation in the world to have a middle class made up of more than half its population, largely because of our manufacturing base, supplemented by our resource sectors.
But then Reagan brought America some new ideas, rejecting classical economics -- from Adam Smith in 1776 to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s -- and embraced a new system called neoliberalism by its founders, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
The theory was that if we just abandoned government regulation and taxation of large companies and the morbidly rich, it would free them up to turbocharge our national prosperity. The newly created wealth, Reagan Republicans told us, would be shared by all.
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