Pitt Hitt's a Home Run

"America has a war on drugs that doesn't work. It has a war on poverty that doesn't work. It has a war on crime that has only managed to fill its prisons. It has wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that didn't work. You want to fix everything that has gone wrong? There's only one answer: America must declare war on America."

America Must Declare War on America

Friday, 29 June 2012 00:00 By William Rivers Pitt, 

Truthout | Op-Ed

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
- Oscar Wilde
I was polishing the local bartop with my elbows the other day next to a naturalized Irishman who works as an electrician. He asked what I did for a living, and I winced a little before telling him, "I write politics," because I knew what was coming. As ever, when I let people know what I do while in the confines of a drinking establishment, I was immediately subjected to a sustained violation of The First Law Of The Bar: "Thou shalt not talk of religion or politics here."
Such moments are normally excruciating for me, pretty much entirely because the absolute last thing I want to do while nursing a whiskey and watching a ballgame is talk shop. This time, however, was different. My new friend regaled me with a succinct, accurate and scathing assessment of his adopted country - "Millions of people need work, the infrastructure of the country is falling down around our ears, but no one in power seems able or willing to put one and one together and solve two problems with one stroke," he railed at one point - before summing it all up with a single, perfect, devastating brick.
"America," he said, "has a war on drugs that doesn't work. It has a war on poverty that doesn't work. It has a war on crime that has only managed to fill its prisons. It has wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that didn't work. You want to fix everything that has gone wrong? There's only one answer: America must declare war on America."
My new friend did not pay for another drink the rest of the night.
Absolutely God damned right.
America must declare war on America, against the fusillade of divisive nonsense that passes for political discourse these days, provided with full corporate sponsorship by a small cabal of rich people via the "mainstream" news media they own from top to bottom. Americans must declare war on America, on the America this fortunate few would create with zeroes to the left of the decimal on their secret donation checks, on the America these reavers and traitors seek to make in their own corrupted, bloated image.
I have made this point time and time and time again, but it bears repeating once more: the single greatest strength the far right and their paymasters enjoy is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything - to gain an advantage in any debate, and be damned to whoever takes a screwing in the process.
A perfect example: on Wednesday, Rand Paul (R-KY), darling of teabagger nation and son of that walking farce of a fake Libertarian Ron Paul, blocked a vote on extending FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program until the Senate votes on legislation declaring that human life begins at conception. Forget all those people in Iowa and Florida who are swamping out their homes after being inundated with record rainfall. We need legislation on fetuses...but God help them if they're born, because these God-fearing Republicans don't give a fig for them once they've passed through the birth canal. Welcome to the planet, brat. You're on your own.

My friend at the bar was on fire over the massive infrastructure problems facing America right now, noting that more than 2,000 bridges are trembling on the edge of collapse in Massachusetts alone. Why has this incredibly important problem not been addressed? Adam Peck of ThinkProgress provided an answer last week:

With as many as 2.9 million new and existing jobs on the line, House Republicans are refusing to pass a transportation reauthorization bill, even after the Senate's version of the bill overwhelmingly passed through the upper chamber in a 74-22 bipartisan vote.
The deadline for new transportation funding is June 30, and if the calendar flips to July without a compromise, as many as 1.9 million workers could lose their jobs, at least temporarily. The Senate version of the bill, if adopted, would create an additional one million new jobs as well, according to Department of Transportation projections.
So why are House Republicans holding nearly three million jobs hostage? Because they want approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to be included in the bill. The State Department estimates that roughly 6,000 jobs would be created if the Keystone XL is approved, but as few as 20 of them will be permanent.

These are but two examples; there are dozens upon dozens more. Were I to list them all, I would singlehandedly cause a worldwide electron and ink shortage. Sufficed to say, where we are can best be explained by how we got here. On the eve of the Supreme Court's ruling on President Obama's Affordable Care Act, James Fallows of The Atlantic laid out how exactly we came to this sad and disgraceful state of affairs:

When you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we'd identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.
You can try this at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which:
First, the (2000) presidential election is decided by five people, who don't even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology. Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them. Meanwhile their party's representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation - and appointments, especially to the courts. And, when a major piece of legislation gets through, the party's majority on the Supreme Court prepares to negate it - even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party's presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.
How would you describe a democracy where power was being shifted that way?

As if all this were not enough already, that small cabal who helped deliver us to this diseased and deranged estate has the perfect answer to all the problems before us: a plastic-fantastic fraud of a multi-millionaire, named after a kitchen utensil, who was against everything he stands for before he was for it before he was against it, who made his money killing American jobs, whose wife tries to connect with the common people by wearing $900 t-shirts on national television, and whose family claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for owning a doped-up horse.
America must declare war on America. You, me, and everyone we know with brain one in our heads and the best interests of the country at heart need to charge the ramparts, stand our post, and refuse to take even one step back.
The Supreme Court is rewriting the Constitution on the back of a corporate pay stub, Congress has made itself more useless than nipples on an ice cream cone, the President of the United States has decided he can kill where and who he wishes with a video game, and Colorado is on fire even as the "mainstream" news media gives respectful ear to a Republican presidential candidate who argues that firing firefighters is a bully idea and the answer to all that ails us.

To a great many people's surprise, a majority of the Supreme Court - led by Chief Justice Roberts, of all people - ruled in favor of the Affordable Care Act on Thursday morning. For many Americans, this was a big victory and a tremendous relief, but in truth, the law does not nearly go far enough. Senator Bernie Sanders said it best: "In my view, while the Affordable Care Act is an important step in the right direction and I am glad that the Supreme Court upheld it, we ultimately need to do better. If we are serious about providing high-quality, affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, the real solution to America's health care crisis is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Until then, we will remain the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman and child as a right of citizenship."

This issue is one of a multitude facing this nation today, and there is only one way to get it done.
America must declare war on America.
Stand your post.

Working To End Youth Homelessness in the LGBT Community

Preventing the Tragedy of LGBT Youth Homelessness

June 25, 2012  |  bchilds

Although homelessness affects many people, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth make up a disproportionate segment of that population. While 1.7 million adolescents experience at least one episode of homelessness a year, between 20-to-40 percent of that population identify as LGBT.
In 2009, President Barack Obama declared June as LGBT Pride Month. The objective of this infographic, created in partnership with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Human Rights Campaign and the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, is to highlight some of the unique challenges that lead to LGBT youth homelessness, in addition to some of the mental health problems that affect the population. While we still have a long way to go, several homelessness non-profits, federal agencies and LGBT advocacy organizations, such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign, are working together to provide solutions to this tragedy.

Click to Enlarge

Health Care for the Homeless Annual Conference in Kansas City, MO Kicks Off Today

This morning kicks off the 25th??? annual Healthcare for the Homeless conference in Kansas City, MO and the event is a first-class affair that folks attending this conference have come to expect from John Lozier and crew.  

This conference is one of two "must attend" events that folks in the world of homeless services try to make each year (the other being the fabulous National Alliance to End Homelessness conference) because not only are the networking opportunities damned near endless, the quality and selection of workshops and lecture sessions is both broad and comprehensive. 

That the conference is held this year in Kansas City plays especially well with me, given that rumblings from providers working in what the east and west coast folks sometimes sneeringly refer to as the "flyover" states indicate perceptions of increasingly isolated and out of touch policy formation that doesn't jibe with the realities of life and poverty that are affecting and negatively impacting both client and service agency.  

What is working in some of the bigger cities around the country on those coasts is either not working at all in the heartland, or is so challenging to implement that it might as well be asking providers to take people experiencing homelessness directly into their own homes as a way to end homelessness in their cities and towns.

Multiple reasons abound for this, including abject poverty within the provider community, ignorance about implementation and the systemic factors that contribute to homelessness, little or no training opportunities for direct service staff, siloed services with little or no agency collaboration and/or integration, frustration with community pushback that demoralizes the workforce, apathetic political involvement (if they're lucky enough to have political involvement), to name just a few.  And while these challenges are certainly not restricted to folks in the flyover states, the situation appears to be pervasive in them.  

Pockets of excellence appear, to be sure, but often the fight to reach excellence is so damned tough that it's hard to ask those examples to help lead others, although those individuals often jump at the chance.  And of course, what works in Gary, Indiana may not work at all in Odessa, MO., so it renders the collaboration moot and ineffective even if it could happen.

 We know homelessness is complex and as such, a cookie-cutter approach doesn't work so well.  But as we begin to dig down into the idea of scalability, we're beginning to see some patterns of successful program pieces emerge.  I think we're still a long way off from being able to promulgate generic approaches that bridge the challenges in a way that makes the chances of an agency's success in ending homelessness while treating mental illness and addiction higher, but that we're even looking for them as the precursor to an integrated approach is a giant step forward in the world of behavioral health.  

Conferences like the Healthcare for the Homeless, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and a host of other smaller but no less important events occurring each year bring us all together to talk about these challenges, barriers, and ways of overcoming them.  This is critically important because for the remainder of every year, we return to our communities and often  operate in isolation.   While efforts are being made in earnest to change this as well, the fact remains that for much of each year, many do operate almost in a vacuum.  

The cumulative trauma of providing services to those on the streets, coupled with the feeling of being alone and unsupported in the work we're doing, and constantly struggling for every penny in order to perform the most basic and rudimentary functions of the job wear heavily on the morale and chip away at one's initiative to do outstanding work.  Subsistence wages, community scorn, and the constant battle to find sustaining funding round out the globe of gloom for those working in this field, and it's hard to remain optimistic and hopeful for clients and colleagues when it's a constant battle for survival and enough gas to get to work each week. 

Add to this a perception that others seem to be enjoying substantial success, support and political will and you begin to understand the reasons for the rumblings of discontent within the flyover states. To those of you who continue the war against homelessness in these locales, know some of us hear you, loud and clear.  Take at least a little comfort in the fact that you have an increasingly louder voice that reminds those on the coasts and in the big cities that all is not well in the many places they've never heard of. 

To be continued....believe it.