I posted this in response to a friend’s Facebook post the other day.
The corporate capitalist state is designed to create big profits for a small group, create both human (homelessness, mass joblessness) and environmental waste and force a large middle to pay the cost. The middle, rightly, gets pissed; the bottom gets further ground into invisibility and the tiny minority sit in their counting houses counting coins and laughing.
I think it fairly sums up my thinking about the issue of homelessness (and probably explains why I ended up in a counterproductive and unnecessary flame war on Twitter earlier today after I criticized a TV report on homelessness on Channel 9’s “Chasing New Jersey”), my own long poem “As an Alien in a Land of Promise,” my friend Jack Ballo’s film Destiny’s Bridge and Sherry Rubel’s fine photos. We began working together on the project almost 18 months or so ago, not being particularly sure where it might take us.
For me, the experience made clear my basic beliefs about how American corporate capitalism operates, which is to generate profits for a small number while finding ways to push costs onto others. The costs, as I’ve written, manifest in waste, which take the form not only of trash and pollution, but also create a kind of human waste — what we call homelessness is actually a byproduct of a system that disposes of what it cannot use. In this regard, homelessness is only partially about a lack of housing and low wages and, as a story in The New York Times earlier this week shows, not really about a lack of jobs. More jobs will not mean less homelessness, though it will help. Higher wages will help. More housing will help.
But as long as we continue to allow the system to be rigged so that it only values investment at the top and views those who are damaged as useless, the tent city phenomenon will continue.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 
Capitalism does not equal democracy or freedom. It is an economic system not a governmental system. Capitalism can function very nicely under a communistic authoritarian police state like Communist China or in brutal bloody fascist dictatorships like those of Franco and Pinochet. William F. Buckley was a big admirer of those two bloody and murderous dictators; that speaks volumes about who he really was. Nothing nice or positive about that bastard.
88.7% of the US workforce is NOT unionized. The GOP is rabidly and aggressively anti-union while the Democrats may pay some lip service to unions, they have done nothing substantive to help unions. EFCA (the Employee Free Choice Act has gone nowhere even when the phony baloney Democrats were in control of Congress). The Taft-Hartley Act should be repealed and EFCA should be enacted but that's not likely to happen with anti-union union hating GOPers and gutless Democrats. Enormous amounts of worker blood was spent fighting for basic rights, the US has an incredibly bloody history of union struggle. We need a new union movement hopefully devoid of violence and bloodshed. Unions would help to level the playing field between workers and management plus the rich and the corporations should be taxed much more or at least taxed as they were in the 1950s or even the 1970s.