Month: August 2017

by William Skink

David Neu, a confused Missoulian, was mystified enough with the recent story of the homeless camp cleanup to write a letter to the editor. Apparently the fact that trash removed is measured in tons didn’t clue David in as to why this cleanup is necessary on an annual basis (really, at least two are probably needed with the current uptick in use).

Here is David describing his confusion:

“The photos of the woman crying along the Clark Fork River and the volunteers cleaning up the home she had been forced to vacate in a recent Missoulian was at once heartbreaking and mystifying.

There seems to be confusion as to what it signifies, and Travis Ross, an “environmental health specialist” for the city and county did nothing to clear it up when he reportedly spoke of the area’s “high potential to be a public park or a disk golf course.” The woman’s companion only asks for a “dumpster or an outhouse.” But as Ross sees it — and who knows maybe his employers — this would only come about if its higher use potential could be achieved, something hampered by the fact that Missoulians are afraid to visit this neighborhood of homeless people.

I don’t think Missoulians are so squeamish — especially those renters making barely sustainable wages — $28,765 annually as reported the Missoulian recently, who make up slightly over half of the city’s population, and by extension are only one paycheck away of joining their brothers and sisters along the river. Or could it be that this “beautiful riparian area with great wildlife habitat … right next to the river” as Ross describes it, is just too good for homeless people?

Allow me to help demystify this issue. The area under and around the Reserve Street bridge has been the scene of stabbings, sexual assaults, a pork-chop dispute (attempted homicide) and a murder (completed homicide) in just the past few years. Missoulians should be afraid of visiting this “neighborhood”. The last time I went there in an official capacity I had a cross-bow pointed at me by an unstable person who later committed arson.

And then there’s the trash.

Some of the tweaker camps we have cleaned up in the past have been unbelievably disgusting. I think the article mentioned one site this year requiring 50 bags to clear. I’m sorry, but any do-gooder Missoulian who thinks a dumpster and an outhouse would solve this problem is being seriously naïve. The people involved in managing this area have been doing this for years after the first clean-up, which cost the Montana Department of Transportation over $15,000 dollars.

And now, this year, it’s gotten worse than ever.

When these stories pop up in local media they do so without context. A few pictures and a few quotes then it’s on to some other canned coverage. Does this add to the mystification? Neu, in his letter, focuses on the comment by Ross with the Health Department. He did not spend any time scrutinizing Steve’s explanation of why they are living at the camp:

Steve said they don’t like staying at the Poverello Center because there’s nothing to do, they aren’t allowed to have physical displays of affection and they don’t always get along with the other residents. He also said he understands why the city needs to keep people from living in the Reserve Street Bridge area and why the trash needs to get cleaned up.

“There is a lot of self-regulation at these camps,” he explained. “I wish they would just provide a Dumpster or something, or an outhouse. We would all throw away the garbage if there was a place to put it.”

While David Neu feels his heartstrings being tugged, I have a different take on Steve’s description of their situation. An emergency shelter isn’t supposed to be there to entertain its temporary residents by giving them something to do, it’s there to provide the very basics—food, shelter—so its temporary residents can move on to something else.

And, yes, there are rules. Couples don’t get to do all the things couples would like to do, and other residents can be difficult, but for those who need it it’s a clean facility staffed 24 hours a day by really good people doing some of the most difficult work imaginable within a broken system getting more broken by the day.

A big part of that broken system is a lack of access to treatment for addiction. The camps around Reserve are not sober camps and that is one big reason why people choose to live out there, without the constraint of sobriety the shelter requires. Take that tearful picture the Missoulian splashed big to get an emotional response from its readers. If you look close you can see a glass pipe gripped in the woman’s hand. That’s my clue there are unstated motivations for this particular couple to be taking up residence at the homeless camps.

The main problem David had with the article, though, wasn’t Steve’s comments. Nope, it’s the mystifying comments from Travis Ross about the area being a scenic riparian habitat that could be enjoyed in a less destructive manner than its current use. That comment leads David to speculate Ross harbors some unspoken opinion that this natural beauty makes it “too good for homeless people”.

That is a big leap unsupported by the manner in which this clean-up occurs. The Health Department and the Department of Transportation don’t have to be collaborating with the Poverello Center and the Clark Fork Coalition to educate and inform people of this mostly volunteer effort to minimize the damage being done. The very people displaced by this clean-up acknowledged they were warned this was going to happen.

For other readers worried about what folks will do after the clean-up I’ll tell you a secret: many will return, some of them immediately, to start the process of trashing this area all over again. Even when the weather turns cold, you will still see wafts of smoke curling up from beneath the bridge.

Why? Because this country isn’t going to deal with the growing chasm of inequality that continues to grow, and Montana isn’t going to deal with all the brutal cuts further impacting people struggling with addictions and mental health issues, and Missoula isn’t going to deal with its skyrocketing cost of living.

Unlike David Neu I appreciate people like Travis Ross. Having worked with him during past clean-ups I know he’s not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get the job done. If you haven’t actually been out there to see directly what goes on, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

by William Skink

For most of the summer I have been locked out of using my ProTools recording software. My meager trouble-shooting abilities were not up to the task as the weeks became months. Finally, last weekend, with some help I re-subscribed and am up and running again.

For me, as an artist, I need to have creative projects to work on. This past week, with the software working again, I recorded a new song I wrote earlier this summer. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, which you can check out below.

By JC

Boom and bust; so goes the cartel capitalist cycle. But what to do when all of the man-camps start to dry up as the world saturates with the cheap oil of stagnant economies and petro-politics, leaving the expensive fracked fields of eastern Montana and North Dakota bleeding in the red?

Much of that temporary housing hauled in for the insta-cities and meth-fueled dens of oil workers is now being repurposed. And at least three cities in Montana are taking advantage of this unused housing. Missoula, Butte and Bozeman have purchased some of these units, but how they are being transformed into local housing speaks volumes about these towns. Their approaches differ radically for affordability issues, and associated homeless populations, the working and homeless poor, addicts leaving treatment looking for places to solidify their recovery, and convicts moving out of prison and back into communities.

Let’s start off with Butte. Some of you may know that the Butte Rescue Mission was forced to close in April due to code violations in the building they had used. So they purchased some of the surplus Bakken housing located in Watford City, North Dakota.

They acquired 11 units, each 720 square feet, and created a design with two pods — one with five units, the other with six, and where 56 people could live (more in the winter) and facilities like a commercial kitchens, dining area, restrooms/showers, and a children’s play area could be shared. There is room for offices for needed professional staff like case workers, counselors and mental health professionals.

Then they went on the hunt for land, and found 6.6 acres on Butte’s south side, where they are seeking a variance to assemble their new Rescue Mission. If all goes well, they hope to be up and running in October, a scant 6 months after losing their last facility.

And what is all of this going to cost the Butte rescue Mission? Well, they purchased the housing for $71,000 (that’s not a typo), and the money came from a donor. A quick look on realtor sites locates 23 acres for $385,000 about where the Mission said it is purchasing the land. Assuming they are taking 1/4 of this lot or similar land close by we can assume the price is around $100,000.

Mission Director Rocky Lyons said that they are looking for donors to help with the land purchase, and to move the units and set them up. I guess we can assume that Butte’s new Rescue Mission will cost next to nothing to the nonprofit, and house 56 people by October, given that all goes well.

That’s a pretty awesome deal, generating housing for 56 people on a shoestring budget of good will and donations, and the Rescue Mission should be applauded!

Let’s move on to Bozeman. HRDC, the nonprofit agency that is spearheading this housing effort, is thinking big. They purchased 75 of the new “cottages”  from Sidney MT through a broker. This is in addition to a proposed program to funnel a fixed percent of development costs in the city to a fund to subsidize land purchases and affordable housing, similar to that in Bend Oregon.

HRDC has gone to the trouble to quantify what each chronically homeless person in their community costs:

A “Housing First Village!“ Very enlightened idea, building tiny homes for less than $10k each. So how is Bozeman going to integrate Bakken housing into their vision? Good question. The costs and final plan haven’t been revealed yet. But Missoula also bought 10 of the same units as HRDC, and Heather McMilin, Homeword’s (Missoula) housing development director had this to say:

“We got them for what you would normally pay for the studs and the wires,” she said. “We got the units at a low enough cost that we can go in and work on landscaping and awnings and clustering and all that. It will be fun.”

So, they were cheap. The Indy priced them out at $35k each. Bozeman, which appears to have a good grasp on the needs of housing in its community, and the costs of homelessness, went all out spending several million dollars on a one-time great deal. Missoula bought 10 and just wants to have “fun” with its new units.

So what is Missoula going to do? Well, first off, 10 units is a drop in the bucket of Missoula’s housing crisis. And Missoula has a 10 year plan to address the issue. Here’s a story from the Kaimin earlier this year:

Now five years into the 10-year endeavor, Reaching Home coordinator Theresa Williams said the plan has shown no measurable effect on the homeless population.

So, Missoula’s Reaching Home program has had no success, yet Homeword wants to have “fun” with its 10 Bakken housing units. Sweet… And homelessness affects .75% of Missoula’s residents — somewhere around 1,000 people.

So let’s dig a little deeper into what is going to happen to the Bakken units. Here’s a snip from the same Indy article:

Homeword has identified a lot adjacent to the new Missoula Food Bank suitable for placing six of the units on permanent foundations in a “clustered” configuration.

Most important, [Homeword’s Andrea] Davis says, the project looks like it will make good on the structure’s initial promise as a good deal. Missoula residents need an annual income of $63,000 to afford a median-priced home in the city, but Homeword will use the federal HOME money to reserve five of the first six units for individuals earning only about half that much. After purchasing land, installing the units and sprucing them up, Davis says, Homeword should be able to sell them for $100,000 or less by the end of next year…

And with some resourceful touches, these little houses shouldn’t look like fire sales.

“There’s just an opportunity to make these cute,” Davis says.

by William Skink

With all the recent attention on the rise of America’s white supremacist strain of fascism I’m curious if the anti-fascist resistance truly opposes fascism in all its guises, or just the American variety.

One of the more confusing aspects of America’s white supremacist movement is the coexistence of antisemitism with Zionism. Richard Spencer recently brought attention to this conundrum with an interview on an Israeli news channel where he said things like this:

When asked by anchor Dany Cushmaro how Jews should feel about the anti-Semitic nature of the protest, Spencer justified the racism, saying: “Let’s be honest… Jews are vastly overrepresented in what you could call ‘the establishment,’ that is, Ivy League educated people who really determine policy, and white people are being dispossessed from this country.”

Asked how he thought Jewish people would respond to that statement, Spencer replied: “…an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogue feelings about whites.

“You could say that I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

For those who understand that Israel is an apartheid state, Spencer’s words shouldn’t come as a surprise. There is a lot about how Israel treats Palestinians that racists in America would love to emulate. For a deeply disturbing perspective on what it’s like to experience Israeli apartheid, Abby Martin’s recent interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast is worth checking out:

My suspicion is opportunistic politicians jumping on the bandwagon to score political points against Trump won’t risk their own political careers to extend their criticism to America’s support of the apartheid state of Israel. Israel will continue enjoying bipartisan support for its deeply racist policies and will continue receiving billions and billions of our tax dollars.

And white supremacists will continue admiring a nation that has so effectively institutionalized its violent, disgusting racist ideology.

If people really want to understand the persistence of white supremacist ideology they need to understand the powerful need people have to exist within the context of a narrative that transforms the chaos of life into definable structures of cultural value.

When dominant narratives break down and fall apart, like during times of national crisis, peripheral narratives have opportunities to seep in, especially if they claim restorative power in the face of national humiliation and defeat.

Nazi Germany, for example, emerged from the post-WWI conditions imposed on it by the victors. But don’t take it from me, here is a quote from a film featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website:

NARRATOR:

The humiliation of Germany’s defeat and the peace settlement that followed in 1919 would play an important role in the rise of Nazism and the coming of a second “world war” just 20 years later. What shocked so many in Germany about the treaty signed near Paris, at the Palace of Versailles, was that the victors dictated a future in which Germany was deprived of any significant military power. Germany’s territory was reduced by 13%. Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for starting the war and to pay heavy reparations. To many, including 30-year old former army corporal Adolf Hitler, it seemed the country had been “stabbed in the back”—betrayed by subversives at home and by the government who accepted the armistice. In fact, the German military had quietly sought an end to the war it could no longer win in 1918. “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain,” Adolf Hitler later wrote. “We demand vengeance!”

The big news that capped another crazy week is the ouster of Steve Bannon. In the interview he gave The American Prospect, Bannon said something I happen to agree with (which of course to some will just further confirm I’m a card carrying member Alt-Right). Even though I’m opening myself up to further smears, here’s the part I agree with:

“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

I have been advocating for more focus on economic issues for awhile, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the Democratic DNA anymore. The lasting effects of what the Clintons did to the party in the 90’s is a significant factor in the rise of peripheral narratives gaining more traction.

In constructing my own fictional narrative (which I hope to start sharing soon) I researched two other significant factors contributing to what people are now seeing rise to the surface: the occult and conspiracy culture.

I’m not sure the reaction to what happened last weekend will lead to a better understanding of the elements at play, or a shift in focus from identity politics to economic populism. Instead, symbolic statues open to interpretation are being argued over, taking the battle in Charlottesville to dozens of different locations across the country.

With the media fanning the flames of conflict between Nazis and Antifa agitators, what happened last weekend will spread.