Month: March 2018

by William Skink

The Montana Post could learn something from Elizabeth Warren, nationally, and James Connor, locally. So far the “progressives” over there have ignored Jon Tester’s servitude to banks. Elizabeth Warren, however, is not ignoring the betrayal of her colleagues. She actually has courage and the consistency of her principles, which was on clear display when she called out the Democrat sell-outs in the Senate for their votes:

Speaking about a series of recently lost policy fights — on gun reform, the tax bill, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and more — Warren told the annual gathering of progressive elected officials and advocates, “Just this week we lost the first round in the battle of a bad banking bill — a bill that would take the reins off of Wall Street’s most reckless actors and put as greater risk of another financial crisis. When I saw a handful of my Democratic colleagues vote for it, it felt like a stab in the heart. Not for me, but for all the homeowners who were cheated and all the taxpayers who bailed out those banks. That is wrong.”

While she was angry at Wall Street, she said, she felt most betrayed by her own colleagues. “It is so hard to fight against all the money and all the lobbying. It is so hard to fight when we fight and lose. It’s worse when some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight,” she said.

It’s maddening to watch alleged progressives with no spine constantly giving their candidates a pass on critical issues. If you don’t think banking regulation is a critical issue then you, like so many cognitively impaired partisans, must have forgotten the economic crisis now a decade old, but still reverberating for the vast majority of the population that didn’t recover like Wall Street did with the help of public bailouts and Fed liquidity injections.

If it really is the economy, stupid, then how stupid is someone like Pete Talbot? In a recent post, titled We’re #1! In income inequality, that is, Talbot reminds MP readers of James Caraville’s infamous phrase. He goes on to suggest that this message could be a winning one for Democrats in 2018 because income inequality has skyrocketed in states like Montana.

Here is how Talbot explains why income inequality exists (warning: this description could make you actually stupider about the economy):

What’s behind this disparity? It’s “due to the rapid income growth among the upper class,” which has “increased the cost of real estate throughout the state and made housing less affordable for many members of the middle class.” Which also means that more-and-more of the average family’s paycheck is going to rent or mortgage payments. No surprise there.

I don’t think Pete Talbot is stupid, but I’m wondering how stupid Talbot thinks progressives are. Referencing Bill Clinton and the economy without mentioning the repeal of Glass-Steagall is just one glaring omission. The description above is another pathetically sparse explanation of what has happened, economically, in our state and our country.

Why has their been rapid income growth among the upper class, Petey? Could it be the direct result of the neoliberal policies of the Obama regime? Here is an article from July, 2016. The date is important because it’s before the election of Donald Trump. From the link:

“The share of income going to the top 1% of families – those earning on average about $1.4m a year – increased to 22% in 2015 from 21.4% in 2014.”

According to him, while the 1% power ahead and continue to reclaim income lost during the recession, a full recovery for the bottom 99% remains elusive. “Six years after the end of the Great Recession, those families have recovered only about 60% of their income losses due to that severe economic downturn,” he said.

It should not come as a shock that to many Americans talk of economic recovery rings hollow. The top 1% of families saw their income grow by 37% between 2009 to 2015, from $990,000 to $1.36m. The incomes of the other 99%, however, grew by just 7.6% during that time – from $45,300 in 2009 to $48,800 in 2015.

This has been the trend, post economic collapse. It’s why Occupy Wall Street movements exploded across the country. Remember that? Remember when young people were taking a stand against the obscenity of bailing out instead of jailing Wall Street?

That movement didn’t get the same immediate, broad support high school kids are getting today advocating to not get shot in their classrooms. But then again, the specter of Trump wasn’t making progressives and other shards of the shattered left go berserk like we see today. No, the progressive strains were largely accepting of the eventual backlash against those dirty hippie camps.

While the economy stagnated for the vast majority of Americans under Obama, the power of the police state grew. It was the economy, stupid, back then and it’s still the economy, stupid, right now.

Because I apparently can’t get enough of stupid, let’s take a look at how Talbot concludes his post:

The phony “populist” message of a Donald Trump: deregulation or immigrants stealing your jobs or “tax cuts paid for by growth” or repealing Obamacare… are all wearing thin. So, Democrats, don’t shy away from a progressive, economic message. A living wage would be a good start, as would a more progressive tax system and a single-payer health care plan.

And maybe we can put a dent in income inequality in Montana and the rest of the country.

I mean, Christ almighty, Jon Tester is VOTING FOR DEREGULATION while a mouthpiece for Montana progressives is talking about Donald Trump.

The Democrat establishment is attacking progressives like Linda Moser because the establishment prefers a lawyer who champions attacking labor (including immigrant women) while Talbot is still talking about Obamacare instead of Medicare for all.

Our own city leaders are continuing to prioritize gentrification as the poor get punched in the face, and the only two ideas coming from this Missoula progressive are either “the regressive way (tax cuts to the rich and corporations in the hope that their extra money will trickle down to the hoy polloi) or the progressive way (increasing wages and benefits for the working class, and upping taxes on the rich).”

No direct action? Is that not even a glimmer of possibility anymore?

Well, of course it is. People take direct action all the time. Those in pain and in despair act with increasingly frequency to destroy themselves. The more deranged and homicidal individuals in our country take direct action to bring into oblivion as many other people as possible.

The direct action of high school students is currently being applauded (exploited?) by supporters of gun control.

And I suspect there will be increasing calls from the resistance (like Josh Manning) to take direct action against Trump.

So direct action is definitely an option, but I would suggest being extra weary, of who is supporting direct action, and why. Cui bono is still a solid mantra in these surreal times.

by William Skink

It was quite a blast from the past reading the Indy’s feature piece this week about Missoula’s Zine Scene. As you can see from the photographic evidence above, a poem of mine found its way into the inaugural edition of Slumgullion, circa 2005. I made a few zines myself, but never distributed them beyond friends.

Maybe someone going to the zine celebration at the ZACC tomorrow will find one of my very limited edition zines floating around for sale or trade.

Nostalgia seems to have a strengthening pull for Gen-Xers. I just finished watching Everything Sucks on Netflix and I have to say it’s a goddamn adorable show. There is a scene where the dad wants to have a private conversation on the telephone upstairs, and to accomplish this task back in those olden days one would need to rely on a second person–in this case, the daughter–to hang up the phone once the other line was picked up.

Spoiler: she didn’t hang up the phone.

For me the creeping nostalgia is butting heads with a deep anxiety about the future. I know I am not alone, but I also don’t have “a scene” I feel a part of.

I sense a similar sentiment from Dan Brooks in his opinion piece this week asking where have all the gamblers gone?

Though Brooks focuses on a subculture of poker miscreants, his sense of loss speaks to the broader trend of gentrification that transformed Jays Upstairs to a business schmoozing space called The Loft. Dan writes beautifully in his piece this week about Missoula’s transformation:

I used to know a dozen hustlers in this town, guys who played for a living, or what passed for a living in a quiet mountain-town economy. They were sporadically broke and routinely drunk, but they tightened up around the end of the month and made rent with a quick kill at Stock’s or the Tip. The internet made a couple of them rich. Poker made them sullen and ebullient by turns, quick with figures and slow with everything else. Years of folding and waiting had rendered them incapable of picking anything up without rolling it across their fingers. They all seemed to share the same cough. They were a community, united by their willingness to put in 50 or 60 hours a week to avoid getting a job.

You can’t do that here anymore. Mostly it’s because the poker boom is over, and the players who remain play better than the guys who crawled out of their basements quoting Rounders. But the rent has gone up considerably since then, too. The bar games have withered away, and those that still spread take longer to fill up, and break earlier. Missoula is a different town from what it was a decade and a half ago. Fewer people expect to make a living without working.

I don’t think many people would tell you that’s bad. You’re supposed to work; it’s immoral not to, unless you’re rich. Our community is probably not suffering for a lack of bar gamblers. It is suffering, though, isn’t it? The old places shut down and the new places are chains. The whole town keeps getting nicer in ways fewer of us can afford. The riff-raff moves out, and the fit professional families move in. This mountain valley is becoming so valuable that soon only the best people will live here. It doesn’t do any good to complain about it. Nobody wants to hear your bad-beat story.

Are we just tomorrow’s geezers waxing whimsical about the good old days, or is something fundamental about the essence of Missoula draining away as new banks and hotels spring up?

by William Skink

The Indy this week has a really interesting article about how Bozeman screwed the pooch on housing affordability. The warning for Missoula is obvious, but the comparison made is more than a little bit generous:

The Garden City does have its advantages. While staff turnover has dogged the administration of Bozeman’s affordability program, the city of Missoula has had a dedicated housing director, former Poverello Center director Eran Pehan, since 2016. And Missoula does have active “production builders” putting $230,000 homes on the market, according to Werwath, thus hitting price points that Bozeman struggled to accomplish with its incentives program.

Missoula’s political dynamics may be more amenable to effective action on housing, as well. While a number of Werwath’s recommendations for Missoula involve better coordination between city and county governments — for instance, developing a joint annexation policy to help determine where new housing will be built — that sort of collaboration has been a challenge for the Bozeman area, where a conservative county commission routinely butts heads with more progressive city leaders. At the Realtor-organized event last month, Missoula County Commissioner Jean Curtiss, a Democrat, was onstage.

Additionally, a single nonprofit in Bozeman, HRDC of District IX, handles everything from low-income housing development to a seasonal homeless shelter and a homebuyer education program. Missoula, in contrast, has several major agencies in the housing space, including the Missoula Housing Authority and Homeword.

I’m sure Missoula officials appreciate the effort to positively contrast Missoula with Bozeman, but I just don’t see the advantages touted above as directly leading to more effective interventions in the affordability crisis Missoula has been experiencing for years.

The development that is happening–some primed with TIF money that should be benefiting the public–is NOT benefiting the public. Just look at the extortion-like threat of blight the Lambros clan was able to use to leverage 7 million bucks to sweeten their re-envisioning of the sprawling Southgate mall property. After securing the money and starting a myriad of projects, Lambros sold out to an Ohio conglomerate for a cool 58 million bucks.

This is just one glaring example of Missoula’s political leadership bending over backwards to help a type of development in Missoula that will not do a damn things to impact the affordability of housing. Hotels, convention centers and now a new ice rink WILL NOT improve the affordability of housing. But that won’t stop Missoula leaders, oh no. They want shiny new things like that ice rink:

The county has already established 3 mills for the fairgrounds, which generate roughly $650,000 per year. But Bentley said the fairgrounds doesn’t want to spread that funding out over 20 years, and it’s looking to finance the property’s redevelopment sooner rather than later.

Some projects, including a new Glacier Ice Rink, would require additional public and private funding, and commissioners have already said that users of the ice rink must contribute to the project’s cost.

How much hasn’t been said, though the county will consider creating a special district later this month.

Missoula is not just in the midst of a housing crisis. We are also experiencing the consequences of Montana’s budget crisis. So while case managers are fired left and right, while the elderly surviving on Medicaid face brutal, cruel cuts, our city leaders are looking for ways to use public money for a fucking ice rink.

And while the poor and vulnerable in Montana face increasing hardship, our Governor is gallivanting around Iowa to test the waters for a presidential run.

This stubborn inability to change priorities will hurt tens of thousands of Montanans. The east coast transplants who can actually afford to live here and send their kids to fancy international schools don’t seem to give a shit, and while we get lip-service from our city leadership, when it comes to action, developers win and the poor keep losing.

Missoula needs to be more honest about its priorities. I think Missoula owes it to would-be poor people thinking of moving to Missoula to come clean and state outright–maybe in a large billboard on I-90–the reality here. It can be a simple message.

Dear poor people, you are not welcome in Missoula, so go somewhere else.

by William Skink

This post is intended to make amends for not fully supporting a real man for US Senate. That real man who should be reelected is Jon Tester–a farmer, eater of meat–and not some namby-pamby gun control zealot.

Am I man enough to support Jon Tester? I am not sure. I own a Justin Timberlake album and may even have bromantic feelings for a conservative. So as a sort of mea culpa I’ve created my Tester Rap, which we will get to in a second.

But first, it’s important to acknowledge that real men get things done, and Tester is a real man who gets things done. Not on gun control, of course. No, Tester knows who the important people are to help, and it’s not the weak-knee liberals he is so often mistakingly associated with–it’s bankers. The conjurers of cash and makers of bubbles need help, and Tester is there for them.

But don’t take it from me, here’s an article from The Intercept you can read about Tester keeping at like a real man to help community banks.  That’s the propaganda pitch, of course, to help “community” banks.  Sometimes real men have to be manipulative like that to help out the important people who just happen to give lots of money to political campaigns.  From the link:

“There was some agreement that we should help community banks,” Brown said in an interview. “But it starts with changing the rules for small banks and then you have to do it for the big guys.”

Instead of the ranking member’s departure ending the process, however, the very next day moderate Democrats on the Banking Committee stepped into his place. Led by Heitkamp and Tester, they negotiated directly with Crapo, and within a couple weeks, reached a breakthrough on S.2155: the “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act” (pro-regulation groups have taken to calling it the “Bank Lobbyist Act.”) Within weeks, the bill swiftly passed the Banking Committee 16-7, with Republicans and a bloc of four Democrats — Heitkamp, Tester, Donnelly, and Warner — voting down every attempt to amend it.

Heitkamp, Tester, and Donnelly are all up for re-election in November, in states Trump carried by a wide margin. Democratic staffers believe they longed to show distance from the national party, whatever the topic. “They want to be able to say ‘bipartisan’ to constituents,” said one aide. “The ‘what’ doesn’t matter.”

So all that said, here’s the video. Lyrics are after the fold. I will also say for anyone concerned that no Petey heads were damaged with the making of this video.  Enjoy!

Continue reading “Jon Tester: A Real Man We Need To Lead”

by William Skink

Homeless in Missoula has been getting some attention recently, as it usually does when the temperatures are cold. Earlier this year the report was supposedly good. From a Missoulian article:

“We have seen homeless numbers go down by 350 people since 2011,” Pehan said. “We are seeing a decline, which tells us some of those efforts are working.”

Still, homelessness remains a vexing issue in Missoula, and counting everyone who lacks permanent, affordable and sustainable housing is an inexact science.

That number of “350 people down” got thrown around in a few articles at the beginning of the year, but I have no idea where that number is coming from. Is it from the point-in-time survey done every January? If so, this year’s numbers won’t be known until the summer.

I am skeptical of the number because late last year it was reported that America’s homeless population was on the rise for the first time in years. From the link:

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.

Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.

Increases are higher in several West Coast cities, where the explosion in homelessness has prompted at least 10 city and county governments to declare states of emergency since 2015.

So is Missoula bucking the national trend? Or are we being treated to some political PR spin? Or something in between?

Last summer I could see—every time I drove across the Reserve Street bridge—that homeless camps were proliferating in greater numbers than they had in years. I confirmed this when I talked to the guy at the Health Department who I once collaborated with to clean up the Reserve camps and others across Missoula. He couldn’t say why, but agreed it was worse than ever.

And now last week the Poverello Center is ringing the alarm that they are sleeping over 200 people and will soon be forced to cap the number of homeless people they are serving overnight:

Amid the cold snap that started late last week, the Pov had 205 people stay overnight Monday, a record high. More than 90 didn’t have a bed and 30 of those people slept on the floor without a mat, according to a Thursday news release.

The building’s capacity is around 160 people. According to a Community Medical Center release, the Pov is planning on limiting its capacity to 190 people.

“This prospect is devastating,” Pov Director Amy Allison Thompson said in the release. “We know the recent cold snap creates fatal conditions for anyone sleeping outside or in a vehicle. We didn’t want to do it, but we will need to.”

Overnight lows should go up as the week goes on, according to the National Weather Service, but still will hover around 20 degrees — the mark the Poverello uses to open their doors to almost anyone and everyone who needs a place to stay.

Last year, the Poverello’s open-door weather policy was in place for almost all of the winter, but it didn’t run into the over-capacity problem.

The last part of this quote hints at the question, what has changed from last winter to this one? Is it just that the need has increased? I think the need has legitimately increased, just as rent is increasing and vacancy rates remain far below the national average of 10%. But that’s not the whole story.

Last year, as the Coordinated Entry System was just being implemented, the Poverello Center announced a policy change in a public meeting. No longer would residents have limits put on the duration of their stay. It was explained that this was a “best-practices” approach. Time limits tend to breed procrastination. But from my experience working at the shelter for 7 years, without time limits, some clients would stay indefinitely.

I don’t want this policy change to be construed as a reason to not support the shelter. Critics who have never had to tell someone they can’t stay inside for a night don’t understand what it’s like. I have been in that position, and it sucks. The Pov has continually gone above and beyond to meet the needs of the needy as our city leaders spend tens of thousands of dollars to study systemic problems, then too often ignore the recommendations.

That said, the direct care staff cannot safely serve that many people in that building. Put more bluntly, the shelter can’t help everyone, which I know is easier to say when a human being in need of shelter isn’t staring at you expecting help.

Maybe calling people in our community without stable housing “homeless” is the wrong approach. Let’s call them economic refugees instead. Maybe then our city leaders will get more serious about addressing this problem with real action instead of studies and plans and lip-service.