Month: November 2018

by William Skink

I’ve been deliberately refraining from an immediate reaction to Missoula City Council’s interim zoning vote last Friday. I enjoyed the Thanksgiving break with friends and family and let my thoughts stew for a bit.

I had talked to someone at the Salvation Army before the holiday break, so I knew the vote was just one step in a longer, very uncertain process of raising money, hiring staff and creating rules for a program to serve some very challenging people with complicated histories and illnesses.

Sure enough, the reporting after the vote puts the monetary goal to be raised at $25,000. City Council appropriates that amount of money all the time to do things like study traffic, but apparently it’s just too damn late to find that kind of money:

Ward 5 Councilwoman Julie Armstrong asked the mayor if the city could provide any of the $25,000. The answer, via Development Services was no – primarily because all suitable grant funding already has been allocated by the granting agencies.

If the Salvation Army were to again provide shelter next winter, and the city knew that likelihood well in advance, the request could be included in the next round of grant applications.

What bullshit. Our elected leaders should have known since last March that an alternative to the Union Gospel Mission was needed to provide a warming space because it was City Fire that shut down both UGM and the subsequent effort at the Salvation Army after a long winter of looking the other way.

Instead of our secular local government getting any of the well-deserved criticism from Missoula residents for being unprepared for what winter in Montana means for the unsheltered, I found myself unprepared (and disgusted) by a social media backlash against the Salvation Army for not being inclusive.

Apparently Missoula do-gooders are more worried about a faith-based organization being inclusive than they are about people becoming dead human ice cubes on the side walks of our fair city.

To appease this waste-of-time response by morally selective assholes, the Salvation Army has pledged to be inclusive:

Leaders of the Salvation Army in Missoula on Monday emphasized that the overnight shelter they’ve pledged to open for the city’s homeless population will welcome all who come through the door.

The assurances came amid criticism on social media from local residents who believe the organization carries a Christian bias and discriminates against members of the LGBTQ community.

Not true, came the reply from Capt. Ryan Boyd, who manages the Salvation Army’s facility on Russell Street with her husband, Josh.

“The Salvation Army is open and inclusive to all people,” Boyd said in a written message.

Will this be enough for the critics, or would they like to further leverage the lives of chronically homeless people in order to impose their agenda of (selective) inclusivity?

I’ll be writing more on this, and have a first draft of a letter to the editor I’m trying to cut down because 200 words is not enough to express my deep disappointment and frustration over this topic.

by William Skink

I think it’s great Donald Trump has brazenly continued backing Saudi Arabia and explicitly tied that support to the US devotion to Israel.

We are the true troika of terrorism, so let’s bring our babies to war!

by William Skink

For all the opposition to Trump in liberal bastions like Missoula, money is still more important than ideology, so don’t expect any concern from city officials to be raised over the Opportunity Zone scheme unleashed by Trump’s tax cuts.

While the pie-in-the-sky hope is that the benevolent private sector will bankroll affordable housing projects in Missoula’s Opportunity Zone, it might be instructive to read this Intercept article about Amazon’s recent announced new locations and how opportunity zones will play a role in the changes that will be brought to these regions:
 

Supporters claim opportunity zones spur renewal and revitalization in impoverished areas. It’s a decades-old bipartisan fantasy that sits uncomfortably at odds with the demonstrated results. Researchers who have studied opportunity zones find that these tax schemes rarely ever help cities, and often financially cripple them.

“At best, they divert investment from one part of the city from another, resulting in no net gain for the city as a whole,” wrote Timothy Weaver, an urban policy and politics professor at the University of Albany, last year. “At worst, they result in tax-giveaways to firms that would have been operating anyway, thereby generating a net loss to city revenues.”

Still, Republicans and Democrats are loathe to give up on what they continually tell themselves can be a win-win for everyone, if we just try really hard. And now a major beneficiary of this federal largesse happens to be one of the world’s richest companies, led by the world’s richest man.

 
I don’t see much opposition or really even much awareness in Missoula over how these engines of gentrification are ramping up, and how hollow the promises of help for poor neighborhoods really are.

Instead, Missoula’s political leadership (and upstart online media platform) are bordering on the tech solves everything mantra. On Democracy Now, two segments seem relevant to Missoula’s tech-sector obsession. Here’s a snippet of a conversation between Amy Goodman and Ron Kim, member of the New York State Assembly. Kim recently contributed to an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “New York Should Say No to Amazon.”:

AMY GOODMAN: So, New York State Assemblymember Ron Kim, if you could respond to the mayor and also this Business Insider report? Amazon is going to be placed in Long Island City in Queens. “Long Island City real estate brokers told The Wall Street Journal [that] they had witnessed a flurry of inquiries over the past week. Some of these people were even buying units, sight-unseen, via text message, The Journal wrote on Tuesday morning.” “This is the first time in my 20-year career that I have seen the market go from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market overnight, based on a rumor,” said Patrick Smith, a Stribling agent in New York City, a real estate agent. So, if you could respond to both this, what de Blasio is saying, a massive growth in the tech sector and jobs, good jobs, for New York’s kids and students and people in this city, and what’s going to happen to real estate?

ASSEMBLYMEMBER RON KIM: I think this is a great example of a misguided technocratic Democrat who is hiding behind big tech and pushing out the narrative to the public that the big tech will solve every single problem in our communities and to humankind. That is not the case. This is a clear example of how big tech artificially raises value. This isn’t real value. As Stacy has said, real value comes from innovation, creativity, small business, local economies, circulation of wealth at the very bottom of our economies. That’s not happening. Amazon, Uber, you name it, all of this is all based on an extraction economy that is designed to extract as much money and value out of our communities, and it’s not going to add to sustainable job growth or economic growth.

For more on the public subsidies Amazon will be getting, here is how another segment from Democracy Now begins:

After a months-long PR campaign, Amazon has officially announced it will split its so-called second headquarters between New York and Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., after being offered more than $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. The news prompted protests at the site of Amazon’s future office complex in Long Island City, New York, to condemn the city and state governments for showering Amazon with massive tax breaks and other giveaways to entice the company to expand into the city. As part of the deal, New York taxpayers will even build a helipad for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is the richest man in the world.

When I wrote Missoula, You Cannot Have It All late last week I was in part reacting to news of City Council scrambling to pass an interim zoning ordinance to accommodate the homeless population the Poverello Center can’t serve.

I am very angry that amidst all this development in Missoula–with condos everywhere, new parks, new schools, a new library, new trails, pedestrian bridges, art parks and play waves–the chronically homeless, who often have substance abuse masking mental health problems, continue to be a forgotten side-note until the cold sets in.

On my Facebook page I expressed my frustration that the lack of action from the Mayor and City Council is a failure to prioritize efforts to keep people from dying on the streets of Missoula. I was offered an opportunity by the Housing Director to get educated on efforts I am not reading about in the paper. I declined.

Instead I’m considering writing an op-ed to educate Missoulians about why this community continues to fail to plug obvious, long-known gaps and how the Mayor’s office is actively down-playing the problem by using numbers that don’t accurately reflect what’s going on.

Stay tuned…

by William Skink

Missoula’s political leadership likes to pretend we can have everything. We can have more open spaces, more development, more tech-sector investment, and more affordable housing. The problem? The problem is reality, and the reality is that no, we cannot have everything we want.

Last May I wrote about a new euphemism for gentrification, called an opportunity zone. These opportunity zones were a result of the Trump tax cut legislation, which snuck this little provision in the bill to provide “…an incentive for people to reinvest capital gains into low-income areas and thereby avoid the capital gains tax.”

The Missoula Current has a new article up about a completely hypothetical use of this opportunity zone, reporting that it “could” include affordable housing, but the reality is the city won’t have any say beyond normal regulatory authority to determine what the private sector will be able to do with their redirected capital gains:

A new investment tool included in last year’s tax bill could bring affordable housing and commercial development to Missoula’s West Broadway corridor and areas to the north.

The census tract was identified by the state as a so-called opportunity zone – a new incentive adopted by Congress that allows taxpayers to invest in a qualified opportunity fund and defer tax payments on capital gains.

“The city can encourage through goal setting and visioning what we’d like to see in that area, but ultimately, it’s a completely private tool,” said Eran Pehan, manager of the city’s Office on Housing and Community Development.

What I suspect will happen in this zone is there will be private sector investment, but not to build affordable housing. Instead nasty motels like The Colonial and the Sleepy Inn will be razed to the ground and the housing these motels provided won’t be replaced.

Gentrification is also knocking on the threshold of the Hip Strip, with the owners of the Montaignes looking at a total overhaul of their historic property, which is apparently a mess. This will be another loss to the stock of affordable housing in Missoula.

And Midtown is also getting some attention for possible master planning:

City leaders have sat down with a group of property owners to begin discussing the possibility of master planning a multi-block section of Midtown as efforts to reinvent the district intensify, Mayor John Engen said.

While rumors of a potential move by at least one major business in the district couldn’t be confirmed, Engen did say that several property owners have turned to the city to discuss the area’s potential, and what could be achieved with planning.

“They have expressed interest in having the Missoula Redevelopment Agency work with them on some master planning and a little dreaming about what could be,” Engen told the Missoula Current. “We’ve had property owners of significant parcels and folks interested at the table.”

Meanwhile, for those at risk of dying for lack of shelter, Missoula’s City Council is going to have to show up on the Friday after Thanksgiving in order to expedite an “Interim Zoning Ordinance” in order to allow the Salvation Army to keep people from dying of exposure. For some on City Council, it’s apparently annoying to be asked to do this on such short notice.

I guess this cold weather Montana thing kinda snuck up on them, despite last February the Poverello Center explicitly stating there are limits to how many people they can shelter.

If homelessness was actually a priority for our city leaders, they wouldn’t be surprised that the dire situation of last winter has not been addressed in the slightest.

I’ve been writing about this continued failure to prioritize the needed planning/funding because I see the lack of preparation. I literally wrote a post in August titled What will happen to Missoula’s Chronic homeless population when it gets cold?

So it pisses me off to read this:

Councilman Bryan von Lossberg said the request came in only on Friday, so he was surprised that city staff was able to put the ordinance together so quickly that it could be introduced Wednesday.

“Taking no action puts lives at risk,” von Lossberg said.

Normally, the City Council would have to wait until Nov. 26 to approve the interim ordinance because public hearings must be announced seven days in advance. Since the announcement goes out Thursday, the end of a seven-day period lands right on the Thanksgiving holiday.

Temperatures are soon predicted to drop into the teens, so Councilwoman Julie Armstrong asked if anything could be to speed up approval. Since the seven-day notice is required by law, Armstrong asked how many might be available at 3 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Seven council members raised their hands, enough to approve the temporary action.

Having done what they could to address the urgency, some council members said the proposal for next winter should be made earlier.

How about instead of city leaders condescending to the overwhelmed service providers on the front lines that they should ask for zoning ordinance changes earlier, you elected civic leaders of our community ADDRESS THE FUCKING PROBLEM?

I would love to see more time and resources directed toward plugging the gaping holes in the support net and less time and resources directed toward turning this valley into a crammed, congested inland silicon valley.

But I’m not holding my breath.

by William Skink

When Trump was on the campaign trail using the term Globalist I have no doubt he knew what he was doing. The term is absolutely used by some as code for “the jews did it” explanation for all that is bad in the world.

And George Soros. I have to mention George Soros.

This makes talking about the reality of globalists/oligarchs/plutocrats/kleptocrats operating at a financial level beyond most people’s comprehension very difficult. Thankfully Peter Phillips, from Project Censored, put together a handy book, titled GIANTS-The Global Power Elite.

The book has a nice 4-part structure framing the global power elite. The managers are the financial giants, the facilitators are the “policy planning centers of the transnational capitalist class”, the protectors are military, NATO, spooks and private contractors, and the ideologists are the media/propaganda/entertainment arm of the ruling elite.

Hopefully the poisoning/co-opting of one word by hateful, anti-semetic white supremacists won’t taint the concept of a global power elite who truly do exist and truly do exert a tremendous amount of influence over the conditions by which we all must live.

In conclusion, Joe Biden draped a fucking liberty medal around the exposed neck of George W. Bush. I like how Lee Camp put it:

This week George W. Bush was awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal to recognize “leadership in the pursuit of freedom.” He had the medal placed around his neck by Joe Biden.

Do you get it now?? It’s a big club of sociopaths jackin each other off. They don’t care about you.

Yep. By the book if you want to be put on a list informed.