Month: August 2020

by William Skink

There will never be equity in our criminal justice system if we only focus on race and ignore class.

And we will never substantively address police misconduct if we don’t place police in the larger context of a criminal justice system that includes city attorneys, county attorneys, public defenders, defense attorneys, judges, coroners, detectives, Sheriff deputies, federal agents, probation/parole officers, jail staff, politicians and the other various worker bees who make the wheels of “justice” slowly grind on and on.

On Wednesday, the naive call to DEFUND THE POLICE is being reported by the Missoula Current like this:

Opponents of police funding have been vocal in their opposition and on Wednesday, some turned nasty in their charges and accusations. Daniel Carlino called the city’s budget and police funding akin to systemic racism and white supremacy.

“You either care about BIPOC safety in Missoula or you don’t, and you’ve shown you don’t with your budget,” Carlino said. “At the end of the day, it seems like you’re going to keep upholding the same white supremacist society since you benefit from it.”

When it comes to dealing with local media, the BLM activists need to get savvy quick and realize the kind of people they are dealing with.

For some recent history on Martin Kidston and his online “news” journal, the Missoula Current, I strongly recommend reading this post from the Outer Limits crew, titled Martin Kidston Is Montana’s Gomer Pyle.

I would then follow that post up with this one about how KBGA’s leadership dumped Outer Limits from their radio spot after Kidston raged and threatened litigation.

Why did local media and Missoula’s college radio station react so harshly to the Outer Limits crew, you ask? Because they were a BIG PART of an effective local effort (that included myself) to raise concern about how public TIF money was being used to line the pockets of gentrifying developers and cultural monopolizers like our benevolent Sultan of Sound, Lord Checota.

Instead of being more aware of these local dynamics, the local manifestation of the BLM movement is demanding their narrow focus on police funding (as it relates to just racial injustice) be immediately accepted to the exclusion of other systemic problems festering like moral rot in our community.

I’m glad a few activists have commented on some of my previous posts, and I hope they continue reading this blog, even though I am a privileged white male speaking with the confidence that privilege has afforded me throughout my life. I would like to think, despite being a privileged white male, that I have learned a thing or two about the community I’ve called home for 20 years.

Tomorrow’s post will be a poem about defunding the police. I hope it gets readers thinking a little differently about the class angle of what activists are calling for.

by William Skink

In more Covid bailout news that won’t benefit your bank account, our very own Senator, Jon Tester, is teaming up with Tom Carper, from Delaware, to bailout operators of entertainment venues with federal legislation called the ENCORES Act:

The Entertainments New Credit Opportunity for Relief & Economic Sustainability, or ENCORES Act, was introduced last week by Tester and Tom Carper, D-Delaware. The bill would create a new tax credit for live entertainment venues with fewer than 500 employees to help cover the cost of refunded tickets for shows that were canceled due to the pandemic.

The emphasis is mine because bailing out “smaller” entertainment operators is one way to explain why Senators from Montana and Delaware are carrying this legislation. Another way to explain it is Nick Checota:

“As our industry faces an indefinite shutdown, the largest expense for independent venues and promoters is the cost of refunding tickets for shows that will not be able to happen to the foreseeable future,” said Nick Checota, owner of Logjam Presents and The Wilma Theater, Top Hat Lounge and the KettleHouse Amphitheater in Missoula. “Tester’s ENCORES Act would provide local venues like mine the help we need to face this challenge.”

Are other cities facing similar challenges? How about the top 25 cities that get the most concerts in the U.S.? Do the entertainment operators in these big cultural centers have businesses of less than 500 people who will be helped by this critical legislation?

I’m sure the uncertainty regarding Missoula’s crown jewel of gentrification at the Riverfront Triangle site, which Nick Checota resurrected last October, has nothing to do with this legislation.

Yeah, nothing to see here at all.

by William Skink

Today I taped an interview with NBC Montana about my work at the shelter trying to address the homeless encampments under and around the Reserve Street bridge. After the interview I accompanied the reporter and the camera person down to the camps to see for myself what is happening.

I spoke directly with two people living at the camps. Over the years doing the work I did, I developed a pretty good bullshit detector. I did not get the sense that the two guys I talked to were bullshitting me.

I was told that people living at the camps are not getting much direct communication. No one was told they could use the dumpster that just appeared one day. The man I talked to claimed the area is being used as a dumpster by mainly outsiders, though he said some newcomers who are camping are being ignorant.

I thought back to the interview, which we taped near the water treatment plant on the other side of the river. While taping we could hear an argument coming from inside a tent at the camps, and it got loud enough and aggressive enough we paused the interview.

There seems to be respect for the Union Gospel efforts to help people, spearheaded by April. The Pov is out there as well, two times a week, but there time is limited, I was told.

While we were leaving, one of the campers we had talked to decided to let NBC Montana interview him. I had to go, so didn’t get a chance to hear what he said, but when it goes online I’ll link to it in the comments.

That is all for now. Time to go jump in a river.

by William Skink

Seven years ago the Montana Department of Transportation (MDOT) spent $17,000 dollars to clean-up the homeless camps under and around the Reserve Street bridge. The Sheriff at the time, Carl Ibsen, visited the camps in person to hand out eviction notices.

That same year I expanded my outreach efforts to the camps with the Poverello’s Homeless Outreach Team, a program I helped launch in 2010. The paid clean-up effort was done by a crew of 4 people and it took them well over a week to do it.

After that first clean-up people returned to the area almost immediately, so I continued doing outreach at the camps. I coordinated volunteer clean-up efforts with the Health Department and the Clark Fork Coalition and together we removed tons of trash.

Here is the Missoulian quoting me in an article from 2015:

Travis Mateer, the homeless outreach coordinator for the Poverello Center, said he comes out to the area once a week to check on a client.

“I look forward to coming out here because I want to have a reason to have a presence,” he said. “We walk around with socks and things and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to give you resources, but I want to let you know that it’s illegal to camp out here.’ And we make sure that they know ahead of time that we’re doing this so people have a chance to remove stuff.”

Mateer said that this year there was a giant “landfill” area where residents had piled their trash.

“That was actually a very positive thing,” he said. “It looks disgusting, but what happened was we attempted to do a cleanup in April but the spring runoff got too high too early so we had to abandon the efforts. And that was actually people living out here helping us out by consolidating trash in one spot to make it easier for us to remove it. So we have a little bit of buy-in from folks out here. Really, I am certainly on board with finding ways to keep this area from being inhabited year-round. Whether that’s finding different uses for this area.”

Doing two volunteer clean-ups a year was, in my opinion, pretty effective. The trash didn’t pile up, permanent structures weren’t established, and the word-of-mouth communication among the population using the area was that is wasn’t a free-for-all the way it had been in years past.

In 2016 I left my job at the Pov. The following year, the last large-scale clean-up effort happened in August. I believe one of the reasons these clean-ups stopped happening at the same scale was because of how the Missoulian decided to report on it, beginning with this picture of tearful Tina.

Here is the story the Missoulian told about this couple that helped reduce the clean-up efforts:

A homeless couple who gave their names as Steve and Tina, and declined to give their last names, were distraught as they sat in the shade a short distance away with two shopping carts full of their belongings. They were in their 40s, and said their house recently had been foreclosed upon. They agreed that they had been given a lot of advance notice of the cleanup, but they were still to the point of tears because their truck recently had been stolen and they didn’t know where to go.

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.”

In the three years since this article was written, a dumpster HAS BEEN PROVIDED to campers in the area, but that hasn’t stopped massive amounts of trash piling up and multiple fires spreading out of control to the point that MDOT is now worried about the structural impacts on one of Missoula’s busiest bridges.

Now the problem is worse than ever, and the collaboration I worked so hard to establish with the Health Department and other stake holders has been destroyed. This is how the Missoula Current is reporting the clusterfuck:

Facing potential fines and penalties from the Missoula City-County Health Department, the Montana Department of Transportation continues to search for a solution to the mounting collection of waste generated by the homeless encampment under the Reserve Street Bridge.

While simply evicting the trespassers from state-owned property would be the easiest solution, that has drawn opposition from homeless advocates, leaving MDT in a bind.

“It’s been pretty clear that a fence and the relocation of the inhabitants there at the encampment isn’t acceptable at this time,” said Bob Vosen, the Missoula District administrator for MDT. “We’re trying to figure out what that means for us from a safety standpoint. We’re trying to figure out what we need to do to protect that infrastructure.”

Having successfully maintained this area for years through collaborative efforts where everyone worked towards a common objective, I find this situation totally maddening. Here’s more:

Several fires have started under the bridge, and that concerns transportation officials.

“We’ve had yet another fire under the bridge. We’re kind of struggling to figure out what we need to do to protect that infrastructure,” Vosen said. “It’s just a matter of time before one of those fires gets hot enough and we end up with a situation where we end up looking at a closure of the bridge.”
…
The City-County Health Department also is concerned about the amount of human waste and other garbage present at the site. It’s what prompted the notice of violation to begin with, and MDT has until November to resolve the problem.

Taxpayers will be charged with the cleanup.

“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of money to clean up the area, and now we’re going to have to do it while we’re navigating the encampment,” Vosen said. “We need to get in there and clean it up, or I’m facing significant fines by the day. We’re going to have to clean up stuff from people who don’t want us in the area.”

When I complained about this situation on Facebook, the director of the Poverello Center, Amy Thompson, texted me on my personal phone to tell me how unhelpful my comments were.

Why?

Because my criticism is directly informed by my professional experience, and I can speak to the Pov’s change in focus after I left my position, a change that undermined the collaborative relationships I built and has led directly to this clusterfuck of finger pointing.

If anyone wants to know more about why I was effective in my outreach position with the shelter, send me an email at willskink at yahoo dot com.

And stay tuned, because there will be more to say on this topic in the weeks and months ahead.

One CORPORATION to rule them all, One CORPORATION to find them, One CORPORATION to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them…

by William Skink

I adapted the famous rhyme by J.R.R. Tolkien describing his ultimate fictional evil in order to apply it to our modern day manifestation of evil corporate consolidation, a phenomenon happening across all sectors of the economy.

Corporate consolidation is often associate with media companies. Here is Bill Moyers providing a brief history of media consolidation:

From the time the Federal Communications Commission was created in 1934, through the 1970s, the US government largely acted to preserve media diversity and prevent media consolidation, putting in place regulations that discouraged any one corporation from owning too many newspapers or television stations or from reaching too large an audience. “The widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,” Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1945, blocking a merger between the Associated Press and other newspaper publishing companies. It was a popular viewpoint at the time — preventing media consolidation was seen as strengthening the First Amendment.

But in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s FCC Chairman Mark Fowler brought a new, deregulatory view into vogue, and the federal government’s efforts to prevent media consolidation began to unravel. A watershed moment came a decade later, when Bill Clinton’s decision to sign the Telecommunications Act of 1996 handed lobbyists a major victory. The law was a massive dose of deregulation that dramatically raised caps on the number of local newspapers and television stations a single corporation could own, and the percentage of the national audience a single corporation could reach.

While the above quote touches on a serious problem, this post isn’t about media corporations consolidating market access–it’s much bigger than that.

This post is about a choice we have regarding the structures of power and how we want those structures to evolve, which brings me to the BIG QUESTION:

Will we passively allow corporate consolidation to CENTRALIZE more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, or will we instead actively move toward DECENTRALIZED power structures that will be more responsive to local needs.

While this idea might not be front and center in the minds of a scared and disoriented population, it was the final rallying call of Michael Krieger’s blog Liberty Blitzkrieg before he decided to shift his focus on hunkering down with his family in Colorado. From the link:

We find ourselves at a moment where the financial and political systems that have dominated for decades are failing in a spectacular and irredeemable fashion. Those who pull the levers are (as usual) attempting to take advantage of the situation by rapaciously snatching and consolidating more wealth and power, while leaving the general public to rot. When faced with such a historic moment, one should assume a certain degree of responsibility to make sure the next paradigm ends up better than the one we’re leaving. If we fail to think deeply about an improved vision and framework for the future, someone else will do it for us.

From my perspective, humanity remains stuck within antiquated paradigms that generally function via predatory and authoritarian structures. We’ve been taught — and have largely accepted — that the really important decisions must be handled in a centralized manner by small groups of technocrats and oligarchs. As a result, we basically live within feudal constructs cleverly surrounded by entrenched myths of democracy and self-government. We’d prefer to be lazy rather than take any responsibility for the state of the world.

We’re now at a point where simply recognizing current structures as predatory and authoritarian isn’t good enough. We require a distinct and superior political philosophy that can appeal to others likewise extremely dissatisfied with the status quo. My belief is humanity’s next paradigm should swing heavily in the direction of decentralization and localism.

If this idea appeals to you, read more at the link. If you don’t think this idea is worth pursuing, then the future you are passively allowing to take shape will include housing and health consolidation from BLACKSTONE and a global financial reset from BLACKROCK.

From the first link:

Over the past decade, Blackstone has relentlessly expanded its reach in real estate. Since going public in 2007, Blackstone has multiplied eightfold the equity capital it devotes to real estate, to $163 billion. Blackstone leverages that capital by taking out mortgages, so the total value of the property it owns “in the ground” is around $325 billion. By these measures it ranks, by Fortune’s estimates, as the world’s largest commercial real estate company.

From the second link:

Over the past decade, private equity firms like Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, The Carlyle Group, KKR & Co. and Warburg Pincus have deployed more than $340 billion to buy health care-related operations around the world. In 2019, private equity’s health care acquisitions reached $79 billion, a record, according to Bain & Co., a consulting firm.

Private equity’s purchases have included rural hospitals, physicians’ practices, nursing homes and hospice centers, air ambulance companies and health care billing management and debt collection systems.

From the third link:

BlackRock, Inc. (BLK) is by some measures the biggest investment management company across the globe, with more than $7.4 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2019.1 As a major publicly traded company with a market capitalization of more than $84 billion, BlackRock provides investment and technology services to both institutional and retail clients around the world.

I am painting this macro-scene of ever-centralizing corporate power because this dangerous force is rapidly coalescing like a massive storm cloud over our collective heads, and it is a storm largely being ignored by the current bickering over municipal funding of police departments.

I don’t think enough people understand how this economic crisis that is just getting started will create incredible opportunities for those who are well-positioned to take advantage of it. If the excerpts above don’t drive that point home, I don’t know what will.

The pandemic has created a quick blow to a significant swath of small businesses across the country while the wealthiest among the wealthy have brought in 637 billion during that same time period.

While the two wings of our corporate mono-party offer the tempting illusion of a political choice, this obscene and perpetual transferring of wealth should be in the back of everyone’s minds as the economic pain manifests locally.