Virginia's poorhouses, Scrooge USA style... + new UK film

[Tony Gosling]

New film - Secret City Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HJGLqMAQbk

Lee | 12.11.2012 10:10 - Screening of Secret 
City, Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way W1T 5DL - 28th November 2012. 7pm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/11/502703.html
London and the City of London are not the same 
place. London is a metropolis of 8 million 
people. The City of London is the famous square 
mile in the middle, with about 7,000 residents. A 
Corporation older than Parliament, the City of 
London has played a key historical role in 
protecting and promoting the interests of finance capital.
Secret City investigates the power wielded by the 
Corporation of London over British economic 
policy, through which it sustains London’s prime 
position at the hub of global finance capital — 
not least through control of the majority of the world’s tax havens.
The film exposes the Corporation’s 
anti-democratic constitution, the ancient laws 
which allow it function as a state within a 
state, and thus to promote an illusory promise of 
economic growth at the cost of the real economy.

Yes, Virginia, There are Poorhouses, and Scrooge Would be Proud of Them
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/yes-virginia-there-are-poorhouses-and-scrooge-would-be-proud-of-them.html
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=163097#163097

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 355 
donors have already invested in our efforts to 
shed light on the dark and seamy corners of 
finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar 
or WePay in the right column or read about why 
we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to 
donate, such as by check, 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/relaunching-the-nc-2012-fundraiser.html>in 
our kickoff post or one discussing 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/wow-met-our-second-fundraising-target-on-to-the-third.html>our 
current target.

Societies have a funny way of walling off 
undesirables. Lepers were secluded in lepers’ 
colonies. Japan is particularly uncomfortable 
with people who don’t fit cultural norms, such as 
the mentally ill and the destitute. It was really 
shocking the first time I saw someone begging in 
the subways in Tokyo in 1991 because it was so
unJapanese
.at least then.

In America, which still is deeply invested in the 
myth that anyone who isn’t rich and successful 
just didn’t work hard enough, being unemployed is 
particularly stigmatized. This protracted 
recession has produced a new underclass that 
isn’t discussed much: the long term unemployed. 
Oh, sure, it’s acknowledged as a statistical 
phenomenon, and maybe you’ll see a sad story in 
the New York Times now and again, but for the 
most part, the desperation of people who once had 
work, and really might never again have paid 
work, or at least not for more than $10 an hour, 
is not as widely discussed as it should be. Even 
before the bust, if you were over 40 and lost a 
decent paying job, your odds of finding any work, 
let alone work that made reasonable use of your skills, were slim to zero.

It’s revealing that Gawker is now up to volume 15 
of its weekly series of 
“<http://gawker.com/5959817/unemployment-stories-vol-15-how-the-fuck-am-i-going-to-pay-for-cancer?post=54234456>Unemployment 
Stories” and we see nary a peep from the MSM 
along these line. When I was a kid, I recall how 
a documentary about poverty in Appalachia 
galvanized opinion that Something Needed to be 
Done. And my childhood reaction appears to have 
had some foundation; 
<http://www.larchmontgazette.com/news/bernard-birnbaum-cbs-award-winning-producer-dead-at-89/>that 
show influenced President Johnson’s War on 
Poverty. So keeping unemployment an official but 
depersonalized problem takes the urgency out of addressing it.

And if you have a long enough run of unemployment 
and can’t afford to pay for shelter any more, and 
don’t have family or friends who will take you 
in, your choices are terrible. There are reasons 
most homeless in New York City live on the 
streets rather than go to shelters at night. One 
of Lambert’s readers recounts her experiences 
when she felt she had no choice other than go to 
a homeless shelter. And this wasn’t in New York; 
Lambert doesn’t know her story, but his 
impression is that she is from the South, say 
North Carolina, and worked in publishing or academia.

Hoisted from comments at Corrente, 
“<http://www.correntewire.com/as_i_see_it_remember_the_old_days_before_social_security#comment-213309>There 
are poorhouses today. They’re called homeless shelters.”

They’re as punitive and pitiless as the old style ones.
In my late fifties, with no prospect of 
reemployment, I recently had my first experiences with two of these.
I’ve worked all my life and been my only support 
all my life. It was my preference to do this, 
rather than derive any part of my upkeep from the 
wages of the person I slept with. My “crime” was 
doing this while female. Since sex discrimination 
has become legal again, I was forced out of a 
profession that’s been redefined as historically 
male, and have not been hired for female entry 
level positions due to my age and “overqualified” background.
I did everything I could, including backpacking 
into legal sites in the state parks in the 
mountains here, to keep from going into a 
shelter, but in the end could not even afford the 
gas to drive the fifteen or so miles round trip 
to the park from where any prospect of work 
existed. (“Obamaville” tent villages are not 
possible the way Hoovervilles were – the times 
are so much more pitiless that almost every city 
has ordinances against such places, and where 
they’re allowed, they’re controlled to the point 
of being worse than the shelters. The infamous 
“tent in the woods” near any urban area is out of 
the question for a woman unless she attaches 
herself to a homeless male for protection).
The shelter itself was physically considered to 
be one of the best in the state. It administers 
most of the charitable and many of the government 
resources for five counties. It is new, the 
fixtures are more than adequate and the meals are 
very good. A major problem was precisely the 
punitive “poor house” attitude: the Calvinistic 
view the women who administered the shelter had 
towards those who needed its services (and those 
women’s freedom to spend their time this way 
depended on the high wages of the men -they- 
slept with). Residents must line up to take a 
breathalyser test in the common area when coming 
in in the late afternoon, everyone must be inside 
the shelter by 6:00 p.m., no one is allowed out 
after that time without written permission, and 
everyone is locked out of their rooms at 8:00 
a.m. on weekdays and 9:00 a.m. on weekends. 
Women’s rooms had four permanent beds and 
lockers, but usually had two more folding beds 
crammed into the walkway at the foot of the beds. 
The men’s rooms were larger but had eight residents.
All the shelter’s maintenance, from cleaning to 
cooking (when that was not done by church or 
other charity groups) to grounds-keeping, was 
done by the residents through required “chores”. 
Every resident was required to “volunteer” for 
one or more such chores every day or be made to 
leave. I did not mind at all doing part of the 
upkeep, but did mind the indentured labor aspect 
of being made to do it. In addition, 
administering such requirements became part of 
the petty abuse the more vindictive of the 
regular staff considered one of the major perks of their job.

Residents were required to work on a “plan” 
towards permanent housing with one of the 
administrators. Such “plans” necessarily required 
a job. These women reproduced the sexism of the 
larger society: in addition to there being more 
beds for men than for women, living conditions 
were kept as much as possible from interfering 
with any man’s job who has one. Their “plans” for 
men were much more realistic as well, in that the 
men had more of a chance of finding work, even 
when they had, as the majority there did, a 
prison record. Their “plans” for women pretty 
much amounted to: you screwed up by not selecting 
a good enough (or any) husband, any job is better 
than no job at all, no matter how ill paid, 
discriminatory or demeaning, and your stay limit 
without a job is 30 days. Their ranking for women 
was below men in services, respect and resources 
and within that ranking, women with children came 
first and women without children were at the very bottom.
Uncontrolled aggression from other residents and 
uncontained illness were the primary factors that 
made living there not possible. There were 
decent, generous, responsible residents, but not 
unlike middle and high school, the lowest common 
denominator ruled. Due, again, to the sexist 
ranking of the administrators, I lost the job I 
had found after a great deal of effort on my part 
and no help at all on theirs. It was a suitably 
gender stereotyped job cleaning bathrooms from 5 
pm until 2 to 4 am at the local university’s 
stadium after athletic events. Any man there who 
had a second or third shift job was allowed 
complete privacy to sleep during the day; the 
rule was emphasized in the obligatory “house 
meeting” held every evening. The administrators 
kept letting a woman with a baby into my dorm 
room for trivial reasons and allowed her to keep 
me awake to the point where I had less than five 
hours sleep in forty eight and could not work. 
Their justification was that women with children 
had priority for any reason, even though that was 
supposed to be only an adult women’s room. They 
had put a woman who had just had a miscarriage 
into the family room, where this woman should 
have gone, as “therapy” and because the other 
woman with children did not want to share the 
room with another child. They dismissed my need 
to sleep for my job as “just shared living” 
(always said with a smug little smirk by the 
administrator) and said I could leave if I had a 
problem with it. I was also attacked on other 
occasions by two women who were later expelled 
for being on illegal drugs; their initial 
unprovoked aggression towards me was dismissed, 
again with a smile, as “shared living”.
Women with dangerous mental problems were also 
put into the regular woman’s dorm. One had kept 
the other women in the room terrorized before I 
stayed there. She also kept them up all night 
because she alone was allowed to sleep there 
during the day (due to her mental illness!), 
while they had to be up and out on the streets or 
at their jobs, as one resident was, by eight. She 
had been committed before for cutting up 
residents’ clothes with a knife; she was 
recommitted again just after I got there.

The official policy towards aggression and 
threats among residents was zero tolerance. The 
actual policy was to let the rats eat the other 
rats and to shoot the ones that came running to 
the administrators. The administrators had their 
favorites, usually those that made the class 
divide most evident, and the less well off and 
less educated paid staff did as well, usually 
those most expert at currying favor and those 
with whom they identified. The atmosphere 
resembled a combination between what I imagine 
prison must be and the type of unskilled job 
where the boss just above entry level uses his or 
her position more for petty gratification than anything else.
The justification certainly resembled those types 
of jobs: “You can always leave if you don’ t like it”.
During the month I was there, I had maybe four 
days where I got a solid eight hours sleep. I was 
sleep deprived and hurting the days I could not 
make it up in my car. I was also, as the cold 
season hit in September, sick most days, as one 
or the other of the women in my room always had 
some virus and residents were almost never 
allowed, even when sick, to stay in bed during the day.
After a month, I went to a women’s only shelter 
in a larger city where I thought living 
conditions and job prospects would be better. I 
think I set the record for their shortest stay – 
less than twelve hours. The administrators, again 
educated professional level women, were great, 
but the regular and after hours staff were worse 
than the former shelter’s. Residents were 
required not only to be out of their rooms during 
the day, but to tell the desk attendant where 
they were going during every part of the day. 
They were required to sign in when they got back, 
and -this was the worst part- to take a urine 
drug test every day, or whenever the desk 
attendant, whose day job really was as a prison 
guard, felt like it. When she decided I needed to 
be tested at the end of my first day and insisted 
on remaining in the room where I was to do this, 
I refused and was told to leave. She and the 
other uneducated after-hours attendant took great 
pleasure in making me pack my clothes into the 
prototypical homeless black plastic bags, leaning 
against the wall watching me the whole time, 
telling me to get a move on and making the other 
residents jump, obey them and get a move on too with they tried to talk to me.
Every other shelter in this region (southeast) 
has the same demeaning requirements, and, I 
imagine, the same vindictive staff and the same 
pack behavior from the lowest common denominator 
among the residents. Even without money, without 
hope, without prospects, I have been physically 
better off living in my tiny car and camping 
where I can safely. I was well again two days 
after leaving the last shelter and have gotten a 
glorious eight hours sleep whenever I can be horizontal and warm enough.


--
+44 (0)7786 952037
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk/
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
uk-911-truth+subscribe at googlegroups.com
"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.globalresearch.ca
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1407615751783.2051663.1274106225&l=90330c0ba5&type=1
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf 

"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic 
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/

Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered 
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that 
shall not be made known. What I tell you in 
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye 
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27

Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20121113/d3ca2eb6/attachment.html>