Attitudes towards poor Americans are worse than ever as corruption and inequality worsen

Roughly 38,000 U.S. veterans eat from garbage cans every day. So Fox News reported back in January, advocating a helping hand for homeless veterans. It was nice to see the news outlet that’s usually so hostile to those who lack shelter take up their cause, even if it was only because these luckless destitute had performed military service. Any compassion for any segment of the millions of vagabonds among us is welcome, especially from an organization, one of whose hosts, Jesse Watters, hates homeless people. He even called them “bags of flesh mutating on the sidewalk,” on June 16. Very likely some of those people regarded by Watters as garbage are veterans. But maybe Watters missed the Fox memo about showing care for that subset of the unhoused, whom he also described as “urine-soaked junkies.”

But then Watters – who is ascending to Tucker Carlson’s punditry spot – has demonized the homeless for years. Back on September 22, 2022, Watters averred that “It was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets.” More civilized because then “nice people” wouldn’t have to see them. Not, nota bene, because penniless people in mental agony were at least receiving psychiatric and medical care. Watters does not seem particularly concerned about treating psychotics, he just wants them out of sight, preferably incarcerated. A lot like Donald “Camps for the Homeless” Trump, who promises that if re-elected president, he will remove this so-called human blight from city centers to peripheral “camps.” As in concentration camps.

This is capitalism. No, zero, nada, zilch psychiatric or medical help for poor people in mental agony. Kinder, gentler versions of capitalism, so-called mixed economies may provide for people in such circumstances. The helpless may be institutionalized and receive care – medicines and therapy. They are not left to perish on the streets. There exist in some such economies the necessary structures, physical and bureaucratic, to tend to the demons of paranoid schizophrenics.

But in the wild west capitalism of 21st century USA, the billionaires don’t give a damn. And they call the shots. They own the congress, the supreme court, the white house, statehouses, governors’ mansions, Hollywood, the military and every other political or social institution – they may not own any given outfit outright, the way they’ve bribed their way into control of the supreme court, but their wishes are heard and tended to. Our oligarchs do not care about vagabonds tortured by psychosis, even if there are lots of them.

Our American masters of the universe simply can’t be bothered to establish a psychiatric public health network capable of relieving these dispossessed people’s misery. Or to promote affordable housing, for those who sleep under the stars but don’t hear demonic voices. For heaven’s sake, we can’t even get a president to follow through on his campaign promise to establish a medical public option, since it might drain profits away from the health insurance racket. Both Obama and Biden explicitly reneged on such a promise, because the health insurance mega-donors weren’t having it. You think that same wildly greedy health care industry might consider a functioning mental health system? One that employs psychiatrists to treat the mentally ill? Ho, ho! Think again.

Meanwhile, our supreme court justices, each paired with a billionaire by an inequality fanatic from the Federalist Society named Leonard Leo, gallivant across the globe in private jets to exotic locales, where they enjoy, luxury, all-expenses-paid (they’d have to be, since those expenses amount to hundred of thousands of dollars) getaways, before returning to Washington to oversee cases involving those very same billionaires. They rule in favor of those tycoons. Then they have the nerve to deny this is bribery. They pretend that life on their not so modest salaries somehow has nothing to do with their unseemly eagerness for handouts from mega-rich financial magnates. But now everyone knows better. We’ve got the best supreme court money can buy – and no way to remove these corrupt judges.

Did you know that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires have made unimaginable, record-breaking fortunes? Today, every dimension of inequality - across wealth, income, gender and race - is rising around the world. Every year, the gap between rich and the rest of us widens.