Jails Are Seattle's Future

There's been a lot of talk recently about Seattle's need for a municipal jail. But not everything has been said on the subject that could be said. For example, no one has suggested that the new jail could be designed with futuristic sweeping curved lines, stand 600 feet up, be painted orange, and revolve, and so be a lovely tourist attraction and Seattle icon. Even though a new jail would create many new jobs and require new housing and supporting retail, no one has said there should be a street car going there. No one has come up with a good slogan, like "Invest In Your Future -- Invest In Prisons."

[Above: Without one of these, how are people supposed to get there?]

I'm going to say those things and more. I'm going to tell you what no one else at Real Change wants you to hear: We need this new jail!

Real Change doesn't want you to know that jailing people is Seattle's last hope to have a surviving economy and clean empty streets. Real Change doesn't want you to know that scapegoating the poor for the problems of the middle-class pays.

Now, right away, I'm sure that some of you liberal losers are thinking, "Wouldn't it be cheaper to build more traditional shelters, rather than spend all that money on constructing and maintaining a jail complex?" On the surface, that sounds sensible. The city is paying, right now, just about $10 per person per day for shelter and transitional housing, while just the maintenance cost of a new jail is expected to be more than $110 per person per day. But when you scratch deeper it sounds like mairzy doats and dozy doats. Scratch deeper than that, and it takes your arm off.

What did I just tell you in the first paragraph? This is Seattle's chance to create a whole new thriving industry! We've been Jet City. We've been Amazon Central. We've been Latteville. Now we can be Jail Town, USA!

[Left: Jail made Elvis famous. Elvis made the Seattle World's Fair famous. The Seattle World's Fair made Seattle famous. Therefore Jails already have made Seattle famous. Let's cut out the middlemen!]

There are only two things we have to do to guarantee our preeminence as the world's greatest jailers, and we are well our way to accomplishing both of them.

First, we need lots more misdemeanants. This is being arranged. Our mayor is finding new ways to enforce bad laws. Using methods that were pioneered in the Deep South during the Reconstruction, Mayor Nickels has been finding innovative ways to make the inescapable conditions of homelessness illegal. Meanwhile, our president and congress have done us the favor of ensuring that we will have an ever-increasing number of homeless people to convict. It has been estimated that by the end of 2012 every formerly housed single man, woman, and child in Seattle who does not have a high-level government job will have been foreclosed upon, or be a barista.

We need to make more drugs and herbs illegal. I recommend aspirin, tylenol, and ibuprofen; that will make it more illegal than ever to hurt. We need to expand the no-smoking ordinance to prohibit smoking anywhere within 25 feet of a hard surface, and we need to enforce it with jail time, and add a three-strikes provision.

Second, we need funding for it. We need funding to build it, funding to keep it going, and extra funding to line the pockets of the lobbyists for it, to make it worth their while.

We can do this, too, Seattle! We just have to think big! We have to become the experts on jailing that the world comes to see and learn from! We have make Seattle synonymous not with gray skies, but with gray bars.

Let's get Rem Koolhaus to design it. Let's build a world-class park around it, and charge for tours. Let's build a new college to train incarceration professionals and to teach politicians how to write laws that can't fail to be broken.

Century 21 has been used. Let's call it Century 22, and dazzle America and the rest of the World with our vision, our innovation, and the experience we will have achieved.

I'm So Privileged

Greg Nickels [our mayor] has me so royally peeved, I'm tempted to just write "Greg Nickels is an arrogant, narcissistic, fool" 75 times and turn that in. I've been told by the editor I could get away with that sort of thing. He's said no one would notice any difference in the quality of my writing, so "what the hell."

I won't though, because I wouldn't want to abuse my free speech privilege. Sarah Palin, who aspires to be Vice President of the United States, a job that requires upholding our Constitution, has reminded us lately that freedom of speech is a privilege that the press should not abuse. Indeed, I clearly recall how in 8th grade history we learned the first ten amendments to the Constitution (they formed what was called the Bill of Privileges), and that the first privilege listed after the Privilege of Religion was the Privilege of Freedom of Speech.

Another privilege we learned about was the Privilege of the People to Peaceably Assemble. I'm sure that if Sarah Palin ever gets to be president she'll keep us on the straight and narrow there, too.

[Right: Some women peaceably assembled to ask politely to be granted privilege to vote. "Please, sirs, with sugar on top!"]

Our activist Supreme Court, abusing its privilege to interpret the Constitution, declared decades ago that people retain privileges of association, asserting they could not otherwise exercise their speech and assembly privileges. Palin has clearly understood how wrong this is.

When Palin accused Barack Obama of associating "with terrorists who targeted our own country" she referred to the fact that Bill Ayers, who helped found the Weather Underground when Obama was 8, and Barack Obama have both worked on the same two non-profit boards. Palin would regard that as an abuse of the privilege of association.

She's absolutely right. Suppose I'm helping put out a fire, at, say, a kindergarten, and I know that the guy passing me buckets of water is none other than Bill Ayers, who blew up a critical Pentagon file-cabinet once. I should walk away from that fire because associating with known terrorists is always wrong, wrong, wrong. The kindergarteners would understand, when they got older, if they weren't burned to a crisp. If they were burned to a crisp, they'd have to ask themselves in the afterlife what the heck were they doing going to a kindergarten in the same neighborhood with a known terrorist?

[Above: President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the landmark Civil Privileges Act of 1964.]

As if just to show you don't have to be republican to have the same kind of grasp of law on privilege as Sarah Palin, this past weekend the administration of our Democratic Mayor Greg Nickels put out a Notice of Land Use Violation threatening to fine a long list of individuals and associations for their support of Nickelsville, at least one of whom was listed for the sole crime of having emailed his support to another of them.

The Notice of Violation notably lists SHARE/WHEEL, the homeless grassroots organization that was NOT responsible for Nickelsville, as a supporter, and includes mention of its Vancouver, Washington, office. But the Vancouver WA office is that of an entirely different organization that just happens to have the name Share.

Therefore Nickels carries Sarah Palin's thinking a step further. Not only should people not do good things if the wrong people join in, they should also pay for having the wrong name. Again, this is as it should be. Share House, Vancouver, started in 1977. SHARE/WHEEL started in 1990. Share House has had 18 of its 31 years in existence to change its name. They have totally abused their privilege of name-having.

But Nickels went too far listing John and Jane Doe as "Persons Responsible For The Violations".

We know what he's doing. He's getting ready to fine everybody who so much as wrote a letter to the editor in support of Nickelsville, $150 a day, every day it exists.

Now we need everyone who cares about Nickelsville and the RIGHT of homeless people to survive to declare themselves to be John or Jane Doe -- I am John Doe.

[Below: I already posted this on my other blog Run Off, but it's worth posting again.]

Spartacus [I now think the subtitles are in Turkish.]

Adventures at Nickelsville

Back in the 60s I was a rally chaser. Missing a rally or a march would be like missing an episode of Star Trek. An enormous sense of grief would come over me, made worse by the knowledge that there would be no summer reruns in the case of the rallies and marches.


[Above: May 5, 1970. I was there. The Yellow Indicatrix tells you where. I am NOT between the other protesters and the Tac Squad. I am on the northbound on-ramp. No friend of head trauma, I.]

Now, though, I just want to sit in my little corner in my tiny room and watch the world go by on CNN and the internet. When a public gathering presents an opportunity to be arrested it only strengthens my resolve to hide out in my room, owing to desmoteriophobia (fear of dungeons).

Not all of us have such fear. Saturday I opened up the Seattle P-I to find none other than my beloved Anitra "Smiling Buddha" Freeman gazing blissfully up at a policeman about to haul her radical-hippy ass off to jail. The possibility that this time they could just leave her there and forget to tell anyone either did not occur to her, or it goosed her, or she'd gone batspit crazy and thought the policeman was Wilford Brimley come to take her to Antarea, where she'd be young forever, and learn break-dancing from Don Ameche.

Anitra was getting arrested for refusing to leave alleged city land upon which Nickelsville had been set up. You may recall that two weeks ago Nickelsville was a homeless peoples' shantytown only in potentia. On Friday of last week it was very much concrete, and as Mayor Nickels wanted it to return to being an abstract idea, he sent the police to try to make it so.

Before Anitra got arrested there was a scene, broadcast on KING TV, of her telling residents of Nickelsville ("Nickelodeons") three options the police had laid out. I've watched the video over and over, trying to figure out the logic of the three options. It sounds like what she said the police were saying was the Nickelodeons' options were EITHER 1) stay and be arrested OR 2) go away and not be arrested, OR 3) go away with shipoopy, and no kiss.

I was actually there to witness that episode and the subsequent 22 arrests, in spite of my aforementioned phobia, because I'd spent the night before boiling peanuts for my sweetheart not considering that, what with her spending the night in a fuchsia tent at Nickelsville and then surely wanting to stick around to be jailed, and me without a teleportation device, I would have to go there to deliver her the peanuts. So I went, and it was just coincidence that the police vans were arriving from the donut shop just the same time I arrived by bus.

It's the story of my life. I boil some peanuts for someone, then I think, oops, got to deliver the peanuts. I get there just as the cops do. Oh, look, doggies!

It all worked out half well though. I did not get arrested. Anitra got caught and released. Governor Gregoire granted a reprieve to Nickelsville itself, letting the Nickelodeons cram as many tents onto a state owned parking lot as could fit, out of reach of the mayor. I got to talk to the people the mayor sent from Human Services to refer Nickelodeons to "proper" shelter in the system, and I tried to find out how they could do that with a straight face knowing that the shelters are full every night. Answer: they don't think about that. They just pass out referral cards to whoever takes them and call it a job done.

Here's your irony adventure: Some people took the cards and went to be referred to the shelter that the mayor keeps saying is there for them, and the referral agency gave them bus tickets and sent them back to Nickelsville!

Greg Nickels is like the owner of a row boat trying to bail it out with a Dixie cup after it's already sunk in 10 feet of water. Greg Nickels is a fool.

Use Protection

I don't know what to say. I can't not be sardonic. It's too fahrfürfrappen easy. Seven hundred billion dollars! The Bushter wants to have seven hundred billion dollars of OUR money, to save the fortunes of very, VERY important rich people, without whom our economy (the machine that cranks out our wealth) would supposedly not be possible.

[Below: That's 7,000,000 of these.]

Well, you know, for the sake of MY wealth and all, I'd just as soon we keep the seven hundred billion dollars, if you don't mind, bitte, danke schön! Auf wiedersehen, vaya con Dios, amigo! Thank you very frappen much!

Our presidente seems to be under the wildly mistaken assumption that we would all be extremely alarmed if the prices of housing steeply plummeted in this country. Actually, this is far from the case. In fact, I would like very much to be able to buy a house for a dollar. I HAVE a dollar. I would not like to buy a house for 650,000 dollars, because I do not have that many. So if housing prices dropped from what they are now (a zillion per house, on average) to a dollar per house, on average, I'd go so far as propose we change the Constitution to be able to re-elect Bush as presidente, over and over again, until the Rapture.

That won't happen (the housing price drop), because nothing the presidente, nor the Republicans in general, nor Democrats are talking about doing about all this, involves making the price of housing lower. They're all about protecting the mortgage industry, and failing that, homeowners. Nobody gives a damn about home non-owners. Nobody's even TALKING about home non-owners. EXCEPT ME! DO I HAVE TO DO IT ALL?

Home non-owners are Americans, too. Why does no one else ever point this out?

Here's what's wrong with the Bush Administration. When they want to seize property from some poor jerk whose land is in the way of an interstate bypass or a CostCo, they just say "Eminent domain!" and "This is all you get in compensation," and, transaction completed. But when they want the junk assets of precious failing investment companies, it's, "Oh please, sirs, tell us how much you might require for your valuable investment properties, that they may be purchase-ed from you by our humble national government, using our peasants' accumulated pennies."

George's plan asks for the same deal he asked from Congress re Iraq. He wants his Secretary of the Treasury to be authorized to do anything at all with the 700 billion. No limits. The future is uncertain. There are terrorists among us. This is a post-9-11 world. Constitutional checks and balances are outmoded in this climate of fear and terror. Saddam Hussein must be defeated at all costs. We only ask authorization to do what is necessary in these dangerous times.

[Right: Forget those bankers, remember who our real enemy is.]

The Democrats, whom I am ordinarily fond of associating with, have seized upon this as an issue, and I give them credit for doing so. Yes, (big applause) if this screw is inevitable, we MUST HAVE safeguards! Lordy, if this deal is going to go down, please, please, dear government, put on a condom before you do it.

It's too much to ask either party, apparently, to demand that if we taxpayers spend that much for so-called junk properties, the properties be used for our benefit. Like, you know, ending our homelessness. Neither party seems capable of seeing that this crisis is an opportunity to end US homelessness in a year.

Instead, both parties are talking about these failed mortgage assets as bad investments that must be made good, i.e. must be turned into money, in the short term. Rather than shelter, which could improve lives, which could create human welfare, which could generate national wealth. That would take altogether too long. It would take as long as slow moving human generations and slow growing pink flesh. We don't have time for the needs of flesh. We have to make a profit this quarter.

Nickels Makes History Repeat

I have a column due by 9 AM this morning, and I've also promised Anitra "Not Acting On Behalf Of Anybody In Particular" Freeman that by the same time I'd read a book-length manifesto on Nickelsville that she wrote with a committee. Not being inclined to do needless work, I shall now attempt to combine the two efforts into one glorious slack-off.

[Above Left: Anitra with acquaintance.]

I've talked about Nickelsville here before but I've never spent an entire column on it. This is mainly due to the fact that it hasn't existed yet. I generally find that when I talk about that which is not, the results are even more obtuse than what you usually get when I talk about that which is.

But Nickelsville is poised to be, probably before the next column is out, so it has achieved a degree of concreteness analogous to that of The Melting of the Polar Icecaps and The Rise of the Oceans Due to Global Warming, or The Great Stock Market Crash of 2008 (both expected later today).

So what will Nickelsville be? It will be a Hooverville that is named after Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor, rather than after Herbert Hoover, a former US President. In the Great Depression Seattle had a Hooverville, a shantytown built by homeless people. A lot of people then thought that Herbert Hoover was responsible for a lot of the Greatness of the Great Depression. So they named the shantytowns after him, the need for them being perceived to be partly his fault.

Today, we don't just think Greg Nickels has a lot to do with how hard it is to survive homeless in Seattle, we know he does. We have listened to him talk a good talk about ending homelessness, while at the same time chasing homeless encampments all around the city and destroying survival gear wherever found. The message from Nickels is, we, the City of Seattle, will end homelessness in the abstract by 2014 (only: not really because the plan isn't to actually end homeless, but hah, hah, that's what we say about it, even though the plan itself says something entirely different, read the fine print), but concretely we will strip all the homeless that are forced outdoors for lack of adequate shelter of all their property, and leave them to the elements.

So as those homeless people who wish to live band together into a shantytown, there is no question whose fault it all is. Nickelsville will be Nickels' fault. Without Greg Nickels and the homeless encampment sweeps he instigated, Nickelsville wouldn't be about to happen. As bad as George Bush is, there would not be a Bushville at this time. Until maybe next week, depending on how many multi-billion dollar financial greed factories file Chapter 11 this week.

As Anitra and Friends' manifesto ably and concisely points out, Nickelsville will cost the City of Seattle nothing. To be less concise: it will not take money out of the general fund. It will not be built by city workers paid by taxpayers. The residents will build and maintain it with assistance from private donors. The city will not be billed for the labor.

People are always saying, "Why don't homeless people ever do anything to help themselves?" Well, they do, everyday. They help themselves by barely surviving in spite of all the obstacles and all the persecution. It's understandable that people can't see that work of surviving, because it's scattered among thousands of personal stories.

Nickelsville should make matters clearer. "What are homeless people doing to help themselves?" Nickelsville, for one thing.

And if, as feared, the city tears Nickelsville down, that would help answer the follow-up question, "Why, if they are helping themselves, are they still homeless?"

The first step in getting out of homelessness is finding a way to maintain and survive every day. If that first step is continually tripped up by the police power of a mayor, then there can never be a second step.

Fannie Seized

Ooh, the Bush government just seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and I'm all a-twitter!

Quick partial telegraphic history of US Government involvement in the housing, rental, and mortgage business since the New Deal: Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) '33, Housing Acts '34, '37, Pinko Commy Federal National Mortgage Association '38 (Fannie Mae), Servicemen's Readjustment Act '44 (the GI "Bill of Rights"), Housing Acts '49, '54, '64, Housing and Urban Development Act '65, Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act '66, Housing and Urban Development Act '68 (created Ginny Mae), Emergency Home Finance Act '70, (created Freddie Mac), Housing and Urban Development Act '70, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) '75, Community Reinvestment Act '77, Homesteading and Neighborhood Restoration Act '95, Pinko Commy Republicans Seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac '08.

Really, it's a hoot when small government conservatives say one day that you have to let the market correct itself, and the next day send in the Marines.

General rule: If poor people are the only ones hurt by a market downturn, a government correction of the market is invariably "liberal", but if wealthy investors are feeling the crunch, it's a threat to our national security. Bolsheviks arise!

The truth is, deep down inside, George Bush is jealous of Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez gets to wear the cool red beret and the khakis all the time and blah-blah all day and no one can stop him. He gets to seize corporations any time he wants. Now, George is probably thinking, "Heh, heh, Daddy never seized a multi-billion-dollar secondary mortgage guarantor! And I just seized two of them suckers in one day! Next week maybe I'll seize BP and ExxonMobil, heh, heh, that'd show'm."

I just wish it went down like in the movies. Hundreds of guys dressed all in black with wicked guns rappel from hovering black helicopters into windows, race down corridors, shoot their way into board rooms, and march corporate executive weasels at gunpoint to waiting buses, which speed them to their new suites at the Concertina Hotel. Why is it never like that? Reality hates me. I'm sure George feels the same way. It's something I sense we have in common. That, and a sweet love of women's beach volleyball.



All of this wouldn't have been necessary if the government had never privatized these corporations to begin with. You don't have to seize what you already own. I blame Nixon.

At the outset the idea was to back up the mortgage industry with public funds, and nobody seriously believed it could happen without them. Then, as Republicans took control in the late 60s (Nixon!) during a relatively minor housing crisis (minor compared to now) they enforced the idea that what Fannie Mae needed was to be cut loose from the government and begin to get her money the Old Fashioned Way. To help her along she was introduced to her brand new wily half brother Freddie Mac, who would teach her how it's done through the magic of competition. (The same administration later brought us wage and price controls).

By seizing both of them, the Bush administration has restored the Fannie Mae piece of the New Deal: Your irony of the week.

Toward Further Confusion

1. How is it that conservatives and liberals so often resort to the same solutions to the same problems? Could it be that conservatives and liberals differ mainly on the nature of their excuses? Could it be Darwin was right, and it's all about whatever works, works? Or is there a God, Who wrote unto Moses (tablet missing, presumed broken) Thou Shalt Lend Private Funds Only?

2. In 1950, to prevent a national railroad strike from interfering with the Korean War effort, Truman ordered the Army to seize the country's railroads. The Army did so successfully with 46 officers, one enlisted man (a sergeant), and eight civilian clerks. Explain, drawing from your own experiences, or experiences of others you've read about, how so few men with weapons can do so much.

Lackawanna Wonderfulness

Here at Adventures in Irony, we aim to put everything that matters into perspective and distort beyond recognition everything that doesn't matter. Let's talk about the US presidential election!

We now know who's running. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is running as the I Spy Bill Cosby (not to be confused with the stand-up or Jello-Pudding Cosbys), so has picked Robert Culp as his running mate. I discovered this watching Obama and Biden being interviewed together on 60 Minutes. The objective is for Obama to be the first African-American president without ever actually mentioning African-American-ness. Instead the focus will be on Wonderfulness and Joe Biden's ability to write his own speeches and direct himself. Obama's election will pave the way, in less than 40 years, for a Democratic Ticket that looks like Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Vice Presidential nominee gives us no choice but to speak of a Get Smart Ticket -- Sarah Palin being basically Barbara Feldon, Agent 99, with glasses, a bigger gun, and higher cheekbones. This means John McCain is Maxwell Smart. If anyone is bothered by this I'm sorry, but I don't make these things up. The McCain/Palin sequel, if it's allowed to happen, will be played by Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway.

Counting Greens, Libertarians, Socialists, and the others, there are at least an additional 11 tickets to choose from that I know of (not all offers valid at all election outlets). When one of those 11 tickets starts resembling a 60s TV spy show team I will let you all know within the week. Ralph Nader had a shot at being The Man From U.N.C.L.E but he blew it when he decided to run with Matt Gonzales. Matt Gonzales may have Illya Kuryakin's hair, his eyes, and maybe even his fashion sense, but he is no Illya Kuryakin.

A lot has been made of Barack Hussein Obama's name, especially the Hussein part. It's often suggested that Barack's parents went way out of their way to dream up the weirdest, scariest, name they could. The notion credits them with far more imagination than they actually showed: Barack's father's name was Barack Hussein Obama. They went with something already tried!

John McCain has been revealed as the least homeless man in America. Many in the homeless advocacy business are investigating what impact McCain's possession of all the vacant housing has already had on US homelessness. What we know for certain is that he's the candidate most capable of ending homelessness in a term at the White House, by inviting all the homeless people into his other digs.

Sarah Palin might not know how to end homelessness, but she could help homeless people get relief from their day-to-day struggles by teaching them to shoot and live off wild game. She knows how to make hats out of pigeons and gloves out of stray cats. I'm sure she'll have no problem with homeless people shooting stray cats. Realize it's not about the cats, it's about self-reliance. It's not about the elk, it's about oil. And so forth.

Joe Biden has been a senator from Delaware for 35 freaking years. He's not known for that, of course, since most Americans have never heard of Delaware ("lowest highest elevation of all fifty states") or knew that it was permitted votes in the Senate. Instead, he is best known for having lived as the son of a working-class car salesman in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, absorbing the honest straight-shooting ethics of all good salt-of-the-earth car salesmen. I didn't really mean to say that, I just wanted to say "Lackawanna."

For Extra Credit

Figure out how John McCain can be said to have had far more foreign policy experience than Barack Obama, but he still can't tell when a war is wrong and an insane waste of people and resources. Should we value experience in and of itself, or should we look at what’s been learned from it?