Kafka Or Mills?
For millions of Americans, the holiday weekend wasn't cause for celebration.
The expiration of emergency federal unemployment benefits condemns scores of recipients to once again ponder precarity. And at a time when the nation faces an eviction crisis. Piecemeal, state-level efforts to extend eviction protection offer a measure of hope, as does billions in rental assistance approved by Congress, but for many renters, this is a Kafkaesque nightmare.
If you sit near the top of the social hierarc
I was lucky to be employed on the side as a consultant by the same bank CEO for over 20 years. Whenever I could I would drop off my regular strategic planning reports in person. So one day as I handed in my latest report, the boss asked me if I needed anything else so I asked him if he had any free money. To my surprise he said, “As it happens I do.” He turned an opened a drawer in his credenza and pulled out a coin folder with the first five state quarters in it and said, “Here.” I’ve still got that folders, now filled. All free money is great even if one is not poor.
In France, post the GFC, it became a type of genre article. Formerly well to do bourgeois confronted to the nightmarish bureaucracy we’ve built to make sure the poor don’t mooch…
And more than one of these former bourgeois was writing furious articles about the dehumanizing process and the petty humiliation and how these inferior state employees dare speak to me in that tone?
… which was making one of my poor but super educated friend laugh green. She was like, “yeah, welcome to my world, b*tch”. Oh and according to her, we haven’t build a kafkaesque administration to make sure the poor don’t mooch but to make sure they know they’re poor and thus worthless.
The cruelty is the point, a feature, not a bug.
I’m not that cynical. Yet.
@fredm421 Your last two sentences are killer. Alas, I think I’m more cynical than you are. Happy Labor Day, all.
Err… Thanks! 🙂 Happy Labor Day to you and yours too!
The cruelty is the point as without sufficient dehumanization they would realize they can easily take the necessary materials for guillotines and have sufficient numbers to once again drag out the offending parties to meet them.
That’s her pov. The money offered creates a dependency (easier to beg for state relief than to revolt and rob or kill bourgeois) and the bureaucracy’s cruelty desensitizes and annihilates the will to revolt…
As she puts it, it makes the urban jungles into zoos. Not necessarily great for the animals there but so much safer for the visitors/neighbours.
I tried pointing out she wouldn’t necessarily be a predator and more likely be a prey in a jungle (she’s a petite woman) but she sometimes counters she’d rather die fighting than being forced to beg for a pittance…
FWIW, though, don’t get too dark an image of our urban problems. It always amuses visiting Americans. Our poor neighbourhoods are infinitely better than their US counterparts. This is not a criticism per se. Our societies made different choices and, well, we may not have found the secret to happiness but our urban jungles are indeed fairly tame, certainly compared to the USA.
I started to type something flippant and callous, along the lines of “that’s why they’re poor”. But stopped.
Because H is right. As we speak, millions of renters are headed to eviction while $40 BN of rent assistance sits untapped. Because, bureacracy.
In my state, Oregon, there is appx $500 MM available for rental assistance. Maybe $30 MM has been disbursed. Our state government offloaded the job to a motley plethora of non-profits who were unprepared for the task and saddled with a maze-like state online system that not even trained volunteers could navigate. Most renters have no idea that assistance is available or how to get it. Tenant advocates are trying to organize door knocking campaigns, which will fail. Landlords are either licking their lips at being able to evict and replace at much higher rents, or struggling to pay their mortgages and unable to help their tenants (the former are the big institutional LLs, the latter are the small mom ‘n pops). This winter, we’re going to see a lot more tents and occupied cars on the streets. All because of bureaucracy.
I personally know a number of local and state politicians. Most of them are aware of how much of a mess things are, but are themselves unable to fix it. Everyone is frustrated. Or claims to be. But most of them won’t suffer any consequences for this fiasco. There’s no accountability at the top, and no power at the bottom.
Could one ponder that the largesse of the Federal reserve and their prompt attention to our
losses….I mean dual mandates…. during liquidity events/financial crises is what protects us from the Kafkaesque abyss of dull madness…just a simplistic notion I guess.
From my POV, it’s been the movie “Brazil”. Or maybe it’s that famous Apple commercial with the woman in running shorts and the hurled hammer, for decades. Try dealing with the USDA, Customs, the FDA, FedBiz (now SAM) and assorted versions of these octopuses in other countries too. I understand the anguish, despair and sense of hopelessness that the average (un)educated American now carries around during “The Age of Sludge”.
There will be no mass revolt. “Let them eat cake” was the only foodstuff (cake flour) remaining in the French aristocracy’s stores/reserves. There was 3 year mini-ice age at the time. We now have droughts, wildfires, and a shortage of low-cost housing.
If I was in my 30’s, I would be building Tarrytown-ish inner city housing; all on government guaranteed low cost bonds. Timing is everything.
Wise is the person who recognizes the best way to help.
One such wise person / friend of mine taught me a great lesson. We were discussing the homeless situation, and I naturally commented “if you give a homeless person some change, how do you know they’re not just going to go buy a drink with it?”
She responded, “Maybe at that moment that’s exactly what they need”