Selected Short Subjects
Pols gather; "conversation" ensues; nothing actually happens; a mystery word is not uttered.
Let us pray:
There is no escape from the problem of ignorance, because nobody knows enough to run the government. Presidents, senators, governors, judges, professors, doctors of philosophy, editors, and the like are only a little less ignorant than the rest of us. Even an expert is a person who chooses to be ignorant about many things so that he may know all about one.
—From The Semisovereign People, by political scientist E.E. Schattschneider
As if to prove the point, the Most Powerful People in Portland’s screwy politics gathered this week in the brand new city council chamber—$2-million worth of woodwork—which impressed Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney no end…
…as the various elected officials, many of whom hate each other (or will run against each other in what are known facetiously as “elections”), faced the apparatchiks of Homelessness Inc.™, who had some explaining to do about some embarrassing numbers…
I forced myself to watch the city’s show on YouTube so you wouldn’t have to (root canals have been less painful). True to the rules of drama, the performance had a back-story: a mini-crisis caused by a shortfall of money extorted by a third governmental body—our old garbage-collecting friends at Metro. Its “soak the not-very-rich” tax that was supposed to shower money on the homelessness problem came up short. The county pols were…
shocked!
…although, if they’d been reading the papers, they would have been suspicious about that Golden Goose…
Significantly, no one from Metro was on the dais. Maybe the city ran out of chairs.
The county homeless cadres, headed by $-quarter-million man Dan Field, came armed with charts and slides and priorities and acronyms and inside-the-bubble lingo…
…although no one seemed to have a PowerPoint that might answer the question: If Portland keeps chasing away the “wealthy” and businesses, and with Elon on the hunt for stupid/corrupt/pork barrel federal expenditures, who in their right mind thinks Metro’s take will go up?1
Ever?
But when you’re in the homelessness business, hope will get you through the dark days until PERS kicks in.
After the dog-n-pony show, it was the turn of the array of 25-percenters and county commissioners2 to say…something.
The media scribblers homed in on socialist Mitch Green, who did a deep-dive into an obscure corner of the Homelessness Inc.™ report and found that there are over 5-thousand “administrators” in the corporation. It was passing strange to hear the champion of working stiffs hint that maybe some should be Eloned out. At least that’s what his sound-bites on TV seemed to indicate…but the part that hit the cutting room floor was more socialistically correct…
Let’s create more highly-unionized bureaucrats! Why not? We’ll all be working for the government pretty soon…
Take my word for it, this was the only actual “let’s do something” proposal among the assembled pols. Which is not to say that there weren’t entertainment values galore.
Candace Avalos will do the impossible
She’ll get us on the same page or else!
She was not alone in failing to mention what those “metrics” will be. But the message was clear: My way or the highway. Be interesting to see if she’ll make it stick. 3
To Hell With the 14th Amendment—We Want Ours!
Loretta Smith made it clear who comes first…
Who knew there are different “Africans, African Americans, and blacks.” This poses a serious question: Who gets to go to the head of the line first?
A Councilor Is Confused…and Admits It!
Jamie Dunphy wonders if…if…if…
A member of Homelessness Inc.™ melts down…or sideways…or…
Meet the county's homelessness response director, Jillian Schoene…
Paid by the cliche?
It Wouldn’t Be a Proper Public Meeting…
…without Councilor Steve “Tiny Terror” Novick providing a comedy embarrassment…
Teacher Tiffany Was Pretty in Passionate Pink…
…in a rig left over from the halcyon days of 2021 that forces her to breathe her exhaust fumes.
The Only Guy With Real Passion…
…was the poor guy who has the least power to do anything about it—our capon-mayor, Keith Wilson…4
…whereupon the person with the hammer, County Chair Vega Pederson, brushed him off with standard apparatchik word-ooze…
…which promised more “conversation” and absolutely no action. Yeah, there’ll be regular PR releases from Homelessness Inc.™, and there might even be a few new product lines—more NGOs are arriving with their begging bowls as Musk sniffs out the big federal corruption centers. But reducing the corporation’s raw material?
Never happen!
By the next day, Metro—origin of the kerfluffle—was already sniping back…
…all just a part of the…
conversation
…which will be, approximately, endless.
What Secret Word Wasn’t Uttered?
Drugs
...although I did hear one sotto voce “substance abuse.” The shambling, fentanyl-stooped, feral ghost in the room was too ghastly for the nice (and well-paid) people on the dais to contemplate. Nope: the consensus was…
“Stuff ’em into housing and then forget ‘em.”
This is the Holy Mantra of Homelessness Inc.™, the cure-all that (like the Covid vax) doesn’t cure anything. But—hey!—it hides the social breakdown behind tax-supported Do-Good walls. This, despite clear evidence that many of the “homeless” ricochet between hovels and the street, and that the hard-core prefer their drug cocktails al fresco. They’re not all fallen saints, folks.
Nor did anyone ask the question: How come when we provide a cornucopia of “services” (at a cost of unknowable $-millions, now down the drain), more “homeless” seem to magically appear at the gates?
Expecting, and getting, more “services” in a cycle of cause and effect. 5
You would search in vain for anything that was actually accomplished by this circle-jerk. It was a typical parade of kick-the-can-down-the-road, pass-the-buckism, ass-covering, and lots of “we’ll get back to you on that.” A play for time, knowing that the mopes in the peanut-gallery are easily distracted and will vote to keep the clowns in the circus when the next mail ballots arrive.6
Precisely what manufactured the triumph of the feral in the first place.
No one in the horde of pols eyeing one another nervously on the dais really has a clue about the problem, let alone doing anything about it, precisely because any real solution would involve removing the incentives for the feral to pick Portland as their roost. Aside from putting Dan Field out of a job (he must thank his stars that he doesn’t have a federal post), what will become of the corpus of people administering the alphabet-soup of programs that have encased “homelessness” in the carapace of rules, regs, budgets, etc. spread between three—count ‘em—mutually dysfunctional governments?
What would happen if the city consciously pulled up the welcome mat?
Unthinkable!
They’ll crank up the rate. Inflation, don’tcha know?
Joke’s on the county types; they’re next in line for the wonders of rank choice voting.
Maybe she’ll even tell us where she lives.
For whom the bell tolls in less than a year. We repeat Pam Fitzsimmons’s question: If there are still feral on the streets, will he resign?
And how about those pilgrims given one-way bus tickets to Portland?
Some might actually be bundled and counted.
Remember when MultCo was claiming it had millions unspent in homeless money?
Or the lies told voters that the new mega-government in PDX would only cost $1 million in infrastructure?
LGBQTQIA2++++ ONLY shelter units??? When will the Portland ACLU support our mentally ill drug addicted homeless cis white males and sue for discrimination?