It's a sad comment on Bush economic strategy, when former business owners, internet web developers, aerospace workers and accountants have lost the mortgage on their homes and are joining the growing invisible legion of former middle class citizens that live in their SUVs or automobiles. The New York Times did a bittersweet story on the mobile homeless in today's Sunday web edition.
The alleged go-go economy created by George W. Bush and the GOP Congress is a slap in the face the former members of the middle class who hang at threads of their former middle class lifestyle by sleeping in their cars on the quiet suburban streets of the neighborhood where they once owned a home.
The New York Times writes: "Last year, William R. Alford started keeping a car cover over the station wagon where he sleeps. "I originally just had drapes, but the condensation on the inside of the windows was a dead giveaway," said Mr. Alford, who has been homeless here in the affluent Fairfax County, Virginia since May 2005."
The police are well aquainted with the growing problem of the mobile homeless because they are rousting them from their cars and arresting them for violating local ordinances against sleeping in cars.
The New York Times,"In 2001, officials in Lynnwood, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, passed an ordinance imposing penalties of 90 days in jail or fines of up to $1,000 against people caught living in their cars."
Peter Van Giesen, a code enforcement officer for the town, said that up to 20 cars a night were found with people parking near a park where there were complaints of people using the bushes as a restroom.
"Most of these people were trying to find work," Mr. Van Giesen said.
My own brother in law is a postal worker who delivers those unemployment checks to residents in an upwardly mobile affluent community here in the suburbs of St. Louis. He tells me he once he begins delivering the bi-weekly unemployment checks to residents behind the doors of these beautiful $500,000 homes, it's only a matter of weeks, at best months the family is moved out and a new family is receiving mail at that address. The previous family has fallen off the face of the earth, gone for good, without even leaving a forwarding address. Kinda scary, huh? A small epidemic of formerly affluent familes vanishing from the face of the earth.
Like several others interviewed, for today's Times article David Chaney said that when he lost his trucking business after Hurricane Katrina and was evicted from his home, he was lucky enough to have already paid for a yearlong gym membership.
The Times writes: That was probably the most important thing I had for keeping up appearances," said Chaney, who moved to Pennsylvania to be near his son, who was in college there.
Mr. Chaney said that while he looked for work, he did not reveal his situation to his son, who was going to school on a basketball scholarship, because he did not want to become a distraction.
While pride is usually the motivation for not telling friends or family, worries about the law and harassment are more often the reason people give for keeping their situation hidden. Safety is also a concern, experts say, since homeless people are frequently targets for crime and physical abuse."
It's a double life because most of these mobile homeless citizens are ashamed to admit to themselves or others that they have fallen on hard times and so they keep it a secret. Some of the mobile homeless tell themselves that it's only a temporary situation.
You spend a lot of effort just trying to pass," said Ms. Kennedy, a former Senate page who wrote a book, "Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (With Kids) in America" (Viking Adult, 2005), about her experiences being homeless for several months in 1997 after her marriage fell apart. But residing -- and hiding -- in plain sight takes guile, and that starts with deciding where to park.
There is a newer, more sinister definition social mobility in America under the rule of Bush. It's the kind of mobility that involves moving everything you can carry from your house and starting a brand new life as a resident of your car. Mail that Amazon.com package to John Q. Pubic, c/o His Car, Permanent Address Unknown. Maybe the mailman knows which car John Q. is sleeping in.
Many mobile homeless are among an emerging class of structurally unemployed but skilled and educated Americans whose unemployment benefits have expired and they are no longer counted by the Bureau of Labor as "unemployed." We have record numbers of American workers, poor, middle class and marginally affluent falling down the rabbit hole of structural unemployment and we never hear the story of what happened to them.
We all must make our small sacrifices to keep this global economy up and running. It's unpatriotic to complain that your new job as a Wal Mart greeter only pays 7 bucks an hour.
Once prosperous Americans have become statistical ghosts that haunt the propped up, outsourced, smiley faced Bush economy. Down and out ( but still mobile) nobodies on the outside, gazing in wistfully at the middle class communities they once called home.
I think its easier to have lived your entire life in abject poverty than to struggle to work your way into the middle class and then suffer the indignity and humiliation of losing everything you own, but your automobile. I know because I've been there and back in the Reagan era. And if a sheriff ever shows up at my home with eviction papers again, he'll end up evicting lifeless corpse from my home. One can only live in "interesting times" for so long.
In five short years we've evolved a liberal democracy, to a neo-conservative oligarchy and the next phase of the Bush economic development plan is neo-Feudal barbarism.
Your social rank of persona-non grata in the neo-Feudal ecomony comes to you courtesy of a ruthless and spiteful aristocratic president who lives to serve the whims of the ruling corporate oligarchy.
Bush is the wealthy errand boy sent by even wealthier class of American aristocrats to spread the hyper-capitalist gospel of pain, suffering and humiliation that is the Republican gift to America's newly ordained wretched of the earth.
It is to our own shame that we have become such a stone cold heartless nation. There are times when I'm ashamed to admit to being American, if this is the manner in which we treat our citizens.
When your nation has loses it's heart and it's sense of generosity, it's only a matter of time before the soul of the nation withers away.
Our nation's soul needs the undying faith of it's citizens to survive.
This social contract of electoral democracy depends on all of us, including our elected officials to maintain the delicate chain of good will, mutual trust and metaphysical karma that keeps the soul of America alive and kicking.
You'd better believe this is class warfare and if the middle class doesn't stand up and fight the power, we will all perish. The barbarians are inside of the gates of the city and smashing, looting and plundering the life we once had.
But for a stroke of luck, any one of us could be among the mobile homeless, the boat people of the neoconservative economy. Now that we all may end up being future boat people, shouldn't we all sink or swim together, rather than be dragged unceremoniously from our homes, one person at a time, by the lords and enforcers of the neo-Feudal economic regime of Bush?
Have we all become grovelling serfs living under a barbaric rule of a heartless neo-Feudal aristocracy? That's how to those homeless residents of Hooverville, lived during the Great Depression until Franklin Roosevelt came along and calmed their fears and restored their faith in the benevolence of democratic institutions.
In 1932 Americans tossed out all the high rolling, corrupt, show me the money, greed hounds of the GOP and took a chance at believing in democracy again.
What the hell is going on in a society where a middle class citizen drives to a respectable job one morning, and wakes up the next morning, jobless and sleeping in his car?
You may wake at 7 a.m. and go to work at the wrong job and by 5 pm that evening you may be mumbling to yourself "This is not my beautiful wife... this is not my beautiful house." As it turns out, David Byrne and the Talking Heads heard the roar of the approaching neo-Feudal leviathan, 20 years ahead of the rest of us.
As David Byrne might frame the growing neo-feudal dilemma: We are no longer participants in our own lives but the mere impoverished observers of the life we once had.
Didn't we once have an ownership economy in this American ghost town of ours? Wasn't there once schools, libraries, parks, museums, buses, and beautiful music in this ghost world where nobody smiles at you anymore?