A response to ‘The importance of voting locally’
Dear Editor:
The U.S. founders warned that they had designed a good participatory democracy if “We the People” could keep it; they understood how governments dominated by a cabal of oligarchs, monarchs, military, industry (or slave-holding) and elites relies entirely upon the complicity and cooperation within every hamlet.
For example, having a corrupt developer in the White House is representative of the corrupt development industry dominating most U.S. regions, including ours, where housing prices are kept artificially inflated by locally elected and appointed officials failures to ensure balanced housing inventories that are supposed to adequately serve all economic classes of residents, while slumlords’ multiple vacancies are subsidized through generous tax write-offs.
Every rigged housing crash and bailout is worse than the last, leaving tens of millions of families facing bankruptcy and broken homes that enrich predatory speculators, bankers, brokers, realtors, insurers and their attorneys with massive windfalls of fees and penalties from the cycle of foreclosure and resale. The poverty and despair from systemic housing fraud is reflected in Humboldt County’s own (widely self-censored) “Trends Report” documenting shocking rates of every major illness, addiction, abuse, infant mortality, homelessness and suicide.
The lucrative manufacture of scarcity, debt and chaos is no longer limited to U.S. predatory prowess abroad. It is occurring nationwide in housing, healthcare, education, energy, justice and public welfare, accurately described today as the “New American Feudalism.” According to research by a Harvard PhD at evictionlab.org, nearly half of all housing in Humboldt County, and most U.S. regions are now rentals. However, rent prices continue to rise because the law of “supply and demand” is undermined by manipulated scarcity in affordable housing.
Eureka’s fledgling progressive city council majority courageously ended millions of public dollars subsidizing the Chamber of Commerce; they passed a Human Rights Resolution and apology to native people amid a resurgence of racism, misogyny, and corruption. By re-electing Eureka’s incumbent city council candidates, including Leslie Castellano for Ward 1 and Susan Seaman (to replace Eureka’s current mayor facing a year-long investigation by the Department of Justice), Eureka can maintain a new progressive direction.
Sincerely,
George Clark
HSU Graduate, 1982
(When PUBLIC university meant “debt free”)
Eureka
