photo credit: normalityrelief
The City of Athens, Ohio (the government of which has yet to officially recognize the Republic of Athens) has found itself under fire for its zoning provisions that prevent the city’s existing homeless shelter from expanding to meet the increasing demands for shelter services.
It’s not a problem that’s unique to Athens. And with poverty on the rise, and charitable attempts at solutions faltering, one man hopes to make a difference.
People Pounds, Inc., which might sound like some kind of weight-loss program, is instead a highly controversial potential answer to the homelessness epidemic, according to the company’s founder and CEO, Dennis Shelton. An ever-increasing population combined with a plummeting economy means the rising demand for emergency shelter has simply outgrown the abilities and resources of non-profit agencies and municipal governments, Shelton said.
“Our facilities will be corporate America’s solution to what social services, grassroots efforts, and government intervention have all failed to fix,” he said. “This is a simple matter of supply and demand, a basic tenet of capitalism. We need 21st century solutions to 21st century problems.”
The basic idea is that individuals who are unable to find sufficient shelter for themselves will have the opportunity to either opt into a temporary kennel (and take the risk that they’ll be “adopted” within a given period of time) or, in areas where the law allows, face the risk of being snared and forcibly taken to such facilities.
The pounds will operate much like many rescue shelters for domestic animals, but with what Shelton calls an “entrepreneurial twist,” to account for the complexities involved with rescuing, placing, and, in some cases, possibly even ”putting down” people as a means of maximizing use of the facility’s space.
People Pounds, Shelton said, will survive primarily by selling ad space on the company’s web site, entering into contracts with city governments that commission “homeless round-ups,” and by collecting “adoption fees” from private citizens who pay to have residents released into new homes.
“We see the problem of increasing homelessness among people as being very similar to homelessness among dogs and cats,” he said. “Sometimes it’s through no fault of their own. Other times we might be talking about a dangerous runaway with a history of violence, or health problems, or any number of things.”
Shelton also cited similarities in public attitudes toward homeless people and homeless pets, with concerns ranging from founded or unfounded fears of potentially dangerous strangers, to sympathy for those in need of shelter.
As for the upstart company’s controversial position on euthanasia, Shelton called the procedure a “necessary evil.”
“Nobody likes it, but it’s something that needs to be done, from a pragmatic point of view,” he said. “But we certainly make every effort to keep (residents) happy and healthy while they’re here. At the end of the day, overpopulation is overpopulation, and homelessness is homelessness.
“Especially in these tough economic times, what can you do?” Shelton said. “Better to serve more of them and euthanize, than serve fewer of them and not euthanize. It’s really about compromise, sacrifice, and the greater good. In the process, we’re also planning to bring a lot of jobs to the areas where we’ll operate.”
He said his company’s hope is that, by consolidating such public displays of poverty, the kennels might serve as a valuable tool for raising awareness about homelessness in the US. It’s a phenomenon similar to what happens when people see first-hand the effects of overpopulation and homelessness among cats and dogs, Shelton said.
“It’s not about trying to equate one animal to another, or trying to say that people are just like dogs,” he said. “Not at all. It’s just a way of saying, hey, all of these are major issues in our society, and they’re only getting worse. We like to think it’s a way to move people to compassion and, ultimately, to action.”
According to Shelton, People Pounds, Inc., is “ahead of the curve” when it comes to expanding services rendered for cats and dogs in need to serving people in need.
“In reality, the only difference is biological species membership,” he said. “We all die from different things all the time anyway. It’s part of life.”
Shelton said his company faces the dual challenges of offering solutions by “thinking more with our heads, and less with our hearts,” as well as applying a kind of moral reasoning he hopes will resonate with the public.
“People Pounds, Inc. just wants to do what makes the most sense for the population as a whole, and to do so as humanely as possible,” he said. “Yes, at some point you have to kind of take your emotions out of it, and just do what makes practical sense.
“But, at the same time, it’s not fair that so many more cats and dogs currently receive needed shelter than human beings.”
“It’s not a perfect solution, but neither are unemployment, slow starvation, or freezing on the street,” he added.
Shelton admitted that his company’s “pounds” are still in the “concept phase,” and that he has yet to receive any permits for construction.
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As our newest White House millionaire awaits inauguration, the rest of us are left to make sense of a gimmick-driven economic system — perhaps rivaled only by a good old-fashioned Ponzi scheme, or possibly by the savvy of the alleged “Nigerian prince” of unsolicited email infamy.
Like Charles Ponzi’s wildly successful (and wildly short-lived) investment scheme in the 1920s, the craftily orchestrated “rescue plan” for Wall Street is a more sophisticated version of paying returns to early investors entirely out of the money paid in by newer investors. The difference between Ponzi’s scam and the modern-day rendition is that no one in Washington has even bothered to get consent from the unwitting later investors, more commonly known as ordinary American citizens.
What the unlucky “Nigerian prince” was unable to extract from us in his imaginative pleas for just a little money up front (“I’m good for it, I swear!”) in exchange for the reward of eventual riches, our own domestic royalty has wrested from us without so much as a form letter.
While the working and non-working poor scan the aisles for the cheapest loaf of bread in the hopes of fitting a can of corn into the week’s expenditures, the ruling elite can find $700 billion of our dollars in the back pocket of an old pair of pants. We’re told that, in the form of more jobs, more loans, et cetera, a monumental bail-out for the rich will ultimately help to save the economy for all of us.
The problem is, millions of Americans who already have jobs can scarcely manage the requirements for bare subsistence. And that’s not some new phenomenon, attributable only to the most recent economic crash. Though ever-worsening, it’s long been the status quo that vast portions of the citizenry are without their own homes (if they have shelter at all), can’t afford to take on loan payments, or pay exorbitant, out-of-pocket health care costs, much less contribute funds to political campaigns.
So, not surprisingly, the eerily silent masses often don’t even get honorable mention in Washington’s discussion about how best to rescue the economy from its own decision-makers’ failures.
The poorest American poor, the invisible class whose struggles are tucked away in the inner cities and rural countryside, are either relegated by our privileged politicos to the domain of financially strapped social services and charities, or accepted as a kind of quaint abstraction, a patch in the glorious quilt that is Americana.
Sure, the gap between the richest “haves” and the poorest “have-nots” is, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, greater in the U.S. than in nearly any other so-called advanced democracy in the world. And granted, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that, by the federal government’s own threshold, nearly one in four American children lives in poverty, the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world. And true enough, the projected future looks dismal at best for millions of already impoverished Americans.
But it’s probably best to reserve that “crisis” talk for describing the setbacks of people who own lots of stuff. After all, the effects on such folks are much more readily apparent — having to scrap plans for the new patio pool, or sell the summer home for below market value, or settle for that less expensive hotel on this year’s trip to Venice. The suffocating squeeze, one might argue, is simply more noticeable to those who started with a bunch of luxuries. Conversely, what has a person with nothing got to lose?
Precisely. Broke is still broke. When they thrived, we were broke. While they struggle, we are broke.
Like the money-grabbing tactics of credit card companies, and the dependence on racking up late fees from the financially desperate, our federal economy itself leans on the languishing of the many for the prosperity of the few. It’s the infinite credit card mentality in action. Living beyond one’s means for those who already have a lot is a practice that tends to spring from greed or frivolous desires (or bad math). Living beyond one’s means for those who have nothing is sometimes an alternative to dying on a cold sidewalk.
Masses of poor people are desperate enough to compete and toil for woefully insufficient wages. Ripe conditions for the ultra-rich to subjugate the services of a weary, obedient, and needy labor force. Super-capitalism at its best is a tried and true method for simultaneously ensuring poverty for millions while expanding the wealth of a few.
Historically, and even amidst our current, strangling economic squeeze, poverty itself has never met the federal government’s criteria for an emergency action plan.
When the old cliche of “The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer” remains intact, there’s no urgent scrambling from Washington to rectify things. Not only do such conditions fail to qualify as a crisis, but they’re accepted as a hallmark of the American way, a testament to “rugged individualism,” survival of the fittest (or richest) at any cost.
Given that they’ll do most anything to avoid starvation, the poor are a crucial resource for the ruling class. It’s when the poor get poorer, and the rich get less rich that we’ve got a crisis on our hands.
Our elected leaders are quick to clarify that this massive hand-out for the super-rich is not to be mistaken for anything that resembles a nasty ”nationalization” of U.S. banks. And they’re right. While the bail-out constitutes a form of partial nationalization, it maintains the integrity of a plan whose facilitators are careful to socialize the self-inflicted losses of banks at the expense of taxpayers, directing the profits back to those responsible for the fiasco.
Genuine nationalization of U.S. banks, on the other hand, could abolish the Wall Street casino game, help to reverse the economy’s downward spiral, provide some relief for those who need it the most, and possibly commit all sorts of other unsavory, even un-American, offenses.
To a cringe-inducing effect, we’ve heard candidates reaching out to the electorate with lots of slick sloganeering in attempts to woo common “Joes” everywhere — Joe Six-Pack this, Joe the Plumber that. This kind of approach might well appeal to the Joes who are interested in awarding style points by texting their votes for the next presidential idol. However, in reality, election cycle after election cycle, Joe and Josephine hard-working-but-broke have remained Joe and Josephine hard-working-but-broke.
But for now, let’s experiment (again) with taking the politicians at their word. Let’s assume that the bail-out is bound to pay dividends for all of us. Let’s rest assured that, for the rich, er, for America’s sake, there’s the real promise of a landmark rescue mission of epic proportions.
And what if, by sheer chance, the new prosperity fails to reach the poor? Well, there’s still the lottery (in states where it’s available), that elusive “hail Mary” shot at financial salvation.
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