Hammer Mill Days

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind. The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else. The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine. In a distant dive, long, long ago Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when ...

The end of the eviction moratorium this past week and the response by the Squad says a lot about the limitations of the administrative state. Mass evictions should not be a problem. The large COVID relief package passed last year included something like $40 billion in rental assistance, distributed to the states. As of now, only about $3 billion has been allocated to the people who need the help. That’s maybe 8%. What the fuck? Why is it that when we go through the ridiculously baroque process of applying federal funds to a problem like this, the money often doesn’t get spent? David Dayen talked about this a bit on the Majority Report on Monday . Put simply, after decades of neoliberal attack on the administrative state, the means of getting government aid to people are sclerotic and dysfunctional. Loudest voice in the room There’s a reason why we have such an atomized, ineffective system for helping poor and working people. Ordinary people don’t have armies o...