Jakov wrote:How are there no local activities trying to organise all these homeless people?

I just realised I wrote 'activities' when I meant 'activists'.

Warren Dew wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

willhud9 wrote:I support healthcare if run on the state level. Meaning Virginia provides healthcare to the state etc. What Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts is something I would love to see implemented in every state. But it is not the role of the federal government to manage every individuals healthcare. I lobby constantly for a healthcare system in my state.

Canadian healthcare is delivered and managed exactly in this manner, every Canadian Province operates its own healthcare system for its population.

The federals contribute about half the funding and set standards.

You clearly don't understand Romneycare. Not only is there no federal funding, it's not funded by the state either. Very few people get subsidies, which are funded from the health care industry from money that used to be spent on care for uninsured that didn't pay their bills. Most people pay full freight for their own health care.

The state also sets its own standards - or did before Obamacare started prohibiting coverage of things like abortions. What you describe is pretty much the opposite of Romneycare as passed in Massachusetts.

I didn't have the impression that Romneycare was at the center of this.

In Canada, the federals set many of the standards that apply in healthcare so as to assure a minimum standard of care will occur right across the country for all Canadians. Provinces set standards on issues that are unique to their jurisdictions.

Any objective examination of outcomes shows that Canada spends less per capita on healthcare, about $3K per year per person, than is spent in the US, which is about twice that, and gets better outcomes, including in longevity.

I'll take that over what goes on in your country any day of the week.

I've enjoyed healthcare in the Canadian system for 40 years and have yet to encounter even one government agent or person in all those years, not a single one, whether federal or provincial. Here, doctors run the system and they are the interface through which people interact with the healthcare system.

Today, Romney can't even admit to having created Romneycare.

Jakov wrote:

Jakov wrote:How are there no local activities trying to organise all these homeless people?

I just realised I wrote 'activities' when I meant 'activists'.

Oh not to worry, I think we got what you meant.

But the answer provided earlier holds up.

Strontium Dog wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:It's classic right wing extremist rhetoric that has no meaning in the real world.

No, it's humour, rooted in the fact that a significant proportion of homeless people have issues with substance abuse.

The "homeless as alcoholics" is a comedy standard, but if you've been around as long as you say you have you'd already know that.

Not the first time people here have had false over-the-top reaction to my jokes and certainly not the last. However I think most won't be fooled by that kind of phoneyism.

Well, then, perhaps that tells you something about your "humor," eh?

It's rarely funny or cool to make fun of people who are in dire straights or to use them as the butt of a "joke."

I think it's called "decorum." Look it up.

Beatsong wrote:I suppose it's always possible that you've gone around America and spoken with a large enough majority of its homeless people to make an informed judgment that their situation has been brought about by their own weakness with substance abuse, and that the phenomenon can be validly generalised in this way. OTOH, it's also possible that you're just spouting more judgmental prejudiced claptrap to blame the victim and absolve far right governments like the one you support of their responsibilities to their citizens.

Guess we'll all just have to decide for ourselves which is more likely.

Fortunately we don't have to guess because there are people out there getting the stats for us. In fact, I don't even need to search the Internet, because someone has provided some relevant stats in the very next post:

campermon wrote:The St Mungos homeless charity carry out their own research on their clients and found;

64% of clients had issues with substance use (drugs and/or alcohol)

I mean, really, fish in a barrel time.

Strontium Dog wrote:

Beatsong wrote:I suppose it's always possible that you've gone around America and spoken with a large enough majority of its homeless people to make an informed judgment that their situation has been brought about by their own weakness with substance abuse, and that the phenomenon can be validly generalised in this way. OTOH, it's also possible that you're just spouting more judgmental prejudiced claptrap to blame the victim and absolve far right governments like the one you support of their responsibilities to their citizens.

Guess we'll all just have to decide for ourselves which is more likely.

Fortunately we don't have to guess because there are people out there getting the stats for us. In fact, I don't even need to search the Internet, because someone has provided some relevant stats in the very next post:

campermon wrote:The St Mungos homeless charity carry out their own research on their clients and found;

64% of clients had issues with substance use (drugs and/or alcohol)

I mean, really, fish in a barrel time.

Bullshit.
Those figures leave 36% without addiction issues at all which makes your generalisation totally unfair. The figures do not show how many had problems prior to becoming homeless rather than developing them afterwards. Quite likely that in many cases the addiction/substance abuse was not a cause of their homelessness but a consequence of it.

Worth noting from the figures that those with mental health problems are the largest group. Does that make them fair game for cheap ridicule? Those with physical health problems are equal to the number with drug/alcohol problems . A large proportion have educational needs. Are these people worthy of generalised cheap ridicule? I think not.....

76% of clients were male
24% of clients were female
39% of clients were from BME communities
64% of clients had issues with substance use (drugs and/or alcohol)
64% had a physical health condition (medical condition, vision or hearing impaired and/or required regular medication)
70% of clients had mental health issues (diagnosed, suspected, depression and/or self harming)
54% of clients had educational needs (learning disabilities, difficulty reading, difficulty with numeracy, managing money and paying bills)
8% had been in care
48% of clients were ex-offenders or had been in prison

To put it another way; feel free to climb into your own barrel SD.

zulumoose wrote:

zulumoose wrote:I think one point that needs to be made is that efforts to provide a minimum standard of living for the poor have largely failed as a result of the social and behavioural problems that go hand in hand with large groups of poor people.

As has been noted in this thread on a number of occasions, the poor in America are not usually concentrated in "large groups of people," however, and this is a circumstance your thesis fails to address.

zulumoose wrote:
Any sufficiently large group of the poor will also contain the worst elements of society, those who are poor because of their unemployability or behaviour, ignorance, drug dependancy, violence etc.

It's not 1960 anymore, dude.

zulumoose wrote:
Hence things like housing projects attempting to raise the minimum standard of living become slums with an overconcentration of problem people and no incentive to invest in improvement, as much is wasted and doomed to degrade quickly.

It ain't 1970 either.

zulumoose wrote:
I am all for the concept of a minimum standard of healthcare provided by the state, as well as a minimum standard of education, and an attempt at a minimum standard of living, but until someone comes up with a practical way of avoiding a rapid degradation into slum conditions, homelessness is practically unavoidable as there is no means of protecting the investment. It is largely wasted money, and wasted resources.

So 1980.

zulumoose wrote:
It seems what I wrote above has been misunderstood, or read incorrectly, by people jumping to conclusions. What I said is in fact correct and, while not a politically correct thing to say, absolutely true.

Well, i'd give it two per cent true.

zulumoose wrote:
I have been accused of mischaracterising the situation today as there are so many people who are poor through no fault of their own.

Rubbish. That is nothing to do with my point. If you collect the poor people together for a low cost housing scheme it doesn't matter how many of them are faultless, you will still have an overconcentration of people who are a problem, because raising the number of faultless poor people does not in any way diminish the number of others, it just alters the ratio. If you disagree with this then tell me where the problem people went, or why the unemployable are no longer poor?

Things change, dude. Life in America's ghettos improved remarkably in the 1990's and up through 2009, crime rates plummeted, crack houses disappeared, Black pride made big gains. But today, unemployment in those communities has skyrocketed to well above 25 per cent, from 8 or 9 percent a decade ago, or even seven per cent.

America's ghettos have been hit by a tsunami in the past three years, a tsunami of unemployment, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies.

zulumoose wrote:
Also it has been implied that I am heartless by suggesting that money is wasted on keeping people alive and sheltered.

Rubbish again.

I have stated that until rapid degradation of housing projects can be avoided it is largely wasted money and wasted resources. That is absolutely true, because any amount of money thrown at these projects will be largely subject to abuse, and wasted, as virtually every long term project attests. That doesn't mean that attempts ahould not be made, just that there is a huge amount of waste, and resultant lack of interest in investment.

This is such an old song. Nobody's singing it anymore. It's dated, doesn't reflect the contemporary situation.

zulumoose wrote:
Does anyone here really think that there would be homeless people around if they were all honest hard working people down on their luck, who appreciate and look after any resources used to help them, and work to improve their assigned low cost housing and protect the investment? Many of them might be, even the majority might be, but there are enough problem elements to ruin it for everyone. That is the reality, and because of that projects fail and suck resources time after time. Low cost housing degrades into slums, avoiding repeat investment, community participation, and any chance at an upgrade. People who can recover leave as fast as they can, leaving the worst elements to remain and entrench.

Again, this is very dated thinking.

zulumoose wrote:
There must be a solution to this, which avoids the obvious extremes of a rigidly controlled prison-like environment, or a rigidly segregated environment, where resources are channeled towards the cherry picked who can be helped most.

Three of every ten black male Americans are already imprisoned. But only about 15 per cent of them actually belong there.

We don't want to add to this huge injustice.

zulumoose wrote:
Either of those, I would argue, can lead to the most hopeless elements heading back to the streets anyway. They don't want to be policed rigidly and won't be cherry picked.

Well, again, this comes off like it was written in 1978, because the conditions, the policies, the results all sound the way things were then.

They are not that way today, except perhaps in some very small and almost inconsequential ways.

Government subsidized mass housing projects have been taken out of the picture, demolished precisely because of the failures they represented 40 years ago. Nobody builds those things anymore. Whole new approaches the housing the poor have been developed and in many places put into practice. Cities now renovate and redevelop older run down residential areas to create low cost housing in a traditional neighborhood form. And they work. People take pride in having their own abode, instead of some concrete cubicle on the 27th floor of some vast smelly warren.

And 15 million of America's 40 million poor where lower and middle class folks just a year or two or three ago, with jobs and homes. Do you get what happens when a deep recession/depression strikes? People lose their jobs, they lose their homes, they are literally thrown into poverty, usually with little adieu. These folks aren't crackheads or bangers or homies scuffling in the hood, they are people who have worked all their lives.

This is why members here complain about what you've posted, it's not that it's "wrong" in an of itself, it's that it's so dated as to be irrelevant.

You need to study up, badly.

Maybe start by reading the thread.

Lucky me living in Iceland.. health-care and all

I support healthcare if run on the state level. Meaning Virginia provides healthcare to the state etc. What Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts is something I would love to see implemented in every state. But it is not the role of the federal government to manage every individuals healthcare. I lobby constantly for a healthcare system in my state.

Both Canada and Australia fund healthcare nationally and set minimum standards.

Then the provinces/states decide how best to apply the funds and administer the programs - for instance one province may fund some things like dental care or eyecare where another may not.

There are so many positive feedbacks that arise that for any civilized first world nation NOT to have UHC is just mindbendingly stupid....and as Romney showed - it can be done successfully in the US despite the entrenched opposition.

Even little Taiwan has UHC and is a model for the world with electronic records and only 2% of costs in administration compared to the appalling 25% in the US system which has the highest per capita costs in the world.

Your problem is you have predators in control of your politics and no one standing up to them.

We had one who did - Tommy Douglas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas
- and from his efforts we got UHC - no easy task against the entrenched medical system.
Canadians in a recent national contest voted him the Greatest Canadian....despite ongoing threats of privatization Canadians value our healthcare system immensely as shown by that vote.

Did anyone else spot the constant Obama-bashing?

smudge wrote:Bullshit.
Those figures leave 36% without addiction issues at all which makes your generalisation totally unfair.

But I wasn't generalising about all homeless people, was I?

smudge wrote:Worth noting from the figures that those with mental health problems are the largest group. Does that make them fair game for cheap ridicule?

Better hadn't - not on this forum anyway.

ali_ihsan21 wrote:

mattwilson wrote:Did anyone else spot the constant Obama-bashing?

I wonder that too, I want to know whether things get worse or the same when compared to Bush period. People all the time complain about Obama.

Yea, I was wondering about the Obama-bashing.. they whole show seemed weird in spots.. a'la propaganda.. ish

Seabass wrote:

MacIver wrote:

Seabass wrote:I missed that one. But I saw this one:



It defies logic, that such a technologically advanced nation, lacks the altruism, to use that technology, to advance the whole of their population.

Could we please have one, JUST ONE thread where someone tries to make a point or instigate a debate on a subject without someone else posting what is essentially "I'm not listening to you because the situation in your country is just a bad, nah-nah!".

Seabass, are you honestly comparing the homeless situation in the USA to the UK? Are you honestly trying to suggest that their safety net and poverty situations are comparable? Unless you want to advocate that only people living in a nation have a right to critique it your posts add nothing to this thread.

Oh, I don't mind discussion and critique. I'm all for it. It's the vilification and smear that I have a problem with.

Perhaps James1v should take a look in the "fookin'" mirror before he calls us medieval and barbaric. As if we don't have safety nets. We have lots of safety nets. But as it turns out, when you are in the second biggest recession in your country's history, things tend to go a little pear shaped, despite your safety nets.

Britain has safety nets too. Better safety nets than we have. And still you have poverty and homelessness. Why? Is it because you are all barbaric, medieval, greedy, shitty, callous, heartless, ultra-capitalist swine? No, of course not. Turns out, there is no such thing as a perfect fuckin' safety net.

I swear, you people, your kind, have this insane notion that the U.S. is this bastion of laissez-faire, free market capitalism that never, ever, ever sees any government intervention. It's fuckin' silly.

My "fooking" large...

When i look in the mirror, i see a guy who, if in government, would make these human beings a "fooking" priority, when it comes to relief. I sleep well.

When a presidential candidate, a multi millionaire, tells his prospective voters, he has payed 17% tax on the millions he has earned in the last year, you know theirs something rotten with your government! I cannot imagine any candidate for President or Prime minister, in Europe doing that. Not when things are so desperate, for so many of their population. They simply would know, they would never be elected.

This thread isnt about "bashing Americans". Its (and the documentary) about bashing uncaring politicians. In this case, American politicians. Who are by any criteria, greedy hypocrites, wearing blinkers, who want their constituents to wear those same blinkers.

Have you even watched the documentary? Or, are you jumping to conclusions, that dont exist?