It’s a dark and snowy morning in Missoula, Montana. A billow of smoke rises up from beneath a pedestrian bridge where several hooded figures huddle around a morning campfire near the river’s shore. A path through the foliage leads away from the campfire toward a shoreline shantytown of tents and lean-tos. Further down the trail a man solemnly lugs a large section of tree recently chopped down by the Parks department that he plans to use for firewood. The morning traffic of the city hums anonymously overhead along the bridges that span the Clark Fork River.
A new society has formed on the banks of the Clark Fork River within the Missoula Valley. From Deer Creek to Deep Creek, an anonymous community of laborers, vagrants, addicts, gypsies and criminals has embedded itself into the riverbanks and adjacent parks. In the spring, this dissociated network tends to cluster into a central village near the California Street Bridge where the real estate is wide and inviting, at least until the river rises with the April runoff.
This was the location of an incident on 02 January 2024 involving several propane tanks that ignited and exploded. The discharge launched flaming shrapnel past several firefighters.
Near Yoke‘s grocery store on West Broadway, the steep banks leading down to the Clark Fork River are smothered by multicolored detritus blobs. Gnome homes stand sculpted into the turf alongside tree houses, meth-dens and shanty settlements built onto the vertical banks above the beach. An abandoned hammock swings in the morning breeze as the tarp suspended above it rattles between the trees. The band of contiguous settlements lines both sides of the river for as far as the eye can see. This is Missoula’s New Hellgate Village, a living topography that shifts with the tides and continues to grow.
When Missoula was first getting started as a trading-post town in the mid-1800s it was originally called “Hellgate Village” and it was a very violent place where duels and killings were a regular occurrence.
Today, paintball shootings and tent stabbings characterize the more charming incidents that transpire in New Hellgate Village.The now infamous Authorized Camping Site (ACS) was the home of so many instances of meth dealing, human trafficking and violent attacks that it had to be shut down in November of 2022 after only ten months in operation. A body was also purportedly found hanging from a tree near the Reserve Street Bridge.
As a result, Missoula’s riverfront has transformed into a veritable dumping ground for what’s left of the American dream. Endless strings of discarded refuse coagulate into sloppy amalgamations of plastic bags, broken glass, rotting fabric, human feces, aluminum cans, hypodermic needles, rubber gloves, disintegrating bed mattresses, bicycle tires, sex toys and cigarette butts.
Many locals are understandably heartbroken by the condition of the city’s riverfront. Citizens with jobs don’t have the time or the energy to clean up after the shantytown catastrophe unfolding all around them, or address the structural reasons for its existence. Taxpayers expect their government to do something about the problem but popular will gets stifled by the red tape of bureaucracy. Eventually some citizens inevitably grow tired of the lack of response and simply take matters into their own hands.
ARRESTED FOR UNAUTHORIZED BEAUTIFICATION
The trouble began when an apparently “mysterious private group or solitary citizen” removed “an entire dump-truck load of garbage” from Missoula’s West Broadway island and left it on the sidewalk. According to the Missoulian, the trash included dozens of syringes and was castigated as unauthorized:
“We don’t really know who’s doing the cleanup, that’s still being investigated,” said Charmell Owens, the city’s code compliance program manager. “We were just surprised early (Monday) morning by six larges piles of garbage and trash that had been collected and was placed adjacent to the sidewalk on Broadway. When that occurs, we have to then pull crews from streets to do a cleanup.”
In the days that followed, NBC Montana noted trash was continuing to find its way up the riverbank and sought the identity of the “Clark Fork Custodian”:
Ryan Tollefson and his dog, Avaya, often stroll along the Clark Fork River, and recently Tollefson says he’s noticed things piling up, like needles, human waste and garbage he never expected there. Tollefson grew up in Missoula, and he’s never seen it like this before, so he did what he thought was right. In late February, he took it upon himself to start cleaning the bank of the river — spending his time off from work to tidy up the place he loves.
Ryan Tollefson and his dog Avaya
“There has to be a solution, man,” Tollefson said. “I just don’t think that giving them syringes and clothing and food and watching it all end up in the river is the solution.”
When he started cleaning, he placed the trash where everyone could see it — on the sidewalk — reminding others that just because it’s out of sight doesn’t mean it should be out of mind. That’s when he got in a little trouble. In early March, Tollefson received a citation from the city for blocking the sidewalks. He said police showed up and questioned his motives.
“I said, ‘Are you going to take me to jail for picking up garbage?’” Tollefson said. But the citation didn’t deter him. Now he’s just strategic about where he’s placing the debris.
Tollefson was initially cited by law enforcement for blocking the sidewalk on 05 March 2024.
While his efforts were appreciated by local taxpayers, they managed to attract fury from several of the Village’s more aggressive residents. On 14 March 2024, Ryan was assaulted with a chain and lock that were whipped down on top of his head by an unstable individual. He wasn’t concussed, unconscious, or bleeding, but law enforcers were reticent to press charges against his attacker.
“The first incident, when I got hit with the lock with the chain, they came and they didn’t even arrest that guy. After he hit me with the chain, he pulled out a big knife –like a Crocodile Dundee knife– that was at least 12” long. But they just said it was my word against his and there were no witnesses or evidence so they let him go scot-free. I asked the officer to feel the back of my head because there was a big lump back there. She just said, ‘“’That could just be your skull.’”
On 20 March 2024 Ryan returned to his beachhead and continued his work, and was again physically assaulted, this time by a different homeless individual than the week prior, and with a different weapon. As reported by Travis Mateer:
“A man allegedly pushed Ryan three times, resulting in Ryan calling 911, but according to Ryan nothing was done to address the issue, so he continued working to remove trash from near the river bank. The man who pushed Ryan got increasingly agitated, then chucked two hockey sticks at him, so Ryan broke the hockey sticks in half and added them to the trash pile, which is when the man began “wailing” on Ryan. When the police responded to a passerby who called 911, they allegedly accused RYAN of stealing the man’s personal belongings.”
Authorities charged Ryan with disorderly conduct, the one-size-fits-all excuse to arrest anyone at any time for any reason. According to NBC Montana:
“Ryan Tollefson said police arrested him after he defended himself when a homeless person attacked him. The man accused Tollefson of taking away his possessions.”
Ryan elaborates:
“This incident happened a week and a half later [than the chain lock incident] at the same spot. A different guy was pushing me around at first so I called the police because he was pushing me. He got upset and they warned him about putting his hands on people. And right after they left, that’s when he threw a hockey stick at me. I broke the hockey stick and that antagonized him. So he started punching me in the face. And then a passer-by called 911 and the police came back. They arrested him for assault and they arrested me for disorderly conduct. But they didn’t have to arrest anyone.”
Three weeks after Tollefson’s arrest, internationally-recognized “firebrand” journalist Travis Mateer conducted his annual cleanup with a crew of volunteers on 08 April 2024. Within a week of this effort, Mateer also was arrested and detained in the Missoula County Detention Center.
In effect, it appears these individuals were cited and arrested for picking up garbage.
Meanwhile the individuals doing the littering are shielded from prosecution because they’re protected by the law. So-called “involuntary homeless” individuals can litter the river, cause a scene and assault citizens with impunity. But if anyone tries to do anything about the trolls living under the bridge, the authorities throw them in the clink.
As someone who oversaw homeless outreach for the Poverello Center from 2008-2016, Travis Mateer sees Ryan’s arrest as symptomatic of a notable deterioration in substantive outreach by relevant authorities:
“If I was still coordinating the Homeless Outreach Program–a program I grew from its infancy in 2010 to a well-respected part of the service delivery system when I left in 2016–this incident with Ryan Tollefson would NEVER have happened.”
Speaking of things that would never have happened, that gaping hole in the burrows beneath Broadway that MDT repaired was only discovered because Tollefson excavated the mountain of trash piled in front of it.
Ryan began his work across the street from the Yoke’s grocery on Broadway. “That’s where I was concentrating my clean up efforts because that’s where it’s the worst,” he said. In the process of excavating this area, he discovered the hidey-hole.
“I found that. [Authorities] didn’t even know that was there until I started cleaning up. … all I was doing was putting the garbage on the sidewalk. And I took such a huge amount of trash out of the river when they came to clean it up, they saw that the hole was there. All the garbage was all around that and was covering it up before I removed it.”
The burrows below Broadway were so badly damaged by the illegal settlements that Montana taxpayers paid upwards of $20,000 for the repair:
“When NBC Montana started reporting on trash cleanups in the West Broadway Street area, we learned about holes dug into the bank of the Clark Fork River. After removing some of the retaining wall, individuals dug underneath the sidewalk, creating nooks for belongings.”
Whether anyone will be charged for the damage remains to be seen. Ryan reflected on whether the people on the beach committing offenses are breaking the law or not.
“No, they’re not. They’re protected somehow. And these guys are just running the streets, stealing, building houses on the river, and throwing needles everywhere. These people aren’t even getting a misdemeanor. And I understand that the court system is flooded and the prison is flooded. I don’t see any point in locking anybody who is addicted to substances up because there is a better way around addiction.
“I said [to police], ‘Why aren’t you guys doing anything about the needles on the ground?’ I mean, if you were investigating a crime that I had supposedly committed and there were syringes all around my feet, would you or would you not assume those were my syringes? And wouldn’t you want to search my person to see if I have drugs on me? You have probable cause to search any one of these people that have syringes within their reach and you don’t do it. You have all the time to encourage them to go to the shelters and places where they can get help, and you’re not doing that either. You guys are sitting in your cars, driving around, doing nothing’.
“When I called the police about the lock and chain incident it took them 25 minutes to respond to the scene, and they drove by three times without stopping. And I was so sick of them driving by without stopping I finally flagged down a Sheriff who was driving by. And then a city police officer called me five minutes later and was like, ‘Where are you at?’
“Instead of helping the issue, instead of helping to solve the problem, they’re going to ticket me for cleaning?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you’re breaking the law’.”
This isn’t the first time that a citizen has ignored institutional limitations and taken the responsibility for cleaning up the riverfront onto their own shoulders. Last year a group of volunteers directed by Travis Mateer launched the 2023 Earth Day Meth-Den clean-up and successfully removed nearly 3 metric tons of garbage from a segment of riverfront by the Missoula College at great personal cost to its organizer. Mateer spent $1,200 of his own money to ultimately be ignored by the City and local media. A fellow journalist from the Missoula Current purportedly covered the event only to have the story axed by her boss, Martin “Gomer” Kidston. Mateer has a long history of assisting such clean ups.
Tavis Mateer gives the thumbs-up following the successful liquidation of the Meth-Den in 2023. Above: before and after pictures of said beachfront Meth-Den.
The 2023 Meth-Den clean-up yielded literally thousands of glass test tubes along the riverbank. It seems ironic that summertime river floaters are constantly reminded to make sure they never ever bring glass onto the water lest they be cited by law enforcement for potentially littering the shorelines with dangerous shards of fractured glass.
If you have an address and a life and things to lose, the authorities can threaten you with fines and court as a means of controlling your behavior. But the vagrants living on the riverbank don’t have anything left to lose so fines and court won’t do much to change the situation.
So what will? And who’s responsible?
A JURISDICTIONAL JIGSAW PUZZLE
Many local Missoulians have become outraged in recent years at the accelerated deterioration of their community. Permanent residents who pay taxes to the City and County and State are rightfully beginning to wonder why no organization or agency of government can coherently name who is responsible for maintaining cleanliness and order along the riverbank. As it turns out, determining who bears responsibility depends on which part of the riverbank we’re talking about.
All land below the low water mark along the riverbank seems to be managed exclusively by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) as corroborated by this 2020 DNRC announcement:
“Based on historical evidence the Bitterroot River is commercially navigable from the mouth of Jenning’s Camp Creek on the east fork (SW1/4, Sec.27, T2N, R18W) to its confluence with the Clark Fork River. Therefore, the state claims ownership of the riverbed below the low water mark between these two points. … DNRC has no jurisdiction above the low water mark.”
Meanwhile, the land above the low water mark along the riverbank is managed by a plurality of agencies and offices including (but not limited to) the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), US Army Corps of Engineers, Conservation District, Floodplain Administrator, and others. Depending on which segment of Missoula’s riverfront jigsaw-puzzle we’re talking about, the jurisdictional finger-pointing can also regard lands owned by the US Forest Service, the University of Montana, as well as Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP). For example:
“The two major camps – off the Kim Williams Trail and under the Reserve Street Bridge – are on U.S. Forest Service and Montana Department of Transportation ground, respectively.”
Meanwhile, the West Broadway Island is operated exclusively by Missoula Parks And Recreation, who’ve closed it for reasons of “vegetation management.” It certainly is true that vegetation has a hard time competing with propane explosions.
Riverfront jurisdictions carve their way through a gauntlet of boundaries and the resulting confusion allows for selective enforcement of the law. Some of these agencies belong to the City of Missoula, some represent Missoula County, and still others are managed by the State of Montana. That’s a lot to juggle, and we haven’t even covered the relevant Federal jurisdiction that’s thrown a wrench into this already byzantine structure.
MDT was placed between a rock and a hard place in 2020 when they faced steep fines from the Missoula City-County Health Department for the human waste ending up in the river as a result of unchecked illegal camping settlements under the Reserve Street Bridge. There were also serious concerns of rampant fires that threatened to close said bridge and necessitate detouring Highway 93 through the heart of Missoula.
Under the constraints of a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision known as Martin v Boise, MDT couldn’t legally move the encampments without an answer to the question of “Where do they go?” So the now infamous Authorized Camping Site experiment was created as a temporary landing platform in January 2022. MDT spent more than $163,000 on a chain-link perimeter fence to deter future settlements. This fence was soon thereafter cut and penetrated by persistent individuals. So in mid-April of 2022, MDT sought a court order to begin a formal eviction process of the remaining encampments under the bridge.
“At its peak, approximately one hundred and forty individuals resided on the Property in tents and temporary structures built with scavenged materials.”
Following a summer where literally dozens of fires ran ablaze below the Reserve Street Bridge, the area was cleared of illegal camps in 2022 and remains mostly clear to this day. MDT Maintenance Chief Steve Felix was happy to report that the site formerly home to more than 100 “urban campers” remains largely empty following the eviction.
Felix’s name comes up whenever repairs are necessary due to illegal settlements that threaten to destroy the highway infrastructure flowing through Missoula, as was the case with the 2022 Reserve Street Camps eviction:
“The fires, propane tanks, and other heaters present in the encampment also posed a risk of significantly damaging the integrity of the Reserve Street Bridge, a vital aspect of Missoula’s public infrastructure. The fires have already caused damage to the Reserve Street Bridge in the form of concrete delamination. … “The only way to abate the ongoing health and safety hazards and threatened damage to public infrastructure is to remove Defendants and their personal belongings from the Property.”
EARTH DAY SCHMEARTH DAY
Government is not capable of solving our problems, as more people are beginning to realize. The riverfront got cleaned up in spite of the City government’s attempts to keep it contaminated. As Mateer attests:
“I can coordinate a safer, cheaper, more efficient cleanup than ANY individual or entity in this town, and if you doubt me, just scroll through the 20+ links featured in yesterday’s post if you want proof about how kick-ass I am.”
Regardless of what any individual or organization might claim about the complexity of managing this ongoing zombie apocalypse transpiring in our streets, it’s obvious to everyone that the problem is growing worse, and government’s solutions are haphazard at best. Activists are exhausted and community clean-up efforts become more difficult to organize when everyone is struggling financially.
Institutions can never solve our problems. They are an impediment to change. The moment they are formed their existence hinges on fooling us into believing we could never live without them.
You don’t need your city officials and you don’t need your government. Your government needs you. No matter how the corporate forces might try to twist “the consent of the governed” into some kind of religious obligation to the state, the power ultimately lies in the hands of We The People no matter how many of us have fallen asleep at the wheel. Public servants exist at the pleasure of the electorate. They’re not our overlords and we’re not their subjects. They’re employees of the public trust.
The inhabitants of New Hellgate Village aren’t bad people. Most of them are a bit rough because they have to be to survive in difficult circumstances. The city’s riverfront was not meant to house tent dwellings, and our society did not have to choose the cruelty of publicly ignoring such profound human suffering on such a massive scale. The City of “Missoula has spent roughly $138,000 on ‘urban camping’ cleanups” in the past year with no end in sight. Will Mayor Davis’ Urban Camping Working Group task force yield competent solutions or prove to be one more instance of institutional cruelty? If Engen’s 10-Year-Plan-To-End-Homelessness is any indication, the answer won’t feel encouraging.
It’s no secret that our miserable status quo actually benefits some people and organizations. Hence the business that is the Homeless-Industrial-Complex and its cousin the NonProfit-Industrial Complex. The people and organizations who profit from the lethal misery in our streets tend to expand the powers of government to benefit authoritarian cronies. These parasites don’t want to problem to be solved because it would end the disaster-capitalism gravy-train.
Tucker Carlson elaborated this point last week on the Joe Rogan Podcast:
“There’s an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. The drug treatment centers that don’t work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless migrant workers, American-born aid agencies, … the arms manufactures that help kill people in foreign countries; people are making money off of this.”
Those who profit from industries related to homelessness are keenly aware of how the optics of what they do could work against them. As a result, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into maintaining public ignorance.
County Commissioner Emails recovered during a FOIA request revealed a conspiracy of silence in 2021. According to Mackenzie Smith, the Emails are evidence that Missoula County officials have deliberately kept constituents in the dark regarding “collaborations” with the private nonprofits who consistently profit from the homelessness crisis:
Emails released in a Freedom of Information Act request appear to show Missoula County commissioners using private partnerships to advance their projects in an effort to intentionally keep plans out of public view.
“We asked United Way to start convening to try to tackle this issue outside the public/media eye,” wrote Commissioners’ Office Chief Administrative Officer Chris Lounsbury to the three Missoula County commissioners in a March 27 email.
“We definitely want to structure this in a way to avoid media parachuting in and derailing productive staff conversations,” replied District 2 Commissioner David Strohmaier.
“The commissioners’ emails regarding the TSOS are riddled with this type of language and blatant desire to conceal their actions from the public and media. And with the aid of United Way of Missoula County, it appears they are able to do it.“
Nonprofits like United Way alongside private sector partners like Blue Line Development (owners of the real estate beneath the Transitional Safe Outdoor Space) work with governments to profit from the disaster while their government counterparts flasely claim their hands are tied. None of the companies or individuals want the causes and conditions of the disaster to be addressed because that would end their gravy train. It would seem community outreach has become co-opted by corporate forces.
HOMELESSNESS IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE, DUDE!
While homeless Americans freeze in the makeshift dwellings of illegal “urban camps,” 15.1 million empty houses remain unoccupied at the behest of their owners, primarily BlackRock. If the answer to homelessness is “housing” – as United Way Executive Director Susan Hay Patrick contends – then why can’t “the richest country in the world” free up some of the 15.1 million empty homes that Wall Street continues sitting on?
There’s no doubt that Missoula’s homeless catastrophe pales in comparison to that of San Fransisco, Portland or Seattle. It is, however, representative of the same institutional indifference toward human suffering that the 9th Circuit has apparently mandated for Western States. The common excuse that “it’s not that bad here” seems quite obtuse when considering that San Fransisco didn’t burn in a day. There were incremental steps that led formerly great cities down this skid-row abyss, such as their deliberate indifference toward theft, vandalism, arson, assault and murder.
As the former homeless outreach coordinator for Montana’s largest homeless shelter, Travis Mateer knows the difference better than most between the legit local homeless population and the harmful criminal elements taking advantage of services meant for said locals:
“I’m including the deteriorating situation in San Francisco in today’s report because of my concern that fear will lead our own community to degrade our ability to make distinctions between houseless people who are dangerous and need to be held accountable, and houseless people who are NOT dangerous, and face just as much risk, if not more, from the dangerous people riding the carousel between the jail, the hospital, and the streets.”
While it’s true that society cannot ethically outlaw homelessness or addiction or mental illness, many of the most violent incidents that occur in Missoula (and require taxpayer-funded services) are perpetrated by drifters, not locals. Peaceful people who’ve fallen on tough times cannot depend on our shelters because criminal gangs have taken them over:
“[R]esidents of this camp don’t feel safe staying at the Poverello Center. Incidents of sexual assault and violence INSIDE THE [Poverello Center] is confirmation of those claims that some people feel safer living outside than they do in an overcrowded shelter where active drug and alcohol use has led to some very bad outcomes.”
It has also become an observable reality that local homeless individuals differ significantly from their transplant counterparts. In 2014 the Missoulian reported that transient Gilbert “Jack” Berry “was brutally beaten, tortured and killed by several non-local transients”:
“[Missoula Police Officer Andy] Roy, who is the city’s main bicycle police officer, primarily deals with the homeless and transient population. He said there’s a big difference between the local transient population and the newcomers. The locals heed his warnings and abide by city ordinances, for the most part. But when he approaches the new transients, Roy said he’s consistently met with a “lousy” attitude.”
We shouldn’t welcome everyone because some people are criminals and bending over backwards to provide them services will result in increased exploitation of said services. If too many people overwhelm the life boat, it sinks. As Mateer explained in 2020:
“The majority of humans across the socio-economic spectrum are not bad, violent people. But some are, and Missoula residents shouldn’t be shamed for worrying about that fact. Do I need to remind readers that a sweet, old man by the name of Lee Nelson had his skull bashed in last month because he and the monster who senselessly murdered him were both staying at the Poverello Center? … So yes, I understand the concern about “who our new neighbors are”, but I also understand how the illuminated braintrust operates, and they will hide behind their homeless-people-guilt-shields all day long if critics wade into this area of criticism without the constructive focus on policy.”
Nobody can assert for sure where any of these people are from, and it only takes one psychopath to keep a whole town busy. Train hoppers and seasonal vagrants aren’t from here, but they’ll gladly exploit any services offered by enablers practicing “fool’s compassion”.
Enforcing the law with regards to murder, assault, battery, vandalism, and theft cannot be conflated with “outlawing homelessness”. Regardless of who owns the land beneath New Hellgate Village, criminal activity within the City Limits is the City’s prerogative, and therefore ultimately the Mayor’s responsibility. The highest overlap of jurisdictions occur within the City Limits. In the past Missoula County Commissioners have proclaimed a state of emergency regarding hazardous waste entering the Clark Fork River. But if criminal activity occurs on the riverfront and someone calls the DNRC or MDT, they will tell the caller to dial 911 and report it to City law enforcement.
Andrea Davis can choose to do something about the crime in the streets or she can continue to serve the interests of global elites. Given that she received her training in the “proper” management of her community at Harvard at the start of her term alongside 26 other freshmen Mayors from around the country, she may likely favor the latter.
The Clark Fork Coalition holds an annual Earth Day cleanup that is undoubtedly commendable. But every year the camps consistently reappear the very next day. The task couldn’t be more Sisyphean and locals have taken notice.
In 2021 volunteer efforts successfully removed more than 15 tons of trash from the Missoula riverfront. In 2022 volunteers collected more than 67 tons of trash. Locals are worried the problem is growing worse and believe that people of means and ability can and should do something about it.
On 26 April 2023, duly-unelected interim-mayor Jordan Hess told Missoulians to donate to charity if they want to see these problems solved, because the City apparently lacks the funds to do its job:
“First of all, uh, we, we suffer from a shortage of resources to address these issues. Uh, members of the public can make a meaningful difference by donating to organizations that work in this space, um, such as the Poverello Center or other organizations that help such as Hope Rescue Mission.”
Did you get that, Missoula? As the City of Missoula wastes money on mountains and hotels, Jordan Hess thinks overburdened taxpayers should donate even more money they don’t have to solve these problems.
But the favorite excuse of Missoula “leaders” whenever the abomination of our public spaces are brought to their attention revolves around the now infamous 9th Circuit ruling on Martin v Boise. This is how Hess framed the limitations imposed by the Martin ruling:
“Municipalities cannot criminalize homelessness, uh, nor can we ticket nor arrest or remove people who are camping in public places because there are no shelter beds, um, because there are no shelter beds for them. So since we don’t have, uh, shelter beds we cannot remove, uh, someone from an encampment, um, in a public space.”
He goes on to deputize the public and further eschew any institutional responsibility:
“We’re asking the public to visit the City website and to follow the information on the homepage, uh, to learn how to report, uh, situations that involve threats to help their safety. People need to understand that if we investigate and we don’t find threats, we cannot ask the campers to leave. Uh, nor will we. …
“We receive dozens of complaints each day and we lack the finances and the staff to get to every situation. Years of cuts at the State level and at the Federal level, uh, but especially at the State level, to mental health services and a lack of support at the Federal level, have put us and other communities in a really untenable position where we’re dealing with these issues as best we can.
Mateer jumps to the observable punchline:
“Ok, so is there anything our hamstrung leaders CAN do? Yes, they can blame the state, which they always do. And they can beg the public to give more money to enablers, like my former employer, the Poverello Center. …
“Are we, as a community, going to be held hostage by these petulant tax addicts who can’t achieve their transformative utopia without squeezing every spare penny from taxpayers while complaining all the way to the bank that it’s never enough when evidence of their failure becomes too obvious for the narrative controllers to hide?”
Travis Mateer operates his bullhorn during a post clean-up poetry reading.
Problems that remain perpetually unsolved tend to be profitable for lazy bureaucrats with an inflated feeling of importance. So, we’re told over and over that there either just isn’t enough money to do what needs to be done or sent on a jurisdictional wild-goose chase.
The onus here is not on citizens. Wall Street has hoarded all of the real estate, the economy is in the dumps, people are desperate, our politics are corrupt and our infrastructure is crumbling. This isn’t about solving the problems exacerbated by those who profit from them. Standards of living have fallen nationwide and supposedly “compassionate” communities have overwhelmingly chosen to ignore the ongoing humanitarian disaster. This is simply about survival.
Missoulians already pay taxes to a City government hell-bent on wasting them. The City of Missoula takes in hundreds of millions of dollars, always needs a little more, and can never complete basic objectives—like fixing roads—with what it has. So the Fire Department has to ask the citizens if they’d like to pay more taxes through a special levy that can’t be robbed by City bureaucrats who’ve depleted the tax base from the General Fund toward projects that gentrify the community, driving up housing costs, driving out locals, and starving municipal services.
Due to the fact that government officials seem reticent to accept uniform responsibility for the abortion that our rivers and streams have become, the work of cleaning them up has fallen on community activists and other people who are tired of watching their community rot before their eyes.
Travis and Ryan have both illustrated their unconditional and uncompromising love for the Missoula Valley. If more locals participated in the management of their communities perhaps we wouldn’t have to outsource said management to disconnected bureaucrats.
In the face of all the adversity he’s experienced, Ryan remains committed to restoring Missoula’s riverfront:
“I’m just trying to be a better person and give back to the city, because I love Missoula so much. It’s my home town. I was born here 43 years ago and I love this place so much. And I just can’t stand to see what it’s becoming.”
“It seems like the whole Pacific Northwest is becoming like this, except for Idaho. I don’t know what Idaho does to keep their state so clean. But everywhere else there’s homeless people and fentanyl and meth. It’s crazy.”
The price we all pay when we ignore our truth tellers while often too great to bear, is difficult to measure until it’s too late to matter. But as with many truths, denial is the path of least resistance many of us choose to walk, especially if we internalize the myth of separation that whispers sweet apathetic nothings of complacency in our ears. And what could be easier to deny than a problem we rarely if ever see? Its too easy not to care about our prison population because we have no proximity to them. Unless we ourselves are in prison, we will never be directly confronted with the 2.4 million Americans serving sentences in penitentiaries. America leads the world in few categories, but per capital incarcerated citizens is one of them. There are many reasons for our obsessive incarceration, but the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to see the underlying causes nearly five decades ago.
Martin warned us of a triple threat so insidious that it jeopardizes the very fabric of our precious republic. That triple threat was the three-legged monster of racism, poverty and militarism. This triple threat results today in the imprisonment of more black men than were enslaved in 1850 – and it isn’t merely a relative increase with respect to population growth, because the population of our prison population has increased disproportionately to the population of the country. Since 1970, America’s overall population has increased by 55.48%, but America’s prison population has increased by 700% over the same period of time according to the ACLU. America imprisons more people than Communist China!
Most of us are unaware that the rapid Privatization of prisons by companies like the GEO Group or Corrections Corporation of America results in that taxpayers only pay for the cells that don’t have prisoners in them. That’s right – if there are empty beds, taxpayers pay the price, thus turning empty cells into a financial disincentive. But most shockingly, we are grossly unaware of the degree of involuntary servitude our 2.4 million prisoners are subjected to, and even less aware of which corporations benefit from prison slave labor vicariously through subcontractors.
“Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.
“But corporate profit is not limited to building and administering prisons. Whole industries now rely almost exclusively on prison labor. Federal prisoners, who are among the highest paid in the U.S. system, making as much as $1.25 an hour, produce the military’s helmets, uniforms, pants, shirts, ammunition belts, ID tags and tents. Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and Target.”
But the scope this exploitation isn’t merely limited to individuals serving sentences in the Prison-Industrial-Complex. According to Sadhbh Walshe there are twice as many individuals currently serving correctional supervision such as parole and probation, paying for urinalysis testing and probation fees. And the 5 million Americans on state supervision are among a sector of the population that is growing even faster than the population of our citizens incarcerated within ‘correctional’ institutions.
Of course there is a tendency in this country to simplify these issues. So often we’ve heard, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” as though the corruption of our public institutions and the militarization of our police forces will go unnoticed to you if you simply follow the rules. But there are many punishable offenses which are not, strictly speaking, crimes.
New laws are being passed all the time to funnel larger numbers of American citizens into these corporate work camps. We’re legislating our way into hell, and we’re doing it one law at a time. America’s fetishism for new statutory regulations has created such an atmosphere of totalitarianism, that even the elites are finding it difficult to ignore. Writing in Politico Magazine, Charles Koch (of all people) recognizes this problem:
“Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. Over time, this has translated into more than 4,500 federal criminal laws spread across 27,000 pages of the United States federal code. (This number does not include the thousands of criminal penalties in federal regulations.) As a result, the United States is the world’s largest jailer.”
it isn’t difficult to see how we got here. Many politicians depend on the perception of being “tough on crime” to get elected, which all-too-often translates to vapid attempts to legislate morality, and correct societal ills by means of criminalization rather than compassionate reason. Heroin addiction is not a crime -it’s an illness, and a public health problem. Homelessness is not a crime – it’s a symptom of poverty amid an economic atmosphere so desperate that 47 million Americans depend on food stamps, 40 million Americans are below the poverty line, and 600,000 homeless Americans sleep out of doors on any given night. Nevertheless, it is in the establishment’s interest to perpetuate “tough on crime” slogans by means of exaggerating crime rates in the media. Crime rates in America are as low as they’ve ever been, but the reporting of crime in the mainstream media is more fanatical than ever before. When combined with cop dramas like CSI, Criminal Minds, and Law & Order that depict pathetically cartoonish portrayals of the world outside, the media’s overreaction to the reporting of crime perverts the collective psyche of America to the point that fascism seems normal.
“People are bombarded with information about crime from the media, which makes them believe the world is a much more dangerous place than it really is. This creates a climate of fear that can negatively affect the way we live, the way we go to work, the times we shop and the precautions we take for our families and children.”
To cite just one statistical gem collected by Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center, we’re provided a small glimpse into the extent of our media’s increasingly egregious fear mongering:
“Approximately half of crime news in New Orleans focused on homicide in 1981, while only 0.4% of the total crimes committed were actually homicides (Sheley & Ashkins, 1981).”
So if violent crime is so low, then why are more people than ever entering the prison population in America?
In terms of what is considered legal and what is illegal in this country, we would be wise to heed the words of Martin Luther King when he reminded us that, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ and it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” If that seems like an extreme example, I invite you examine a small sample of some of Ameica’s more ridiculous statutes, which have created a climate where it is illegal to collect rainwater in Colorado, Utah and Washington, it is illegal to consume raw milk in 17 states, and federally it is not only still illegal to possess the ancient medicine we know of as Cannabis despite overwhelming public outcry, but 15 million Americans have been arrested for Cannabis possession since 1970. This is just a tip of the iceberg when we consider all of the additional fines and citations accumulated by millions of Americans every day for inconsequential and often petty, technical offenses, such as traveling 5 miles over the speed limit or failing to come to a “complete stop” at a signal. And now the paranoid atmosphere of the Terror War further ensures that the divide between the crowbar hotel and the so-called free world is often only one honest mistake away.
But the height of America’s legal absurdity comes into view vis-a-vis the hypocrisy of Nixon’s War on Drugs, which rages on to this very day.
THE FOUR-FOLD RACKET
While the War On Drugs is frequently referred to as a “failure,” this appraisal assumes that the goal of the drug war is to make America a drug-free zone. The truth is that the Drug War is an elaborate profit scheme whereby the established regime can quadruple-dip their profit margin. The initial profit comes into view with state-sanctioned cultivation and importation for large shipments of highly profitable substances, such as cocaine and heroine. It wasn’t just savvy businessmen like Frank Lucas who figured out how to use connections within the US military to smuggle heroin into America inside the coffins of dead servicemen. The government themselves, and the corporations who buy politicians through campaign contributions, have been caught with their pants down on numerous occasions conducting state-sponsored drug trafficking. This kind of state run gangsterism might have remained merely a rumor were it not for the brave journalism of Gary Webb. Marc Levin wrote in October 2014:
“Webb’s reporting uncovered the story of how tons of cocaine were shipped into San Francisco by supporters of the CIA-backed Contras and then distributed down to LA to a Nicaraguan named Danilo Blandon, who sold it to a street dealer from South Central, Freeway Rick Ross.”
The next profit margin is enjoyed almost exclusively by police unions and other law enforcement agencies who bust the users and distributors on drug crimes, imposing fines and seizing property. In fact, the American racket of seizing property without convicting anyone of a crime known as Civil Asset Forfeiture accounts for nearly $2 Billion in police revenue annually.
The third profit margin occurs when police take the newly seized drugs and turn around to sell them. Because so much of these kinds of sales happen in the shadows by the untouchable enforcers of law, this problem is more rampant than we know. But occasionally such operations become uncovered, as it was in Chicago in 2013 by New York Daily News:
“Three Chicago-area cops robbed drug dealers of their stash while executing search warrants, then turned around and sold the heroin, cocaine and marijuana, pocketing the cash.”
There is one more kind of profit in this business, and it involves the largest financial institutions in the world. In March of 2013 Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on the subject of HSBC’s $1.9 Billion settlement on charges of laundering money on behalf of Mexican and Columbian drug cartels. No members of HSBC were charged with a crime despite the admission by HSBC that they were responsible for laundering $881 Million in drug money, as well as violating America’s sanctions with Iran, Libya, Cuba, Burma, and the Sudan. Warren concluded her questions with the following statement:
“If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re gonna go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your bed at night — every single individual associated with this. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”
This is especially alarming when we consider that more than half of the people in prison are in there for drug-related reasons. Today’s drug war is not only a conglomeration of the three legged monster of Racism, Poverty and Militarism that Martin Luther King warned us about, but is a war that has been perpetuated to lay the groundwork for today’s American Gulag Archipelago. A vast network of prisons that rivals any concentration camp complex ever known before.
Though they’re only caught occasionally, these kinds of operations are business as usual for American institutions, and documentation for these kinds of cases exists as far back in the historical record as you care to go.
The line between legal and illegal seems to be more of a matter of one’s bank balance than of evidence-based assertions in the name of justice. And it follows that in the pervading ideology of gangster capitalism, the ownership class are not fond of anyone who spills the beans on their schemes, nor of individuals capable of rallying the public toward rejecting the tyrannical despotism crawling all around us. The establishment has repeatedly taken decisive action to silence figures like Martin Luther King and Malcom X, the Black Panther leaders and any other powerful orator capable of drawing a crowd and fanning the flames of righteous indignation. Popular leaders and effective journalists were, and continue to be, systematically exterminated to prevent any uprising capable of opposing the status quo in a meaningful way. Leaders whose popularity and notoriety protected them from assassination were imprisoned instead. One such leader was, and is, Mumia Abu Jamal.
Mumia’s incredible story chronicles an ineffable journey from gifted broadcast journalist working the streets of Philadelphia, to death-row author whose books have made him perhaps the most famous prison inmate of modern times. Assessing the reason for Mumia’s incarceration, a thorough examination of the historical record demonstrates not only that the evidence for Mumia’s guilt simply does not exist, but that the state framed him in 1981 explicitly to shut him up. Accepting life in prison as an opportunity to write seven bestselling books, today his very existence challenges our beliefs about freedom of expression. But in order to properly understand this brilliant writer, we must come to grips with the modern American Gulag, which brings me back to the fastest growing industry in the American Empire. The truth is that Mumia’s story is not exceptional. Leonard Peltier’s story shares an eerie parallel. Both men were imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, but because they were well spoken and socially adept, it was politically advantageous to imprison them and make examples of them.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE?
While we were distracted with Game of Thrones and Call of Duty, our country has transformed into a the dystopia that American’s have repeatedly denied would ever happen here due to the delusion of American Exceptionalism that refuses to acknowledge that seeds of corruption could ever germinate in the U.S. For those who say “it can’t happen here,” we need but simply recall the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942 to recognize that it has happened here already, and is happening on a daily basis courtesy of a $75 Billion per year industry that garners profits for shareholders based on how many people are in jail. And now with the advent of “Guaranteed Occupancy Agreements,” if prisons fail to fill the beds, the taxpayers bear the burden. “It can’t happen here” is a sentence uttered in ignorance of the American Government’s bombing of Philadelphia neighborhoods on 13 May 1985. “It can’t happen here” is a perspective of wishful thinking that ignores the Waco siege in Texas of April 1993. “It can’t happen here” is a fantasy that outright ignores the writing on the wall provided to us by the likes of Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Karen Hudes, Sherry Peel Jackson, and countless other whistleblowers. We can no longer afford the luxury of apathy that drives us to blindly accept this as “just the way things are” by perpetuating the lie that “it can’t happen here.” The more we ignore it, the worse it will become. Until we realize that the militarization of police nationwide is nothing short of the inception of an American Gestapo that sees the citizen as the enemy, increasing numbers of our children will attend Con Colleges and Gladiator Schools, or worse.
Even if we embrace the immature thinking that the people in prisons deserve to be there, someday most of them are going to get out and rejoin society, conceivably. When they get out, if they haven’t dealt with the internal strife that led them into prison in the first place, they’re more likely to return to prison, end up homeless, or commit suicide than effectively reintegrate into society. Jobs are already difficult to find, but try finding a job if you’re a convicted felon. The state refers to the Gulag euphemistically as the “Department of Corrections” but nothing remotely corrective happens behind bars, because there is no profit in seeking solutions. It is not in the monetary interests of this machine to allow inmates the social mobility to leave the prison system once they’ve ventured inside it. This problem is exacerbated intensely by America’s modern paradigm that sees Prisons as a Business, which is a major reason why the number of incarcerated Americans has multiplied by several orders of magnitude and rates of recidivism have soared over the past few decades. Its all on track to follow the Capitalist “Infinite Growth” paradigm until and unless something significant finally stands in its way.
In 2010 I spoke with a young man named Daniel who worked for the organization Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). Despite the escalating drug war, Daniel was confident that the future looked hopeful. His positive outlook centered on how Baby Boomers would react to their children going to prison; that when they inevitably witness what is happening to their progeny, it would be inconceivable to allow this to continue. Daniel’s analysis couldn’t have been more lucid, and illustrates perhaps the only way to turn this around before it’s too late to reverse the Southward trend down tyranny’s slippery slope. The voting public are by and large comprised of elderly citizens, who were sold today’s America on the promise that they needed to be kept safe, which meant being tough on crime, and being tough on crime meant expanding the Prison Industrial Complex. Now that our parents can no longer ignore how the jagged teeth of this system tears their children apart, the dinner table conversations couldn’t be more necessary. There has never been a time when it was more important to turn the television off, put the cell phone down, and engage. We stand at the edge of oblivion, and whether they’ve been hypnotized by the media or not, whatever the mass of people deem as acceptable is what will prevail. We can no longer afford to maintain a mentality of apathy, complacency or indifference when it comes to America’s Prison Industrial Complex.
SLAVE-ON-SLAVE EXPLOITATION
America’s mainstream opinions are anchored in the facade of carefully prepared sound-bytes designed to prevent discussions by fueling bigotry concerning those who question or condemn the status quo.
If, for example, you dare to question the intention behind the reality of modern warfare, droves of unconscious masses declare that you’re demeaning the brave soldiers that have fought and died for your freedom. If you dare to propose that river waters are more important to the health of unquantifiable life forms than a pipeline that threatens to pollute it, hoards of consumers condemn you as radical, leftist, environmentalist scum obviously trying to destroy our economy. In exactly the same way, if you dare to question the practices at work inside our Prisons, you’re denounced by the mob for putting all of our communities at risk by letting evil off the hook or taking sides with the ‘evil doers.’ Such obtuse opinions fail to acknowledge how evil it is to exploit the world to obtain a few fleeting crumbs from the sands of impermanence.
But by and large many have enjoyed the luxury of remaining blissfully unaware of the state of the country, until we arrive at the point where we are now. There have been so many arrests, and now so many people are in prison, and the police corruption has reached such fever pitch, that these issues have become all but impossible to ignore. But many American’s continue to struggle with the great difficulty of juxtaposing ‘American Exceptionalism’ with the state of America as it is today. It’s perfectly natural in such a situation to wonder how this is possible in the freest and most prosperous country in the world? Unfortunately, despite what we’re routinely fed through the media, not only is America not the freest or most prosperous country in the world, there is a growing consciousness which recognizes the warning signs that we may be goosestepping our way into yet another repetition of history.
When we look at the Prison-class, and what it is further becoming with the privatization of prisons, what we see emerging is a permanent slave population harvested from already impoverished communities. We see an atmosphere of jailing society’s undesirables, starting with the homeless because people can universally condemn the homeless population. And that’s usually how fascism gets going. This isn’t a mere possibility that we may be headed toward – we’re already there now. You’d think the overwhelming militarization of our domestic police forces would illustrate this straightaway. According to The Guardian:
“Since 2006, state and local law enforcement have acquired at least 435 armored vehicles, 533 military aircraft and 93,763 machine guns, according to an investigation by the New York Times published in June. This was made possible under a department of defense program that allows the agency to transfer excess military property to US law enforcement agencies. More than $4.3bn worth of gear has been transferred since the program was created in 1997, according to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO)”
There are very good reasons for sending people to prison, and they include war-crimes and money laundering. Unfortunately no war criminal guilty of genocide and no banker guilty of embezzling the world’s economy faces so much as a shred of justice. Meanwhile our institutions habitually send millions of people into the hell of prison because they changed the state of their consciousness – an act that harms no one but potentially themselves. The masses go along with this scheme because it is easier in the short term to punish people than to take the steps necessary to heal them in a responsible way that will last.
Perpetuating the pain of people that most often grew up in very painful circumstances is only going to maintain this new slave-class – which is, of course, the goal of the ownership-class. Providing meaningful programs to heal deep psychological wounds and guide personal responsibility, education and self-progression would provide new-found strength that could ripple out into our communities and culture.
A transformation is possible, but requires our participation and dedication to a radical paradigm shift that embraces compassion-based solutions instead of profit-focused punishment. As long as monetary incentives to lock people up persist, the ownership-class have no reason to change course from their present trajectory, though they may use words on occasion to admit they are aware of the depravity of the situation, as Charles Koch has. This industry is too profitable to abandon, and private prison industries have spent tens of millions of dollars sending their lobbyist armies to Washington to secure their bottom line.
We must also recognize how the deliberate use of legalese to distort language and thereby coerce the population into consenting to unjust statutes makes us as liable for the present situation as those who have recognized how to exploit it.
If we are honest with ourselves about the present income inequality that has now reached fever pitch, it is simply a continuation of exploitation on behalf of the ownership class who reap the benefits from people of modest means who, for whatever reason, willingly consent to their own enslavement because they mistakenly believe they are free. The true success of this system lies in America’s routine acceptance of it. It is accepted because, “if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:25). Americans see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and in dreaming for carrots they will never grasp, have rendered themselves docile for the duration of their lives.
Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
Alexandria “Rain” Smith is a poet, artist, and host of the Outer Limits.
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