Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Last night Anderson Cooper provided a television milestone by focusing on an issue that cries out for attention, the savage neglect with which the most vulnerable people in American society are treated.  Cooper's report from the streets of America's second largest city should hopefully send shock waves to people of conscience reverberating throughout the land.

A good deal of shock reverberated through me when I saw this eye-opening report.  I had been born, raised and educated in Los Angeles and began my professional writing career in the newspaper field there.  To see what has happened to the nation's second largest city should send a stern warning to the rest of the nation.

The Cooper report focused on the 50-square block of downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row.  Cooper revealed that Skid Row is currently home to "some 11,000 people, with the highest concentration of homeless in the country."  

The revelations of the all-seeing camera's eye panning over the blighted area was reminiscent of the worst sections of Calcutta, long recognized as a grim bench mark of tragic poverty.

Toward the end of the report another grim figure was revealed reflecting the tragedy of current Los Angeles.  Kaylor Shemberger, head of Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, related that hospital care for the homeless is part of a much larger problem.  

In Los Angeles County about 88,000 people do not have a roof over their heads on any given day.  According to Shemberger, there are simply not enough shelters and clinics to care for them.

The segment began with a bone-chilling disclosure.  A 62-year-old homeless woman named Carol Ann Reyes was shown wandering helplessly in a hospital gown on a Skid Row street.  Ms. Reyes had been discharged from Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Hospital where, after taking a fall, she had been treated for three days.

The hospital confirmed that Reyes was placed in a taxi.  The driver was told to drive her to Skid Row and deposit her there.  Why the hospital attire?  Hospital officials admitted they had lost her clothes, sending her away without pants or shoes while providing her with a diaper.

According to hospital records Reyes was disoriented, had slurry speech, high blood pressure, and suffered from a persistent cough and fever.  Investigators later learned why Reyes was so disoriented.  Along with the foregoing list of problems, she also suffered from dementia.  

"They're dumping a 62-year-old woman with dementia in the heart of Skid Row?" an incredulous Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo responded.  "That's what's going on.  And it's shocking and criminal."

The "60 Minutes" report also revealed the case of Gabino Olvera, a 41-year-old paraplegic who lives in his car, which is equipped with hand controls.  Olivera keeps his wheelchair on the seat.  After being involved in a minor traffic accident on February 7 he was brought to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital and treated for bruises.  

Hollywood Presbyterian officials acknowledge that Olvera was subjected to an 8-hour ordeal sitting in the hospital's waiting room.  When the morning shift ended he was put in a van and sent back to the same Skid Row address the hospital had as a listed residence for the homeless man.  It was Midnight Mission, one of the oldest on Skid Row.

The pattern of shame and neglect continued to the sad story's conclusion.  Olvera never made it back to Midnight Mission.  Instead he was dumped in the street four blocks away.

Deputy City Attorney Jose Egurbide, who investigates hospital dumping cases, and who showed "60 Minutes" around Skid Row, arrived with police minutes later.

How did we reach this tragic point?  I recall a television report years earlier about a new program that Governor Ronald Reagan had instituted in California.  Reagan was happy to adopt a recommendation from his favorite economic guru, ardent supply side economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman was the world's leading economist representing aggressive privatization.  To Friedman privatization was as an all-embracing panacea.  Leading elements of the corporate community shared Reagan's bullish enthusiasm for Friedman and privatization.

Reagan embraced Friedman's concept of privatizing mentally challenged people.  They were taken out of supervised facilities and told to fend for themselves in groups.  

A despairing shot of a group of mentally challenged men sitting in a small room in Long Beach, California remains frozen in my memory, products of the Friedman "half way house" concept being embraced by Reagan.  For me it embodied a callous example of "the blind leading the blind" with all victims suffering.

A few years later on a trip to London I would observe the half way house concept even closer at hand.  Margaret Thatcher, a stalwart Friedman privatization devotee, tried out the half way house concept during her better than a decade reign as Britain's prime minister.  

I was alarmed to see the number of shabbily dressed street wanderers begging for change on the city's streets, including the affluent Tory stronghold constituency of Kensington, where Thatcher enjoyed high popularity.  

On visits to the West End by night, scores of homeless victims were seen wandering the streets and sleeping outside expensive stores selling some of the more expensive clothing items available in the world on makeshift beds of cardboard boxes.

The wave of homelessness featuring numerous helpless souls needing permanent medical care has become increasingly pervasive in cities throughout America and Great Britain.  These are the results of the tragic policies implemented by Reagan and Thatcher from wild-eyed privatization schemes promoted by Milton Friedman.

Devotees of Friedman should stop by the New York Port Authority in midtown Manhattan during the height of winter and see the scores of homeless victims sleeping inside the busy transit center to escape the biting cold of the nation's largest city.

It is doubtful that any of the foregoing will seep through to the brainwashed ranks of Fox zombies and Limbaugh dittoheads.  Hopefully discerning citizens of the world community will begin to see how damaging Friedman's wild privatization concepts have been wherever and whenever his schemes have been employed by knee jerk corporate controlled politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.