Historical Hull House Halts Helping Hand

Hull House was founded in 1889 to help immigrants adjust to America. According to AP it helped 60,000 foster children and battered women a year. According to the story posted in The Chicago Tribune’s News website, “The agency's board chairman Stephen Saunders said Thursday that the organization will close this spring and file for bankruptcy.” [1]

 

According to Liam Ford and Kate Thayer, Chicago Tribune reporters, writing on January 21, 2012, in Reliance on shrinking government funds doomed Hull House; the closure of the private agency helping foster kids, and battered women was due to its dependency on Government Funding. As if echoing the voice of Occupy Chicago’s support of Occupy Wall Street, “In fundraising, ‘it's difficult to raise private money to donate to government work,’ said Margaret Berglind, president of Child Care Association of Illinois. ‘The government is asking you to do today's work at yesterday's prices.’” The article points out, “Even with high-profile fundraisers honoring prominent Chicagoans at places like the Museum of Science and Industry, it's been hard for the organization to make up for losses from government cutbacks.”[2] In a related story, “Terry Mazany, president and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust, called Hull House's bankruptcy filing “the canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the impact of successive years of cutbacks to human services in our state. This action is a reminder of just how precarious the viability of this sector is in the face of government retrenchment.”[3]

We are told that Capitalism will work to “trickle down” and assist the less fortunate, yet this is the news of the day. How much more needs to be written about the lies we are told daily about the superiority of American Capitalism? Not only is the public sector failing, but the private sector charity (or love, as it has been translated) is nonexistent. Liam Ford and Kate Thayer point out that private donation trickled to a few million for this historic institution in recent years. Even the Tribune, in print, and television (as seen on WGN’s Morning News) wants us all to embrace American Capitalism and the Voo-Doo economics started under Ronald Reagan 32 years ago. 

In a recent conversation I was told (on Twitter) by an Occupy Chicago sympathizer, “I [wouldn’t] call all upper 99% (80%+) evil; they [are] doctors, [and small business] owners who worked hard. Some see the need [for] change, others don't.” There is much truth in his observation. The caveat, however, is that even in this current system, those who see the need for change can do very little.

In 2007, I shared Elliott Currie’s observations on how the free market (American Capitalism) economy leads to crime in the United States of America.[4]  

Elliott Currie identifies seven pathways through which the free market economy creates the high risk of crime in the United States:

1.       The progressive destruction of livelihood;

2.       The growth of extremes of economic inequality and material deprivation;

3.       The withdrawal of public services and support, especially for families and children;

4.       The erosion of informal and communal networks of mutual support, supervision, and care;

5.       The spread of materialistic, neglectful, and “hard” culture;

6.       The unregulated marketing of the technology of violence;

7.       The weakening of social and political alternatives.^[5]

This is exactly what we are seeing played out in the nation today. People are on the street, even now when the temperatures are dropping below freezing, protesting this materialistic, neglectful, and hard culture. They are classified as criminals, and worse, even by those who are less than a paycheck away from destitution. Stories fill pages on the crime ridden, infested, unhygienic impromptu camps of the Occupation Movement around the world; some locations have even labeled the protestors as terrorist.[6]
 

The real crime is not committed by the Occupy Protestors. The real crime is committed by those within the system who embrace the criminal mentality, and the destruction of humanity. What are we seeing here?

1. Jobs are outsourced because it is more profitable to run a sweet shop in China than develop a viable business in the US. 
2. The destruction of the Middle Class as 400 people control more wealth than 151,285,314 people.
3.  Constant threats to popular social networking sites like Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, the now defunct Megaupload[7], by heavy handed legislation as proposed in SOPA and PIPA.
4.  The constant attacks against the Occupy Wall Street movement by local police acting on the behalf of a few prominent officials desperately quashing any call for accountability.
5. And now, The Bankruptcy of Hull House after 123 years of operation, and surviving The Great Depression of the 1930s.

Even Republican Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich is questioning what is going on in the U.S.A. today: "[C]rony capitalism, where people pay each other off at the expense of the rest of the country, is not free enterprise; and raising questions about that is not wrong."[8] He has since decided that questioning Crony Capitalism is wrong to his constituents. 

Hull House is closing. The 60,000 foster children and battered women it helps per year will now turn to the state. The 157,460,224 who don’t want to see change in the nation, those who quashed Gingrich’s criticism (politically motivated thought it may be), may indeed be qualified as accomplices to flagrant criminal activity; or just plain evil.

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[1] Associated Press. (2012, January 19). Chicago's Jane Addams Hull House to close. In Chicago Tribune News . Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-hullhouseclosing,0,6480287.story

[2] Ford, L., & Thayer, K. (2012, January 21). Reliance on shrinking government funds doomed Hull House. In Chicago Tribune: Chicagoland. Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-hull-house-closes-20120121,0,5594743.story

[3] Kapos, S. (2012, January 20). 'Canary in the coal mine': Hull House will file for bankruptcy . In Crain's Chicago Business (blog). Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120120/BLOGS03/120119729

[4] Potts, C. A. (2008). Wealth, Women and War (p. 74). Dallas, TX: WordTechs Press.

[5] Cullen, F. T., & Agnew, R. (Eds.). (2003). Criminological Theory: Past to Present (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, p. 338.

[6] Rawlinson, K. (2011, December 5). Police in City see occupiers as 'terror' risk. In The Independent . Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-in-city-see-occupiers-as-terror-risk-6272434.html

[7] Tijs, A. (2012, January 20). File-Sharing Site Megaupload Has Been Shut Down. In Noise11. Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://www.noise11.com/news/file-sharing-site-megaupload-has-been-shut-down-20120120

[8] Finnegan, M. (2012, January 11). Newt Gingrich: 'Crony capitalism . is not free enterprise'. In Los Angeles Times . Retrieved January 21, 2012, from http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/11/news/la-pn-newt-gingrich-crony-capitalismis-not-free-enterprise-20120111