The Voice of the People ... or at least my own

May 19, 2002

I was speaking with a Russian from the Ukraine recently. He described at length what was different about the Ukraine and the United States. What did he choose to talk about? "In United States, if you want to move, if you live in Minnesota and you want to go to California, you just pack your bags and go. In Ukraine, you can't go. The government gives you apartment and that is where you live for life. Whole families grow up in the apartment. Entire generations live in the same apartment. So if you live in Minnesota, you can't go to California. The government owns the housing." In the USA the ownership of apartments is largely dispersed. Since ours is young society, we have not had the generations of ownership trails that occupy the lineages of Europe. In those societies the government either played more of a direct role in economic development, or population pressures exposed the housing market. The United States has never confronted this issue because we've never had to since the "West" was always available for expansion. Thus the portents of social explosion which occurred in the crowded cities of Europe periodically since the middle ages, has not really occurred in the United States until the 20th Century. The Western safety value of migration created a fluidity of land development, so that ownership of the land went to those who grabbed it first. This land grabbing did not get evenly divided, and large proprietors and corporations got the lions share, but the left over pieces did get diversified so that the local character of land ownership was maintained. Since the 1800s the local proprietor has eroded. The dispersed small factories and stores became consolidated or out of business in the last 100 years, and the population shifted from rural to urban, from South to North, East to West, in order to accommodation the new arrangements. The consolidation of the United States economic system became apparent in the 1970s. Ownership of property became consolidated in the last 30 years. Large sections of the top 200 cities are owned by Land Holding Companies who are affiliates of large conglomerates like Time Warner and Coca-Cola. The landscape thus carved out is another in a long historical development that has affected the rest of the world. We do take for granted here that we can just get up and move whenever we want. None the less the act itself is not easy. A deposit between one to two thousand in addition to first months rent is necessary. Unless the mover is in the financial state of the upper 25%, finding an apartment in a distant city is doable: either by renting a hotel while seeking an apartment, or by using a service which makes the arrangements for large fee. Obviously, not everyone has this kind of money. It would be an interesting study to measure the number of people who reside in certain cities against their income. What would it mean, if a much higher proportion of well-off constituents were migrants than lower income residents? Our society is becoming more and more stratified between those who can afford and those who cannot. Freedoms are becoming muted by the dollar. There are Citizens who can afford health insurance and expensive healthy foods and those who cannot. Citizens who can afford long legal battles will have a much higher chance to defend their freedoms than other citizens who cannot wait four years to prosecute the company that screwed them for $4000. The companies know this, and they are better funded, so they can live out their own ideas of "freedom" from responsibility. Citizens who want to speak the truth and get the message out, will be less effective than multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, and well-funded research firms who are paid to write reports and influence opinion. We live in a democracy and we are free, but we are no less vulnerable to the political cabals of power hungry fiends than is the rest of the world.