Homelessness is Ownlessness
On July 24, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order with a thick black permanent marker that authorizes the involuntary incarceration of people living off the grid in public spaces. Like all sociopathic cruelties, this lawless order is given a name suggesting wholesome intent: Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets.
According to recently defunded National Public Radio, the proclamation clears the way for towns to jail people “who are a risk to themselves or others,” including those guilty of “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks [that] have made our cities unsafe.”
Trump frequently acts on his own inhumanly genius intuition, but this time he had the prior approval of the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 28, 2024 the Wall Street Journal reported:
“The Supreme Court loosened the restraints on city officials confronting homeless encampments, overturning a lower court that found it unconstitutional to penalize people for sleeping in public when they have nowhere else to stay.
“Writing for the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments, which a lower court invoked to strike down the city’s ordinance, had no role to play in limiting government responses to homelessness.”
Notably, it’s not just Republican cities taking advantage of the court’s rollback of human rights for the homeless. On August 16, 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported in another article titled “San Francisco Has Embraced a New Tool to Clear Homeless Camps” that
“Between July 2024 and July 2025, the city arrested or cited more than 1,080 people on illegal-lodging charges, over 10 times the number of illegal-lodging arrests during the same period a year earlier. In April 2025, illegal-lodging citations and arrests hit 130, the most in a single month since the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
It’s not at all surprising that the U.S. government intends to destroy encampments and round up vagrants to send them to publicly paid for and privately run detention camps. People with medical bankruptcies, indentured by student loans, addicted to drugs they use illegally (for the most part to self-medicate, since access to legal and effective treatment is beyond their means), people with unmedicated cognitive pathologies, the neuro-divergent . . . in fact, anyone who does not support the culture of extract, consume, and discard by direct participation in the cycle of economic exceptionalism is eligible for loss of personhood and legal cancellation.
It’s not a new thing for American federal and state governments to incarcerate the poor. Fresh out of college, I worked for a time in one of the many publicly funded and privately run half-way houses established to catch the outflow of “deinstitutionalized” “delinquent” youth and ambulatory mental patients who’d been released on Ronald Reagan’s order.
The facility in which I worked as an unskilled and immature “counselor”, occupied what had been a county poor house, down on Poor House Road in rural West Virginia. The story of displaced families, public ostracism, and community shaming hung like warm smog and was preserved in the place name. The “treatment” we administered to our adjudicated clients amounted to reward and punishment behavior modification regimes, soft surveillance, group bitch sessions, and G.E.D. tutoring. The class division between staff and residents was crystal clear. Although counselors, including me, were generally young idealists who tried, despite our corporate overseers, to create real relationships and connections with the kids we lived with, the system hired us for our time, patience, and the friendly veneer of caring we would present while keeping our clients off the streets and out of polite society’s hair.
Another halfway house where I worked as a young college grad in a poor rural town “served” (as the saying goes) deinstitutionalized mental patients. Mostly, I worked with people afflicted by schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorders. As with the incarceration-lite that kept my young Poorhouse Road clients sequestered away from the surrounding community, these neuro-divergent people had absolutely no agency over their own lives. Hallucinating residents and some with actively traumatizing bouts of paranoia and glossolalia were kept occupied with lessons on practical living skills as they gathered in a local church basement during daylight hours. At night, they were free to roam the town, sleep on benches, or retire to government subsidized “apartments” like the basement of a commercial establishment that one of my assigned charges slept in under piles of rags. When I inquired about how heat was provided in winter, my attention was drawn to the pipes in the ceiling that sent hot water to the rooms and offices above. In every case, local landlords were taking handouts from government programs to subsidize them for housing people left utterly dependent on the good or ill will of others. The experience went far in lifting me out of my naivete about how society “serves” the least powerful members of our communities. I believe the president’s cinematic hero, Hannibal Lecter, said it best: “with a side of fava beans.”
Enclosure of the Commons and Elimination of Commoners
The privatization of nature, referred to historically as “the enclosure of the commons” was begun in England and accelerated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by evicting people (called commoners) from the land in which they dwelled, to create monopoly control over that land, all its uses, and all that it held. This monopoly control over parcels of nature is exclusionary. It separates the owners from their communities and privileges them to disregard community rights. Since that time, there’s not been much indecision about what to do about capitalism’s misfits. It’s been more a question of just how to disappear them off the streets and from public places while at the same time making a profit.
We would do well to revisit the past to understand the origins and rules of the game. When fifteenth century English mercantilists, the equivalent of high-roller investors today, realized they could get wealthy by controlling the European appetite for woven wool, many ambitious Englishmen satisfied their desire for exceptional wealth by conspiring to raise more sheep and create more profit by confiscating common land and coercing peasants to labor on their behalf raising and tending the herd. Both schemes – commandeering the commons and turning self-reliant commoners into serfs – required the king’s permission. For such drastic measures to be enforced and opposition quelled, ambition had to be backed up with the force of royal command and the threat of retribution for transgressors. The enclosure and privatization of public land by bougie wannabes came with royal strings attached of course. The king collected his IOUs and let the property lines be drawn.
So, the land was privatized and, genius move, the people who had been evicted and pushed beyond the walls and hedgerows that came to define the boundaries of new estates were criminalized, subject to imprisonment, deportation, and serfdom for being landless and masterless. To be landless was to be without connection to official society as either a wealthy owner or as a laborer bound to the manor. To be landless and boss-deficient was to be declared a criminal danger to the new social order that centered profit and desacralized human and other-than-human community. Today, credentialless, rightless, homeless people are in the same boat as the commoners whose traditional homes were appropriated for the convenience of a propertied class that gained its status as a privileged aristocracy of trade by coming into possession of stolen land. The criminalization of vagabonds (a term with origins in the 15th century) helped secure the legality and on-paper legitimacy of bougie claims.
Cruelty is Efficiency
Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes explored the cannibalistic spirit of our age in his Columbus and other Cannibals: the wétiko disease of exploitation, imperialism, and terrorism. Forbes would have recognized America’s official policy of predation on commoners as a particularly nasty case of infection by wétiko, the mind parasite that proliferates in a culture of greed. He made the case that historical figures like Christopher Columbus and George Washington suffered from this disease and it caused them to consume whole communities in inhuman orgies of slaughter. Seneca Chief Tanacharison named then British officer Washington “Conotocaurius,” which means “Town Destroyer” in 1753. Then, in the midst of the American Revolution, Washington, having changed his loyalties, ordered the utter destruction of over forty British-allied Iroquois community encampments and the butchering of their inhabitants during what’s called the Sullivan Expedition in 1779. All for a noble cause, of course.
For some ungodly reason, whenever a community-shattering power move like enclosure and privatization is imposed on commoners, it’s always done in the name of efficiency, modernization, and progress. According to Brittanica,
“In England the movement for enclosure began in the 12th century and proceeded rapidly in the period 1450–1640, when the purpose was mainly to increase the amount of full-time pasturage available to manorial lords. Much enclosure also occurred in the period from 1750 to 1860, when it was done for the sake of agricultural efficiency. By the end of the 19th century the process of the enclosure of common lands in England was virtually complete.”
Echoes of the English enclosure of the commons, and the later campaign to de-Irish Ireland by privatizing the whole of the island in British aristocratic hands, can be heard in Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s plans to occupy and de-Palestinian the rubble-rendered Gaza Strip. Donald J. Trump’s order to disappear modern commoners from American communities isn’t original; it’s historic plagiarism out of the same playbook Andrew Jackson used to inflict the Trail of Tears on Eastern Native Americans; the same chapter in which you can read the rationalizations that made it possible under Calvin Coolidge’s presidency for white supremacists to clear and depopulate a Black business district in Oklahoma by burning and leveling buildings from the ground and the air in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
Progress as Dehumanization
Dissolution of communities and violence against those people dispossessed in the process is a pattern Western economic colonization has repeated again and again. Today’s homeless are not the only victims of colonialism’s modern reach, as the lessons of Gaza suggest. We also know that with the resource colonization of rural American communities by corporations and the dissolution of their community self-government by judicial fiat, including state preemption of local lawmaking, Dillon’s Rule, and administrative regulationism, communities persist as aggregates of human-occupied dwellings, but largely devoid of interdependent, reciprocal and cooperative human relationships. Their purge from the role of citizen, along with the deportation of legal and undocumented migrants and the homeless has yet to sink-in for small-town Americans who were among Trump’s biggest MAGA supporters.
With the privatization of urban public spaces that is at the heart of Trump’s purge of encampments, and with neutered rural municipal governments trying without success to fend-off their takeover by the corporatized state, individual identification with place-based community has eroded to nothing. And that is the purpose in utterly destroying conquered communities. It was the plan that created Indian reservations. It can be seen animating the routine criminalization and private imprisonment of urban black men, far from home and family.
U.S. history as it’s taught, using the most progressive curricula allowed in public schools, does not include truths uncomfortable to Democratic boosters of the mythological American Dream. In 1845, U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond from South Carolina responded to English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in a letter, writing that
“in all countries where the denseness of the population has reduced it to a matter of perfect certainty that labor can be obtained whenever wanted, and the laborer be forced by sheer necessity to hire for the smallest pittance that will keep soul and body together and rags upon his back while in actual employment there is no need for human slavery.”
The purpose behind the intentional promotion of and refusal to end poverty, but to make it disappear from public view, was made clear. Wage slavery would shut excess laborers out of the system, their services no longer required. Go away and stay away. And with the erosion of workers’ individual rights now accelerating under the Trump-led tantrum of the oligarchs, the only deference to personhood now recognized by public government is digitized information about an individual that’s accumulated through daily participation in the bureaucratized corporate matrix. Social security checks will no longer be sent to people via the postal service. The funds are now electronically transferred to bank accounts. Full digitalization for a Palantir-ready transition to database-only interactions between government and subjects is in-the-works. Soon, only people with searchable on-line profiles will be recognized as having legal personhood in the nearly complete surveillance state.
People without homes have committed no transgression. Their right to survive is, however, inconvenient for a surveillance state trying mightily to privatize and enclose the whole of human society. So, the new criminality attached to off-the-grid living is the lack of a proper digitized identity. The narrowing mandatory criteria of citizenship are being made ever-more difficult to meet. Without a consumer profile that reflects a personal, active interface with the econo-matrix, the socially disconnected among us are not counted as rights-bearing juristic persons. Tramps, vagabonds, bums. Had they created a virtual avatar to replace their obsolete though empirically real humanity, they’d be left alone for now.
Donald Trump’s oligarchic handlers know all of this. That’s why they have him pursuing policies like physical removal of economic non-persons, the homeless, from the land they occupy and involuntary incarceration for landless and masterless people. They are landless, because the land has been privatized. They are masterless, because they have not volunteered for wage slavery. And whatever other conditions of difference can be used to describe them, whether neuro-divergent, drug-dependent, financially ruined, or rejecting modern social pathology as a conscious choice, they are without economically documented personhood discernable through corporate analytics and thereby rightless.
Said differently, the modern era is the intellectual descendant of colonialism’s theory of winner-take-all in which possession of commandeered property conveys legal rights to otherwise naturally rightless humans. Under this paradigm, rights are not conveyed to humans as a birthright. Citizenship and associated legal rights have some baseline standard for being awarded to people in the United States, but it is not awarded for being born here. According to the new logic, whoever is propertyless is rightless; a “what,” not a “who” in America. And whatever is rightless can be treated as property or potential property, including people and “nature.” This is the logic that enslaves the whole world to the demands of those privileged above all others by the property they possess.
That’s the whole ball of wax. It’s the rationale behind the constitutional legalization of slavery in 1789. It’s the core principle underlying once fully-constitutional property qualifications for voting and holding public office. It is the justification for corporate property having rights that law defers to while acting with indifference to individual and community rights. And it’s why constitutional originalists now in the U.S. Supreme Court majority are okay with the depersonalizing class war now raging against Americans.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that the same rationale explains the mass deportation of people who have established themselves in-country, but are not on the list of documented people officially cleared as ethnically inoffensive to white supremacist sensibilities. By diminishing and disappearing the rights of property-deprived and document-deprived people, the rights-retaining property privileged citizens (AKA, the rich) are automatically elevated above the human community and redefined as the legitimate human community.
Indigenous people, debtors, and immigrants are among the earliest victims of narcissistic social self-improvement through violent conquest and predation. The homeless are, like the others, victims of self-aggrandizing predation. Not necessarily the first, but the simplest to eradicate.
After a long history of abuse by power, resignation to subjugation grips much of society and challenging criminal identity theft by government and businesses when they commandeer land or relocate people from their place of connection to the world has yet to become the rallying cry for revolution. Rationalizations for cruelty masquerading as grown-up political realism are conjured to mask the shame of severing the natural connection to the land that modern town-destroyers deny exists.
What does the Trump regime’s attack on birthright citizenship have to do with the militarized disappearing of homeless people? The notion that being born within the jurisdiction of the U.S. government bestows automatic citizenship, as specifically guaranteed by the fourteenth constitutional amendment, and that legal rights guaranteed to citizens are therefore a birthright, are no longer meaningful ideas in the new world order being made ready for AI and the penultimate completion of the enclosure movement with the panopticon of non-stop digital surveillance. In that grave new world, only by significant property ownership and the attendant freedom from community obligations that wealth affords can one’s personhood rise to the revamped status of citizen. The disappeared, the deported, wage slaves, debtors, agrarian rurals, Indigenous, and other vestiges of humanity will cease to matter.
It’s time we connect the dots, understand that human place-based communities have been under siege for centuries by sociopaths desiring to open the land on which commoners live to exploitation for the exclusive enjoyment of people who have abandoned sharing community with those they deem to be lesser humans. Until we confront and end forever the exceptionalist policies that created homelessness, mass migrations of people, and disenfranchisement of every American from community self-determination, the siege will continue. The planet will descend into enclaves of mere survival and deprivation. That’s our children’s fate, unless we resist with non-cooperation and sabotage and alternative ways of living with and in and as nature, because the sane among us still know we are a part of it, not apart from it.
Read article from the original source at ZNet Articles here.
