Today’s Hobos

Years ago, Woody Guthrie sang the “Hobo’s Lullaby,” lamenting:

Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can’t you hear the steel rails hummin’
That’s the hobo’s lullaby

I know your clothes are torn and ragged
And your hair is turning gray
Lift your head and smile at trouble
You’ll find peace and rest someday

I live in New York and the other day, riding home on the subway, I sat across from someone who might have been a post-modern hobo.  He was most likely a “homeless” or “unhouse” person.  It was 15-degrees outside and I initially couldn’t tell it if the person was a “he” or a “she” nor whether the person was “black” or “white”.

The person was covered from head to toe in an assortment of mismatched clothing, including a thick hat covering his/her head, a wool scarf over her/his face, a couple of coats (including an undercoat that looked like a long dress), socks and a pair of mismatched sneakers, one really a floppy slipper.

Eventually, it became clear that this person was a white male and surprisingly young (probably in his late-20s or early-30s). One often sees “homeless” older men – and occasionally women – on the subway carrying their belongings in plastic shopping bags, but rarely a younger white guy.  I sat across from him, wondering if he was a druggie or someone suffering a mental disorder.  Could he once have been someone I knew?

I kept asking myself, “What could I do?”  Could I give him some change or a dollar? Could I try to take him to a city-run public shelter? Sadly, I realized that I couldn’t do anything for him and left him in the subway when I got off at my stop.

Subway cars are relatively warm and, in all likelihood, the guy was on the subway to get out the freezing cold.  Did he pay the toll to get in the subway?  At some point– perhaps after falling asleep– this wayward guy will likely be approached by the police or transit authorities and either flee or be taken to a city-run homeless shelter.  Or is one of the ten people in the city who so far have died due to the snow and freezing weather?

In all likelihood, he was but one of thousands that the city identifies as the “unsheltered homeless,” an ever-growing population.  Every day, whether in the subway or on the street, we pass apparently homeless or unhoused people adrift in the city.  Many of these lost souls seek help in city shelters or, in the worst case, are found dead on city streets or parks.

New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has identified the city’s homeless crisis as a priority concern.  Soon after taking office, he declared:

“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing, whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is.  What we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made time and time again.”

Since taking office, he has established a Department of Community Safety and promised to end homeless encampment sweeps.  One can only hope he can pull off a miracle.

***

Now don’t you worry ’bout tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go
Tonight you’re in a nice warm boxcar
Safe from all that wind and snow

The U.S., not unlike other “advanced” capitalist countries around the world, is going through another “great squeeze” – the socio-economic-political process by which the rich and super-rich capture an ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth and leave an ever-increasing number of poor and middle-class people ever-more impoverished.

The first “great squeeze” took place during what was known as the “gilded age,” lasted from the 1870s to 1910s.  They were driven by the arrogance of a new economic order, one based on the opportunities of industrialization and the vast wealth to be garnered.  It spawned a new buccaneer class of capitalists like no other that preceded them.  It was the era of the “robber barons,” tycoons that included Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Jay Gould (railroad and finance), Andrew Mellon (finance) and Andrew Carnegie (steel).

Today, Vanderbilt’s and Rockefeller’s corporate descendants include Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, among many others. They rule during what can be called the second great squeeze.

Today’s “Big Tech” companies are giant, global conglomerates that include Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft. But there is also Big Phama — i.e., Johnson & Johnson, Roche Holding, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly; Big Oil — i.e., Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips; Big Tobacco — i.e., Altria, Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco; and Big Telecom — i.e., AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.  Collectively, they have transformed the U.S. economy into a cartel nation.

The new robber barons are driven by a combination of greed and political cunning that enables them to have considerable influence, if not control, over the federal and state governments throughout the country.  Like the robber barons of old, today’s barons engage in ruthless business and political practices and they’ve got Trump in their pocket.

Forbes reports, “The richest 1% of households in the United States have accumulated almost 1,000 times more wealth than the poorest 20% over the last three and a half decades, and economic inequality is getting worse at a rapid pace …”

Perhaps most disturbing, in the third quarter of 2025, the top 1 percent of households owned 31.7 percent of all U.S. wealth, the highest share on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking household wealth in 1989. As reported by a CBS affiliate, “That share has grown even as wealth growth for the rest of the population has stalled or slowed, the data shows.”  It added, “Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.”

So go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Listen to the steel rails hummin’
That’s a hobo’s lullaby

Today, who is singing for the hobos, the ever-growing population of displaced or unhoused people in New York and throughout the country?

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