From the New York Times, a reminder of Homer Simpson’s favorite place in the Big Apple:
The reference, from The Simpsons, season nine’s first episode:
Most of those arrested un the 6 January Capitol coup attempt were men and women whose desperation was, in part, fueld by personal fiancial crises, according to a study from the Washington Post.
From the Washington Post:
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
<snip>
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
<snip>
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”
The message for Democrats
Note the use of that word “precarity,” a term we’ve frequently used in describing the victims of 21st Century unbridled capitalism, a system in wealth is equated with virtue, and in which the poor and the marginalized are simply suckers, the dregs of of an all-against-all social Darwinian struggle.
In the 1930s, people in similar plights were the backbone of the Democratic Party, mobilized and energized by a vibrant left and the politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
And they are the same people abandoned by the Democrats starting with Jimmy Carter and even more by the neoiliberal regime of William Jefferson Clinton.
Abandoned by the Democrats as the party shifted to the Right, they were the natural prey for the rhetoric of Donald Trump, and so desperate they were willing to grasp at the thinnest of reeds with the hope of escaping a flood of debt and finding high ground.
By merging itself with the pastors of deeply reactionary but deeply media savvy megachurches, the Republicans made a pact with the devil, who arrived in the person of Donald Trump, a man who rejected the Sermon on the Mount and indulged in almost everything Christians once considered abominations.
And the greatest boost to his fame was The Apprentice, a show based on the rawest form of social Darwinism.
Trump promised change in jeremiads, a form familiar to any student of the Bible, and because most reactionary Christians fervently hope for the imminent onset of the End Times.
If the Democrats are ever to reach these people, the party must revive some of the fervor it possessed in the 1930s.
And his Christian followers would do well to remind themselves of a Bale verse, specifically Luke 16:13:
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
From a new Gallup survey of American satisfaction with public policy sectors, some record lows of the 21st Century:
From the report:
Overall, majorities of Americans are satisfied with five of the societal and policy areas: the nation’s military strength and preparedness (74%), women’s position in the nation (62%), the acceptance of gays and lesbians (55%), security from terrorism (54%) and the quality of medical care (53%). These top-rated issues — particularly military strength — have typically ranked near the top each year since 2001. Acceptance of gays and lesbians has been a high-ranking issue since 2015.
At the other end of the spectrum, a record-low 18% of U.S. adults are satisfied with the nation’s efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness. The poverty and homelessness measure has consistently placed near the bottom of the list, along with campaign finance laws, which was not asked this year. Satisfaction with the state of race relations has been muted since 2015. Crime satisfaction generally has not ranked as low as it does this year.
In addition to efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness, several measures have reached their lowest satisfaction in Gallup’s history: the nation’s policies to reduce or control crime (27%), the position of Black Americans and other racial minorities in the nation (35%), and the quality of the environment (41%).
Posted in Class, Crime, Environment, Ethnicity, Governance, Housing, Politics, Poverty, Sociology
But real woes will continue long after the pandemic burns itself out.
First the numbers, via the Los Angeles Times:
Los Angeles County is fast approaching 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases, a massive milestone that means 1 out of every 10 Angelenos has been infected at some point during the pandemic.
That L.A. County, by far the nation’s most populous, has such a high case count is not a shock, but the rapidity with which infections have grown is staggering.
It took the county nearly 11 months to top 500,000 coronavirus cases, which occurred in mid-December. At the current rate, L.A. County will crest the 1-million mark by the end of this week, doubling its colossal case count in a month.
The approaching benchmark comes two weeks before the one-year anniversary of the county’s first confirmed coronavirus case.
Homelessness will rise, study says
Jobs lost when businesses shutter during lockdowns will lead to a major spike in homelessness in L.A. County, reports the Los Angeles Daily News:
The recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to send 603,000 working-age adults into homelessness across the United States by 2023, more than 52,300 of them in Los Angeles County, according to findings from a report released Tuesday, Jan. 12.
Across California, the number of adults who are of working age and could face homelessness is predicted to be 131,400, according to the report put out by the Los Angeles-based Economic Roundtable, which used data from the 2008 Recession to study the connection between job-loss and homelessness and potential effects of the current recession.
While large percentages of the working-age adults projected to become homeless are expected to be couch-surfing, Economic Roundtable analysts also predict many will fall into a deeper form of homelessness.
The think tank projects that as the result of the current recession, chronic homelessness is expected to rise by 86% in Los Angeles, 68% across California and 49% across the country, over the next four years.
When pollsters survey Millennials, the folks born between Ronald Reagan’s inauguration and the end of Bill Clinton’s first term in office [1981 to 1996], thee answers they give skew Left on issues like climate and energy, foreign relations, while they identify themselves less as religious than generations before or since, while the lean toward the Democratic Party more than any other generation.
And while they’re better educated than other generations, they’re also more likely to live alone or with their parents.
They also tell pollsters they’re more convinced than other generations that White racism is the main factor in holding back the progress of Black Americans.
But a new survey reveals that while they make talk liberal, when it comes to some of their actual actions, that supposed enlightenment may be less than it appears.
From the University of California, Los Angeles:
Are millennials really as ‘post-racial’ as we think?
In attitude, millennials might be the least racially biased demographic in America, according to existing data about this this group. But a new study led by UCLA professor of sociology S. Michael Gaddis reveals that when it comes to actions — like judging who would make a good roommate — millennials still show strong racial bias and anti-Blackness.
American millennials — those between the ages of 24 and 39 — are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other demographic and have higher levels of education. Multiple surveys have found that these individuals typically respond to questions about their beliefs, hypothetical actions and attitudes about race in ways that have been deemed “post-racial,” or more accepting and progressive than previous generations.
Gaddis and co-author Raj Ghoshal of Elon University decided to test whether that body of evidence translated into how millennials behaved when making real-world decisions, like who to accept as a roommate.
For this experimental study, published in the open-access journal Socius, researchers responded to real Craigslist ads posted by millennials looking for roommates in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The team used specific names that signaled the racial background of the room seeker, whether Asian, Black, Hispanic or white, and tracked responses to 4,000 email inquiries about the ads.
They found likely discrimination — in the form of fewer responses to their queries — against Asian, Hispanic and Black room seekers, even though each query about the open room included the same information on job and college-degree status. The only variable was the name of the applicants.
While queries from white-sounding names got the most responses, emails from Black-sounding names received the fewest.
“Essentially, when it comes to many racial issues, we cannot just ask people what they think and trust that their response is truthful,” Gaddis said. “Researchers must use a specific type of field experiment that requires us to engage in deception by pretending to be someone we’re not — for example, a Black room seeker — and examine how people react when they don’t know they are being watched.”
The Craigslist ads themselves provided a lot of information on the age, gender and socioeconomic status of the posters, though not definitive details on each poster’s race. Although Gaddis and his team presume many of these posters were white, it’s likely that other racial or ethnic groups were engaging in discrimination as well.
Rates of response to people with Asian or Hispanic names showed the most variation, depending on the first names that were used, the researchers found.
“Queries that used more ‘Americanized’ versions of first names, paired with a last name that implied Hispanic or Asian background got more responses than those with more typical-sounding Hispanic or Asian first names,” Gaddis said. “We think that probably comes across as a signal of assimilation.”
To select names for the made-up room seekers, Gaddis relied on a data-driven approach that uses names and information on race from real birth records and tests individuals’ perceptions of race from those names. He has previously explored how names that give a clue to race have an impact on the success of job seekers and college applicants.
Lots more, after the jump. . .
Continue readingPosted in Culture, Ethnicity, Housing, Human behavior, Intolerance, Race
Just how low can Trump go?
He has just hit new depths, and he still has more than three weeks to go, but this latest outrage in especially deplorable, given that the pardon recipient stole more than a billion dollars stolen from nursing homes and assisted living facilities in a state where COVID is now raging through seniors living in care facilities.
From Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times:
President Trump’s tsunami of pardons and commutations has been such an effective guide to the most loathsome individuals in today’s America that it’s hard to know where to begin in pulling out case histories.
But here’s a standout: It’s the case of Philip Esformes, who was convicted last year in what federal prosecutors termed “the largest healthcare fraud scheme ever charged by the Department of Justice.”
Esformes’ crimes involved $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims to Medicare and Medicaid for services at his network of nursing and assisted living facilities in Florida. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison on 20 felony counts. Noting that the charges on which he was found guilty carried combined maximum sentences of 255 years, prosecutors had asked for 30 years.
<snip>
Coming as it does in the midst of a pandemic. . .the Esformes clemency underscores all the inequities and dysfunctions of the American healthcare system, which Esformes exploited for massive personal gain.
Nursing homes are deadly, especially for racial, ethnic minorities
The grimmest of realities form the University of Rochester Medical Center:
Older residents from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds and their caregivers bear the severest brunt from COVID-19 across the entire spectrum of US nursing homes and assisted living communities, University of Rochester Medical Center researchers report in two groundbreaking studies in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
For example, nursing homes with disproportionately higher numbers of residents from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds reported two to four times as many new COVID-19 cases and deaths per facility than other nursing homes for the week of May 25, according to a study led by Yue Li, Ph.D., professor of Public Health Sciences.
The findings – the first to be reported based on newly mandated, weekly data reported from 15,587 U.S. nursing homes to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) – are also the first to document the disproportionate impact on residents from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in nursing homes across all states.
Disparities of this magnitude, Li says, suggest that longstanding, fundamental inequalities in nursing homes resulting from segregated facilities with limited resources and poorest quality of care are being “exacerbated by the pandemic.”
A first-ever empirical study involving the incidence of COVID-19 in US assisted living communities showed a four-fold higher case fatality in these communities, compared to the counties in which they are located. The study was led by Helena Temkin-Greener, Ph.D., M.S., professor of Public Health Sciences.
“As in the nursing home study, we also see that assisted living communities with more underrepresented residents have more cases, and we confirm that communities with a higher proportion of residents with dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and obesity, experienced more COVID-19 cases,” Temkin-Greener says.
Florida nursing homes, assisted living facilities hit hard
In the Sunshine State, where Esforme sucked more than a billion fraudulent dollars from his nursing homes and assisted living facilities, has seen some of nation’s highest death tolls in nursing homes and assisted living facilities,
From WJXT News in Jacksonville:
As Gov. Ron DeSantis prioritizes seniors for new vaccines, the COVID-19 death toll for long-term care residents and staff members has increased to more than 8,000 since the pandemic started.
The number of long-term care deaths exceeded 8,000 in recent days, with the number at 8,085 in a report released Sunday by the Florida Department of Health.
Other data from the department show that the vast majority of those deaths involve residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities, with one facility in Miami-Dade County accounting for 70 resident deaths and another for 56 resident deaths.
<snip>
In all, long-term care residents and staff members make up about 38 percent of the reported 21,212 Florida resident deaths since the pandemic started.
On Monday, the total number of reported positive cases among residents was 2,885, and 2,551 positive staff members.
More from the Tampa Bay Times:
An alarming surge in coronavirus infections and deaths in Florida nursing homes since October has elder care advocates warning that the lack of a state strategy for accurate and immediate testing at elder care homes will mean this holiday season will be a heartbreaking one for many.
On Tuesday, AARP released a report that shows that the COVID-19 death rate among Florida nursing home residents doubled in the three weeks around the Thanksgiving holiday, and infections continue to climb among the state’s most vulnerable residents. The death toll spike was so alarming that AARP decided to report on the data rather than wait for its scheduled monthly release on Jan. 10.
“The fundamental problem is the continued inability to provide accurate, rapid-result testing of everyone entering elder-care facilities — staff, visitors, family caregivers and vendors,’’ said David Bruns, spokesman for AARP.
“Absent any change in policy, this surge is going to increase. People are going to die,’’ warned Brian Lee, director of Families for Better Care, a nonprofit that advocates for families of nursing home residents. “It’s a total disaster because the governor and his team could have saved lives.”
You have to wonder how many of those deaths might have been prevented had Esformes poured his stolen cash into building up the facilities’ infrastructure.
For that alone, he should be unpardonable.
As for Trump, once he’s out of office, why not try him for a few of the crimes he’s pulled off and sentence him to community service washing bedpans in those facilities Esformes looted?
Sounds good to me.
Without prompt federal action, the Biden administration could be faced with a wave of evictions unprecedented in the nation’s history, with as many as 40 million Americans, impoverished by the coronavirus pandemic, thrown out of their homes.
From USA Today:
Millions [are] on the verge of being evicted with the federal eviction moratorium set to expire at the end of January, unleashing what advocates say could be a housing catastrophe of historic proportions: Without federal intervention, they fear, as many as 40 million people could be displaced amid an ongoing and still worsening pandemic.
“We’re facing potentially the worst housing and homelessness crisis in our country’s history,” said Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C.
The eviction moratorium approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was originally set to end Dec. 31. It was expected to be extended through January by Congress under a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package that also includes offering $25 billion in emergency rental assistance – the figure requested by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in a letter submitted last week to the CDC and co-signed by 1,500 housing advocacy organizations.
“The least the federal government can do during a once-in-a-century pandemic is assure each of us that we’re not going to lose our homes in the middle of it,” Yentel said. The $25 billion, she said, was not nearly enough to meet the actual need, but it was a step in the right direction.
Among the likely victims: Entertainers
Among the occupations where unemployment is pandemic, it’s the folks who’ve kept us entertained during the viral siege who have clocked up unprecedented levels of joblessness, reports the New York Times:
During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.
In many areas, arts venues — theaters, clubs, performance spaces, concert halls, festivals — were the first businesses to close, and they are likely to be among the last to reopen.
“My fear is we’re not just losing jobs, we’re losing careers,” said Adam Krauthamer, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in New York. He said 95 percent of the local’s 7,000 members are not working on a regular basis because of the mandated shutdown. “It will create a great cultural depression,” he said.
The new $15 billion worth of stimulus aid for performance venues and cultural institutions that Congress approved this week — which was thrown into limbo after President Trump criticized the bill — will not end the mass unemployment for performers anytime soon. And it only extends federal unemployment aid through mid-March.
The irony, is, of course that folks like Jeff Bezos, people who’ve reaped vast rewards since the pandemic emerged, also make lots of their wealth on the backs of entertainers [think Amazon Prime video].
Why not simply add a pandemic profiteering surchagre to his his income taxe forms this year?
Donald Trump’s longest-lasting legacy could be a massive wave of homelessness unlike anything this country has ever seen, with a third of the country evicted from their dwellings.
At the very least President Joe Biden has going to have the biggest mess to clean up this country has seen since the Civil War.
From Newsweek:
Over one-third of American adults could face eviction or home foreclosure amid the COVID-19 pandemic during the next two months, according to new data from a U.S. Census Bureau survey.
The latest data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, taken between November 25 and December 7, found that 35.3 percent of U.S. adults are “living in households not current on rent or mortgage where eviction or foreclosure in the next two months is either very likely or somewhat likely.”
The survey found that residents of Washington, D.C. are the most likely to face eviction or foreclosure, with 67.3 percent of adults living in households where the prospect is at least somewhat likely. States with a majority of adults also likely to lose their homes include South Dakota, South Carolina, Georgia and Oregon.
A potential housing crisis sparked by a massive wave of evictions has been a topic of concern for many in the U.S. recently. A federal moratorium on evictions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to expire on December 31 despite no signs that the pandemic, or its devastating economic impact, will be ending anytime soon.
With businesses closing for good and a massive unemployment problem, the majority of Americans have been devastated by the pandemic at the same time that the stock market is booming, and America’s billionaires have gained an astonishing $1 trillion in wealth since the pandemic began.
Today’s official unemployment figures are a fiction, created when his administration simply discarded the numbers of people classified as “discouraged workers,” people who found no place to exercise their hard-won skills. John Williams added those numbers back in to produce a more accurate picture of joblessness at his Shadow Government Statistics website.
Here’s how things looked as of last month:
And its not just the coronavirus, as we’ve noted repeatedly.
Upcoming evictions, canceled unemployment payments, childcare, local and regional government services, schools, and more are on the brink of economic catastrophe.
The University of California, Berkeley, asked some of its leading scholars about the crisis confronting the Golden State, and here’s what they had to say:
California fears human, economic crisis as Washington relief talks continue
High-stakes negotiations underway in Washington, D.C., over a new round of pandemic relief funding could help California to achieve a relatively quick recovery — or, if they fail, contribute to an economic slump that lasts for years, UC Berkeley scholars say.
In a series of interviews, experts said a new COVID-19 relief package could provide critical aid to vulnerable groups as the pandemic renews its devastating surge. Millions of unemployed workers are slated to lose their benefits on the day after Christmas, and hundreds of thousands of renters could face eviction in the new year. Hard-hit small businesses, child care centers, local governments and universities also face historic financial threats.
Last March, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a $2.2 trillion measure — the CARES Act — to provide support to individuals, businesses and institutions hurt in the early months of the pandemic. A new round of federal aid could benefit tens of millions of Californians, the Berkeley experts said, if Republicans and Democrats can bridge deep differences to come up with a plan in the days ahead.
As earlier pandemic relief runs out, “we know poverty is increasing,” said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. “We know that hunger and the incidence of hunger are increasing, especially for children and people of color. We know that homelessness by the millions will increase if we do not have another moratorium on renter evictions.”
“Right now the economy is barely holding on,” added economist Jesse Rothstein, faculty director of the California Policy Lab at Berkeley. “If we don’t pass something more, we basically take away the legs that support a teetering economy. There’s a real risk that the economy will collapse into something like a traditional recession and … bankrupt millions of people.”
A bipartisan group of moderates in Congress has proposed a $748 billion aid bill, with a separate $160 billion measure that includes financial aid to state and local governments devastated by extra expenses and lost revenues resulting from the pandemic. That’s less than half the size of the CARES Act, and with the virus accelerating and U.S. deaths surpassing 300,000, it was unclear Wednesday whether congressional leaders are still using it as a basis for their negotiations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met until after midnight on Tuesday and indicated that they were making progress on a deal of roughly $900 billion. Sources involved in the coronavirus relief package told Politico that it would include a second round of direct payments, but would likely leave out state and local funding and a controversial liability shield to protect businesses from COVID-related lawsuits by workers and customers.
Allegretto, Rothstein and other Berkeley scholars said the congressional measure falls far short of the robust investments required to counter the pandemic’s economic shock. But, they said, funding in areas such as unemployment insurance, child care and renter protections could ripple throughout the economy, bringing important human benefits and helping to protect economic stability in California and nationwide.
A million workers could lose unemployment insurance within days
Since the start of the pandemic, nearly 45% of the California workforce has filed for unemployment insurance. When two key federal pandemic benefit programs expire beginning Dec. 26, 1 million workers will face the sudden loss of their benefits, said a report released Tuesday by the California Policy Lab.
The measure being developed by the bipartisan congressional group — the Emergency COVID Relief Act of 2020 — would extend the two federal programs for 16 weeks.
That could bring nearly $10 billion in unemployment benefits to Californians, enough to preserve or generate almost 45,000 jobs by April, the analysis found. The measure also proposes a supplemental federal payment of $300 per week in unemployment benefits. That’s down from $600 per week provided under the CARES Act, but still enough to drive $30 billion in economic activity in California before the end of April 2021.
Whether the federal government should supplement state unemployment payments or provide one-time checks to most Americans, as in the first round of pandemic relief, is the focus of intense debate.
“Unemployment benefits are targeted to the people who really need it: the people who lost their jobs,” said Rothstein. “It’s nice for everyone to get a check, but it’s not essential.”
Rothstein also noted a hidden threat: Even if a new measure is passed soon, pandemic unemployment payments will likely be interrupted because states will need time to adjust administrative systems for the program.
Evictions, childcare, and more, after the jump. . .
Continue readingA public servant who tried to help the public lost his job because he stated he hated an Alabama law that allows landlords to file criminal charges against delinquent renters, even in the midst of the pandemic.
ProPublica, the non-profit public interest investigative news group that works in cooperation with major media, covers the story of the firing and an ouster resulting from a story they published.
Journalists Maya Miller and Ellis Simani write the followup for ProPublica:
A Deputy Prosecutor Was Fired for Speaking Out Against Jail Time for People Who Fall Behind on Rent
Continue readingAn Arkansas prosecutor has been fired after speaking out against the state’s criminal eviction statute in an October ProPublica story. Garland County deputy prosecutor Josh Drake was let go from his position on Oct. 31 by Michelle Lawrence, the prosecuting attorney.
Arkansas is the only state where landlords can file criminal charges rather than civil complaints against tenants for falling behind on rent. Drake told ProPublica, “I hate that law. It’s unconstitutional.” It constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, he said, echoing other Arkansas legal experts and advocates across the political spectrum.
Under the law, which dates to 1901, if a tenant’s rent is a day overdue, they forfeit their right to be in the property. If they don’t leave their homes within 10 days of getting a notice from their landlords, they can be charged with a misdemeanor and fined for each day they overstay.
Evictions in the state can snowball from charges to warrants to arrests to jail time, leaving people with criminal records that hinder their ability to find a new home or get a job. In civil evictions, by contrast, landlords can pursue unpaid rent and other additional fees from tenants, but the process doesn’t include daily fines for staying in the property without paying or put tenants at risk of jail time.
ProPublica found that since 2018, more than 1,000 cases have been filed under the criminal eviction statute. During that time, judges have sentenced at least 37 renters to jail after charges stemming from the law, which is officially known as “failure to pay rent, failure to vacate.” Women and people of color have disproportionately been charged.
Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national moratorium on evictions did not stop the criminal filings. Since the Sept. 4 order, at least 49 people have been charged, with more than two dozen cases filed in the last month. Meanwhile, the number of new cases of the coronavirus in Arkansas has risen dramatically since mid-September. The state now has over 1,000 hospitalized because of the virus, according to Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Landlords told ProPublica they preferred the criminal statute to civil evictions because the criminal process is cheaper. Taxpayers shoulder the cost when county attorneys like Lawrence and Drake pursue tenants. In civil eviction hearings, landlords have to cover their attorney fees.
Drake had been prosecuting cases on behalf of Garland County, in central Arkansas, since March 2018 on a part-time basis. Lawrence called Drake into her office the day after ProPublica’s story ran and said she was firing him because his remarks drew media and statewide attention to her office, Drake said.
Lawrence, who began working in Garland County’s prosecuting attorney’s office in 1994 and was elected as the prosecuting attorney in 2016, declined to comment, citing an office prohibition on speaking about personnel matters.
During Drake’s tenure, he handled at least a dozen criminal eviction cases. Like many landlords, state legislators and prosecutors, he had the impression that the statute never led to arrests or jail time. That’s not true, however. Since 2018, 45 people have been arrested exclusively for failing to pay rent and not leaving, according to state records.
Evictions in Arkansas can snowball from criminal charges to arrests to jail time because of a 119-year-old law that mostly impacts female, Black and low-income renters. Even prosecutors have called it unconstitutional.
Despite his misimpression, Drake nevertheless disliked the statute because he said it effectively transformed county attorneys and law enforcement officers into collection agents for landlords. But he said he felt he had no choice but to prosecute the cases because it was his job. He never voiced his objections until the ProPublica story.
“I stand by what I said. I still feel the same way,” he said. “It’s one of those things that I’ve always been ashamed of, but I’ve never been in a situation where I could do anything about it.” Now, he said, “I can at least call more attention to it.”
Donald Trump, preaching to the converted in a Duluth, Minnesota, rally Wednesday, concluding an attack on the Obama rule he ended that call for construction of more affordable apartments in suburbia:
“By the way, just so we can get this straight, 30 percent of the people in the suburbs are low-income people. Thirty percent of the people in the suburbs are minorities. And so we’re ruining this American dream for everybody.
“They zone you out, they build low-income housing next to your house. And then I hear I’m not doing well in the suburbs. I’m not doing well in the suburbs — are you people crazy?”
While Trump is an overt racist, preying on the deep anxieties of a White middle class sliding ever-downward as rapacious banksters and corporate pirates plunder what’s left of American economy, on another level, he’s playing a shell games with class at the center of his agenda.
The stock market has hit ridiculous highs, much of created by stock buybacks, high-frequency trading, outsourcing of factories and labor to Asia, and the radical reduction or outright elimination of healthcare, pensions, and other once-traditional benefits, and the transformation of tenured employees into private “contractors” [read serfs].
Pitting the middle class against those a few rungs below ever-more-precarious economic ladder is class way of distracting those in the middle from vast accumulation at the top of the wealth generated by the blue and white collars beneath them.
Posted in Banksters, Class, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Economy, Finance, Governance, Housing, Law, Politics, Poverty, Race, Uncategorized, Wealth
While Democrats are nursing hopes of control of one or both houses of Congress, victory might contain a poison pill that could redound to the Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans benefit two years down the road.
Make no mistakes. The warning signs are already quite clear, as embodied in this series of 10-year graphs we’ve assembled from the marvelous resources of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
First up, housing prices are soaring again, already reaching well above the levels of the 2007-9 Great Recession [indicated by the shaded areas of the charts], a crash triggered by shady mortgage lending by the nation’s leading banks [click on the images to enlarge]:
And as housing prices rise, so does mortgage debt, which has also topped pre-Great Recession levels as the Trump Administration slashes protection passed under the Obama administration::
Credit card debt is also soaring:
Yet another form of debt is also rising as states and the federal government slash colleges and university funding, sending tuition rates through the roof:
The next graphs is particularly ominous.
While Donald Trump claims that under his administration, unemployment levels have hit record lows.
But that’s only because soaring numbers of folks have simply given up and dropped out of the labor force:
For our final graph we look at the growing amount of U.S. debt held overseas, trillions of dollars that could explode in the face of Donald Trump’s self-declared trade wars:
And now, with this graphic introduction we turn to a very important documentary from VPRO Backlight, a creation of producer Marije Meerman for Dutch public television and a warning of dark times ahead:
Lessons from Lehman and the Coming Crash
Program notes:
Have we learned the Lessons from Lehman and could we have predicted the Coming Crash? Ten years ago, the crash on Wall Street took us by surprise when Lehman Brothers’ bank went bankrupt. The financial crisis that followed this crash on Wall Street was like a chain reaction; a pole dancer with her five mortgages turned out to be connected to the huge gap in the Greek national budget. Is it possible to predict the coming crash? What are the lessons learned from the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Can we predict the coming crash of Wall Street by looking back to the last 10 years and take a lesson from Lehman?
Sometimes, it is important to look back in order to predict what we might be heading for. Ten years ago, we were taken by surprise when Lehman Brothers’ investment bank went bankrupt. In the followinf months, banks needed saving. Millions of tax payers money was used. Worldwide, banks, villages, cities, and even countries went bankrupt or were hanging by a thread. Few, if any, bankers were convicted. Crypto currencies like bitcoins thrived on the growing suspicion towards banks and governments. Finally, central banks around the world set up buying asset purchasing programmes in order to create cash out of nothing. A strategy to pump money into the financial system, hoping to keep it afloat. What have we learned from this crash and its consequences? Over a period of ten years, VPRO Backlight reported on the snowballing financial crisis. It turned out that a journalist, a former banker and an economist had predicted the 2008 credit crash and are now warning against a new crash. We pay them another visit to find out what they had seen, where many others were blind.
If we look hard enough, can we see why we are now in the calm before the next crash?
With: Nomi Prins [author and former banker for Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers], Ann Petifor [economist] and Isabella Kaminska [journalist for the Financial Times] with cameos by Jim Rogers [super investor], Roger Ver [bitcoin-evangelist], Joris Luyendijk [journalist], and Yanis Varoufakis [former Greek Minister of Finance].
For generations, immigrants left their homes for a new land, and of homesteading farms on some of the millions of acres of virgin soil.
But now the land is under threat from giant agribusiness corporations, many of them owned by investment bankers, real estate developers, and, more ominously, by the threat of climate change, which is literally squeezing th last drops of water out of once-fertile soils.
While the first threat seeks to end the role of the smallholder, the latter two change the very nature of the land itself.
We come from a long line of farmers. The first Brennemans were political refugees, fleeing religious persecution in Europe in the 1600s in search of farmland in Pennsylvania, a colony founded by a religious dissident to provide a safe haven for other religious dissidents.
We know that small farmers care about their land, developing intimate relationships with each contour, learning which patches of soil bring the highest yields and which need special care, while investment bankers obsess only over the bottom line.
Many farmers agonize over the growing corporate control of their own land in an age when companies genetically alter the crops they plant by retaining ownership of the seeds themselves, barring farmers from doing what farmers have done for millennia — saving seeds from this year’s crop to grow next year’s harvest.
And then there are the patented chemicals made by those same corporations, chemicals needed to grow those same patented crops.
The investment funds move in
Like vultures, investment funds circle America’s wounded businesses and institutions, waiting for the opportunity to swoop in and harvest “troubled assets” everything from apartments and newspapers to — since the crash of 2008 — America’s farmland.
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Madeleine Fairbairn has been looking at the change of ownership of America’s farmland, as the university reported last year:
“We’re seeing growing interest in farmland acquisition, and we are seeing new investment vehicles being developed, but we have no idea what it means for small and mid-sized farmers,” said Fairbairn, who received a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study “farmland financialization” in areas of peak agricultural production in California and Illinois.
Until about 2008, financial services companies looked askance at buying farmland, but today, they are snapping it up at an impressive pace: As an example, Fairbairn says TIAA, the leading retirement investor for the academic community, owned no agricultural land before about 2007; today, TIAA controls $8 billion worth of farmland globally, investing on behalf of itself as well as other institutional investors.
“We’re in the beginning stages of what could be a significant shift in land ownership,” said Fairbairn. “Pension funds have enormous resources because they manage money for so many individuals. This has potentially major implications, since access to affordable land is a cornerstone of American agriculture.”
A rural sociologist, Fairbairn has tracked the trend since it first emerged. She has attended agricultural investment conferences where “farmland funds” were pitched to potential investors, and witnessed the development of investment vehicles that cater to the phenomenon, including publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) that first came on the U.S. market in 2013.
“Land ownership is a really important part of agriculture, but one that most people spend very little time thinking about,” said Fairbairn.
California and Illinois represent two poles of U.S. agriculture: California is dominated by high-value specialty crops and “permanent crops” like almonds and wine grapes; land is very expensive; and corporations already are major players. Illinois produces commodity row crops like corn and soybeans, and is home to more small, family-owned farms.
There’s another force at work too, and that’s overseas investors.
Consider, for example, the Saudi royals, who have been scooping up American soil, buying acreage to raise hay to feed the imperial horses.
But the extent of the land grab is much greater, as the Midwest Center for for Investigative Reporting revealed in a 22 June 2017 account:
[B]etween 2004 and 2014, the amount of agricultural land held by foreign investors doubled from 13.7 million acres to 27.3 million acres — an area roughly the size of Tennessee.
While representing only about two percent of total farmland, the value of the foreign-owned U.S. farmland soared from $17.4 billion (in today’s dollars) to $42.7 billion during that same time period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Most of today’s foreign investment in agricultural land began to increase in 2005, according to the Midwest Center’s analysis.
Of the top foreign investors who own agricultural land, nine bought most of their land between 2004 and 2014, about $8.1 billion worth of farmland, the Midwest Center found.
The final threats: Destruction of the soil itself
Worse still are those threats that destroy the land itself.
Of the two, we’ll consider the less threat first — the destruction of land through development.
We begin with a map, depicting the amount of farmland lost to the bulldozer between 1992 and 2012, as revealed in Farms Under Threat: The State of America’s Farmland, a new report from the American Farmland Trust [click on the image to enlarge]:
Conversion of agricultural land to urban and low-density residential development between 1992 and 2012
The development of agricultural land is shown in relationship to the low-to-high continuum of productive, versatile, and resilient values for agricultural land. The conversion of agricultural land to urban and low-density residential uses between 1992 and 2012 is shown as high (dark brown-red, > 25% conversion within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius], moderate [light brown-red, 10–25% conversion] and low [tan, 5–10% conversion]. Urban areas are shown in gray.
- Our analysis, the most comprehensive ever undertaken of America’s agricultural lands, shows that nearly twice the area of farmland was lost than was previously known. Additional major findings, include:
- Between 1992 and 2012, we lost nearly 31 million acres of land. That’s 175 acres an hour, or 3 acres every single minute
- 11 million of those acres were among the best farmland in the nation—classified as the most productive, most versatile and most resilient land
- Development disproportionately occurred on agricultural lands, with 62 percent of all development occurring on farmland
- Expanding urban areas accounted for 59 percent of the loss. Low-density residential development, or the building of houses on one- to 20-acre parcels, accounted for 41 percent
And the temperature’s rising
The final threat up for consideration today is the long-term and destructive impacts of global warming on the soil itself.
As any farmer can attest, soil is more than just inert dirt. Each soil is a complex ecosystem, harboring microbes that process soil minerals, digest dead organic matter, and release carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses.
Crops favor specific soil types as well, requiring significant levels of fertilizers when planted in less-favorable soils. A considerable body of science reveals that changing water levels changes the microbial community, and the drier soils become, the fewer species of soil microbe can thrive, resulting in a collapse of soil biodiversity.
And now a new study reveals that drier soils also play a direct role in global warming, as starkly captures in these maps, with the upper maps reflecting the regions average temperature increases between 1965 and 2014 compared. to a 1902-1951 baseline period. The lower maps feature of projection of temperature rises for 2050-2099 compared to a 1951-2000 baseline [click on the image to enlarge]:
More from the University of California, Irvine:
Dry months are getting hotter in large parts of the United States, another sign that human-caused climate change is forcing people to encounter new extremes.
In a study published today in Science Advances [open access], researchers at the University of California, Irvine report that temperatures during droughts have been rising faster than in average climates in recent decades, and they point to concurrent changes in atmospheric water vapor as a driver of the surge.
“Available soil moisture can remove surface heat through evaporation, but if the land is dry, there is no opportunity to transport it away, which increases the local temperature,” said lead author Felicia Chiang, a UCI graduate student in civil & environmental engineering. “Atmospheric conditions can influence soil, and we argue that they’re shaping the temperatures we experience during droughts.”
UCI’s research team analyzed observed temperature and precipitation data from the early and late 20th century and discovered that regions undergoing droughts warmed more than four times faster than areas in the southern and northeastern United States with average weather conditions. In addition, climate models showed a significant warming shift in Southern states between the late 20th century and early 21st century.
These changes point to a greater number of droughts and heat waves co-occurring. This can lead to such calamities as wildfires and loss of crop yields. Widespread conflagrations, spurred on by abnormally high summer temperatures, are currently burning around the world, including in parts of California, Scandinavia and Greece.
“Heat waves and droughts have significant impacts on their own, but when they occur simultaneously, their negative effects are greatly compounded,” said co-author Amir AghaKouchak, UCI associate professor of civil & environmental engineering and Earth system science. “Both phenomena, which are intensifying due to climate warming, are expected to have increasingly harmful consequences for agriculture, infrastructure and human health.”
He suggested that society has a responsibility to respond to the challenges presented by this new climate reality.
“The observed escalation in the number and intensity of wildfires is likely caused by the increase in frequency of hot droughts,” AghaKouchak said. “We need to bolster our resiliency against these threats to protect our population health, food supply and critical infrastructure.”
This study was partially supported by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
Posted in Agriculture, Banksters, Climate, Development, Environment, Food, Governance, Housing, Journalism, Nature, Resources, Science
From the World Health Organization’s Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children’s Health and the Environment [open access], a graph of the leading environmental causes of childhood deaths worldwide [click on the image to enlarge]:
With the Trump Administration rapidly dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, a new report reveals just why protecting the environmental saves lives, especially young ones.
From the World Health Organization:
More than 1 in 4 deaths of children under 5 years of age are attributable to unhealthy environments. Every year, environmental risks – such as indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inadequate hygiene – take the lives of 1.7 million children under 5 years, say two new WHO reports.
The first report, Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children’s Health and the Environment [open access] reveals that a large portion of the most common causes of death among children aged 1 month to 5 years – diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia – are preventable by interventions known to reduce environmental risks, such as access to safe water and clean cooking fuels.
“A polluted environment is a deadly one – particularly for young children,” says Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General. “Their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways, make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water.”
Harmful exposures can start in the mother’s womb and increase the risk of premature birth. Additionally, when infants and pre-schoolers are exposed to indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke they have an increased risk of pneumonia in childhood, and a lifelong increased risk of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma. Exposure to air pollution may also increase their lifelong risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.
Top 5 causes of death in children under 5 years linked to the environment
A companion report, Don’t pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children’s health, provides a comprehensive overview of the environment’s impact on children’s health, illustrating the scale of the challenge. Every year:
- 570 000 children under 5 years die from respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, attributable to indoor and outdoor air pollution, and second-hand smoke.
- 361 000 children under 5 years die due to diarrhoea, as a result of poor access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene.
- 270 000 children die during their first month of life from conditions, including prematurity, which could be prevented through access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in health facilities as well as reducing air pollution.
- 200 000 deaths of children under 5 years from malaria could be prevented through environmental actions, such as reducing breeding sites of mosquitoes or covering drinking-water storage.
- 200 000 children under 5 years die from unintentional injuries attributable to the environment, such as poisoning, falls, and drowning.
Ongoing and emerging environmental threats to children’s health
“A polluted environment results in a heavy toll on the health of our children,” says Dr Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “Investing in the removal of environmental risks to health, such as improving water quality or using cleaner fuels, will result in massive health benefits.”
For example, emerging environmental hazards, such as electronic and electrical waste (such as old mobile phones) that is improperly recycled, expose children to toxins which can lead to reduced intelligence, attention deficits, lung damage, and cancer. The generation of electronic and electrical waste is forecasted to increase by 19% between 2014 and 2018, to 50 million metric tonnes by 2018.
Posted in Children, Corpocracy, Environment, Food, Governance, Health, Housing, Law, Medicine, Politics, Poverty, Resources, Schools
We started reporting in California back in 1967, just as hippies started flocking to California’s sunshine in hopes of, well, who knows what?
Many of them arrived in old Volkswagen vans and battered panel trucks, mobile homes for those with little money but high on hope [and a lot of other stuff, too].
We had moved to Oceanside, working for the late, lamented Blade-Tribune.
Every newsroom back then had police scanners, tuned to the frequencies of local police,m sheriff’s, and state law enforcement agencies, so we kept our ears attuned to code numbers for significant crimes as well as the occasional cop-to-cop banter.
We also had to learn another kind of code, the peculiar terms used by local cops to describe people, things, and activities. [One such term we learned a couple of jobs earlier was sail cat.]
In Oceanside, we started hearing a new term, creepy-crawler.
Which I soon learned meant hippie.
When parking becomes a matter class politics
Oceanside was booming, thanks to the Vietnam War, because the engine of the town’s economy was the adjacent Camp Pendleton, a veritable factory for turning out well-trained Marines to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
You saw the occasional pickup truck with a camper or a trailer, even cars like the Nash Ambassador with a front seat that dropped back level with the back seat to form a very comfortable bed, as we know from personal experience.
Until the creepy-crawlers came, the occupants of those vehicles had either been tourists or folks visiting Marines at the base, people who in any case looked like everybody else and contributed to the local economy by spending on meals and other things.
Creepy-crawlers, on the other hand sucked money out, what with their panhandling and all — or so the reasoning went.
But even worse, they freaked out the straights and scared people off, what with their long hair, unshaven skin and those weird clothes, the beads, and all that pot and other weird shit they were taking.
Not exactly what you wanted in a town where to official motto was Tan Your Hide in Oceanside.
Like many other cities up and down the coast, California began enforcing new or rarely used parking ordinances, aimed at hippies while simultaneously also banning those who had once been tolerated, thanks to all those pesky civil liberties lawyers who were fighting against selective enforcement.
In other words, the unwillingly unemployed and the working classes were also victimized along with the creepy-crawlers.
Hippies are, for the most part, long gone, but the poor remain, today’s victims of laws drawn up in a different era.
How a Santa Barbara tackles the problem
A few years after we worked in Oceanside, we took an interim job in Los Angeles, where we I handled printing jobs for an NGO. We met a graphics designed who lived in Santa Barbara, a town to the north I’d only passed through on the Pacific Coast Highway.
What’s it like? I asked.
You know what they say about Santa Barbara, don’t you? she replied.
Allowing as how I didn’t, she responded: It’s the home of the very rich and the very poor, the newly wed and nearly dead.
Just as Oceanside was middle class, Santa Barbara was home of some of California’s richest, and remains so today. And in very few places do the rich exercise their control so openly, with the shameless assistance of the local newspaper.
And in Santa Barbara, laws against folks sleeping in their vehicles are strictly enforced.
From BillMoyers.com:
Homeless in the Shadow of Santa Barbara’s Mansions
From the accompanying report:
Twelve years ago, the Safe Parking program, run by the nonprofit New Beginnings Counseling Center, began offering a provisional solution. Its program places those sleeping in their vehicles into 20 private parking lots scattered around the city and provides bathroom facilities and some security. The parking lots are available only overnight and the cars must move by early morning. The group estimates they take 125 vehicles off the street every night and help more than 750 people a year.
The stories that Safe Parking’s clients tell me often involve a catastrophic financial loss precipitated by unemployment, domestic violence, injury or illness and the resulting medical bills. Most are working, although they have often lost secure, decently paid jobs and now struggle to make ends meet with multiple part-time jobs. A growing number of those forced to live out of their cars are families. All have been priced out of a brutal housing market.
Rents in Santa Barbara have skyrocketed in recent years — 20 percent in the last year alone — with one-bedrooms priced at $1,500 or sometimes significantly higher. The simple calculus of supply and demand is partly to blame. With a vacancy rate below 0.5 percent, a crisis figure, the housing market is at the mercy of landlords. Nor are there enough subsidized units to make up the shortfall for low-income renters — or plans to build sufficient numbers of new ones to meet the need, advocates say. “Santa Barbara’s housing market is broken and has been,” explains Chuck Flacks, executive director of the Central Coast Collaborative on Homelessness.
Inspired by their new friend in Washington, the Israeli government decided to grab more Palestinian land.
And a direct beneficiary is a settlement backed by Trump’s choice for the Israeli ambassadorship.
From the Washington Post:
Israel approved the construction of 2,500 housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, just two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with President Trump.
Netanyahu and members of his right-wing government have bristled at the harsh condemnations of settlement growth by the Obama administration, which condemned the Jewish communities as “illegitimate” and “an obstacle to peace.”
Trump, however, has signaled more accommodating policies toward Israel and has called for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and a potential future Palestinian state. The Jewish settlements have grown to house more than 400,000 Jewish residents in the West Bank.
“We’re building — and will continue to build,” Netanyahu said following the announcement.
There was no initial reaction to the announcement by the Trump White House or the State Department.
>snip<
But the potential sites could carry deep political resonance in the United States. Jeremy Ben- Ami, head of the liberal Washington-based group J Street, noted that about 100 of the possible new units are in Beit El, a West Bank settlement supported by David Friedman, Trump’s selection to be the next U.S. ambassador to Israel.
UPDATE: More from the Guardian:
Israeli politicians have rushed to exploit what they see as a pro-Israel and pro-settlement US administration.
The announcement of 2,500 new housing units in the West Bank is one of the largest in years and marks a comprehensive rejection of December’s UN security council resolution, which described settlement building as a “flagrant violation” of international law and an obstacle to peace.
The decision, approved by the rightwing Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, seems certain to further increase tensions with Palestinians and the wider Middle East, already high over the Trump administration’s proposal to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said the move would have “consequences”. “The decision will hinder any attempt to restore security and stability; it will reinforce extremism and terrorism and will place obstacles in the path of any effort to start a peace process that will lead to security and peace,” he added.
Posted in Governance, Housing, Mideast, Politics
Cheap adjustable rate loans plus an insane derivates market brought the global economy crashing down nearly a decade ago, and now the housing market is reinflating, fueled in large part by more of those adjustable rate mortgages.
Those cheap loans triggered a massive housing price inflation, as loan officers signed off virtually all buyers, thanks to those robosigning machines [which are still very much in use].
And given that President-elect Trump has stocked his cabinet with Wall Street banksters, an Associated Press news story should send chills down our collective spine:
U.S. home prices rose again in October as buyers bidding for scarce properties drove prices higher.
The Standard & Poor’s CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index, released Tuesday, rose 5.1% in October from a year earlier after climbing 5% in September. Prices for the 20 cities are still 7.1% below their July 2006 peak.
The broader Case-Shiller national home price index was up 5.6% in October and has fully recovered from the financial crisis.
Prices rose 10.7% annually in Seattle, 10.3% in Portland and 8.3% in Denver. New York registered the smallest year-over-year gain: 1.7%. Los Angeles prices rose 5.7%.
From the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a look at the course of the housing bubble through the end of July:
And it’s not just home prices that are soaring. Rents are rising dramatically as well, another bad sign of a developing crisis:
As home ownership rates fall, mortgage interest rates rise, and the housing bubble reinflates, America’s growing numbers of renters are falling behind, with all but the oldest and the wealthiest [often the same folks] losing financial ground.
From a new report on housing and household finances from the Pew Research Center:
From the East Bay Express:
Oakland Landlord Evicts Tenant, Then Hangs Pro-Trump Billboard on Building
‘On Christmas Day I’m being evicted. Can you believe that?’
eats shoots 'n leaves 
