A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Peru
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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It’s official: the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic saw the richest people in the UK increase their wealth to over half a trillion pounds. 2020 saw more people become billionaires than ever before. That’s the verdict of the latest “Rich List”. But of course, for the rest of us, life wasn’t that fruitful.
The Rich List just gets richer
As PA reported, the Sunday Times Rich List showed that there are now a record 171 billionaires in the UK. Ukrainian-born Leonard Blavatnik tops the pile as the richest person in the country. He’s an oil and media investor. Blavatnik saw his fortune surge by £7.2bn to around £23bn during the year of the pandemic. His business interests include Warner Music, which he sold a £1.37bn stake in when it listed in the US last year.
But as the Sunday Times tweeted, it was a record year for its Rich List:
Britain created more new billionaires during the pandemic than in any year since @thesundaytimes #RichList was launched 33 years ago https://t.co/fZffzuypNt
— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) May 21, 2021
PA reported that the number of UK billionaires jumped by 24%. Their wealth rose by 21.7% over the year, going up by £106.5bn to £597.2bn. How odd, when compared to the wealth of the UK as a whole:
Last year UK GDP contracted by 9.9%. The largest annual fall on record. The collective wealth of UK based billionaires, meanwhile, grew by 21.7%.
— Tom Mills (@ta_mills) May 21, 2021
“Unsettling”
So, these are the 10 ‘fattest cats’ in the UK according to the Rich List:
- Leonard Blavatnik – £23bn.
- David and Simon Reuben – £21.46bn.
- Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family – £17bn.
- James Dyson and family – £16.3bn.
- Lakshmi Mittal and family – £14.68bn.
- Alisher Usmanov – £13.4bn.
- Kirsten and Jorn Rausing – £13bn.
- Roman Abramovich – £12.1bn.
- Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho – £12.01bn.
- Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family – £11bn.
But even the Sunday Times had to admit that this sharp increase in the wealthiest people’s wealth was obscene. PA reported that compiler of the Rich List Robert Watts said:
The global pandemic created lucrative opportunities for many online retailers, social networking apps and computer games tycoons.
The fact many of the super-rich grew so much wealthier at a time when thousands of us have buried loved ones and millions of us worried for our livelihoods makes this a very unsettling boom.
A nightmare for the rest of us
Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the pandemic has been nothing short of a nightmare.
It’s been marked by an increase in precariousness, poverty, and destitution for many people in the UK. As The Canary has documented, this is the reality if you didn’t make the Rich List:
- The number of households living in destitution doubled in 2020.
- Four in ten people who needed financial support to self-isolate couldn’t get it.
- Chaos with Universal Credit included researchers slamming the contentious £20 uplift as “inadequate”.
- Half a million people entitled to Universal Credit didn’t claim it due to the complexity of the system, for fear of looking like ‘scroungers’, and other reasons.
- Unicef fed hungry children in the UK for the first time in its history.
- The Trussell Trust saw food parcels it gave to children increase in number by 107% in 2020.
- The Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) said that it saw an 88% increase in overall use between February and October 2020.
- The Trussell Trust said it saw a 47% increase in “need” between 1 April and 30 September 2020. It gave out 1.2m food parcels.
- By November 2020, almost 700,000 more people were in poverty than before the pandemic. This included 120,000 more children.
And moreover, the poorest communities saw the highest coronavirus death rates. As The Canary previously reported, some attribute this in part to years of social security reform.
As one Twitter user summed up:
This is not something we should should be proud of. To host a billionaire in 2021 means that you have 10,000’s people in the same country living in absolute poverty.
Billionaires are a human parasite. https://t.co/bIX0ViC22O
— The Bear (@bear_roar) May 21, 2021
How’s that “levelling up” going now, Boris Johnson? Because the only levelling up so far has been for the Rich List billionaires.
Featured image and additional reporting via PA
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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In order to maintain the endless expansion and infinite growth that capitalist economies require, our economy demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. In fact, economists and politicians generally believe that we need to keep the global economy growing by around 3 percent annually, meaning that the economy needs to double every 20 years — that’s twice as much of everything 20 years from now — and then twice as much as that 20 years later.
It’s not hard to see how this kind of exponential, infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing ecosystems collapse. However, it’s not just an environmental concern. In his latest book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, ecological economist Tim Jackson explores how the ideology of growth permeates our minds and our societal institutions in insidious ways which end up making us miserable.
Truthout spoke with Jackson about why this ideology is so pernicious, why it is holding us back from truly flourishing as a species, and what a post-growth world might look like.
Robert R. Raymond: To start, I’m wondering if you could lay out the main arguments you write about in your book.
Tim Jackson: The main argument in the book is that a world after growth and after capitalism could be a richer place. In some sense, both growth and capitalism, although they’ve contributed to progress, have also swindled us. They’ve sold us a false dream about what progress means and even about what human satisfaction means. And in locking us into an iron cage of consumerism, they’ve prevented us from seeing the depths of the human spirit and the possibilities for human fulfillment and for human progress.
One of the main points I wanted to make is the idea of limits — the idea that growth in the conventional sense is limited and the planet is limited — and turn that idea on its head and say that you [can] think of limits not as a constraint, not as a prison that keeps all of our possibilities limited to the amount of materials or the amount of money that we have or the possibilities for expansion of the economy, but actually as an idea of a doorway, a gateway to a different world.
We should think of limits as teaching us, not about what is bounded, but what is unbounded. Those unbounded parts of our lives, those unbounded possibilities, our endless creativity, our ability always to find places where we can dedicate our energy to human progress, to social connection, to relationship, and to a sense of meaning and purpose. That’s a core idea in the book, that beyond limits lies this expanse where there’s an even deeper fulfillment to be found.
In the book, you describe how our leaders have developed an “allegiance to the great God of Growth.” Can you describe why capitalism is reliant on growth? Is it an essential part of the system? In practical terms, what are some of the consequences of our reliance on infinite growth?
You can think of capitalism broadly as a system that privileges the idea of selfish profit-seeking behavior at the core of the organization of our economy. And that profit-seeking behavior is supposed to lead to efficiency — and sometimes does lead to efficiency, and sometimes even benefits society — but it works better in one set of activities than it works in another. It works quite well when you’re talking about the efficiency with which we use materials to build products and then expand our markets to sell them to other people. And the difficulty is that once you’re on that particular path, you’re almost immediately locked into a process that says, “Well, we get more and more efficient and we expand further and we invest our proceeds into technologies which make us more efficient again.” And you find yourself very quickly in a process in which expansion becomes integral to the system itself.
Where this goes wrong is — apart from the planetary implications of accumulating more and more stuff and building more and more things and consuming more and more products — there’s an inbuilt inequality there because the few people that are able to accumulate, because they own capital resources, can make themselves much richer. But it doesn’t necessarily always trickle down to the poorest in society. And in fact, in the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve actually seen the opposite. The rich got much richer and the poorest people in society found their wages stagnant, their livelihoods insecure, their work precarious — particularly in advanced economies.
How has COVID informed your understanding of our growth-based economy, and what has it revealed about the shortcomings of our current economic system?
One of the most striking lessons of the pandemic has been that it’s exactly those people, those precarious livelihoods, who turned out to be the most critical when it came to protecting our lives in the face of the coronavirus. That is, the care workers, the nurses, the teachers, the frontline workers, the people who delivered goods and services when we couldn’t get out, the people who cleaned … all of our homes and offices, the people whose livelihoods had been squeezed by. We forgot about the people who just sustained us, the people who nurtured us. So that economy of care was the one that had gone missing over several decades because of the way that capitalism has this locked-in drive towards expansion and profiteering and productivity.
That to me is a deep structural problem in the way that we’ve organized our economies. And we can think about taxes to redistribute the wealth that’s too concentrated, we can think about mechanisms or technologies to change the impact on the climate. But right at the heart of that is this mechanism that systematically demotes the importance of some of the most socially valuable people in our society. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have to face as we come out of the pandemic, and as we think about life after the pandemic, and as we think about life after capitalism.
What would a post-growth economy look like, for us in the West, but also for the Global South? There are some on the left who advocate for “growth agnosticism,” which is a stance that acknowledges that some parts of the world still require some form of economic growth. What are your thoughts on that?
I do think it’s important to be a little bit differentiated — there’s no one-size-fits-all vision. And I also happen to believe, and I think the evidence really supports this, that in the poorest places in the world some income growth is essential. When you look at the relationship between income and life expectancy, say, what you find is that as you go from having virtually nothing to around about $15,000 per capita, you get these vast increases in life expectancy and educational participation, you get a vast reduction in infant mortality and maternal morbidity. And even things like happiness increase very quickly from zero income to around about that $15,000 mark.
That’s real evidence that investing in and increasing incomes in the poorest countries is a good thing — there are places where incomes need to rise. And then you look at the data past that $15,000 per capita point across countries and you find a really bizarre phenomenon, which is that the prosperity gains, the gain in life expectancy, for example, the gain in terms of lower infant mortality, those gains really start to tail off, and in some cases, they even go into reverse. So, you get these perverse situations where you have very rich economies like the U.K. or the U.S. with life expectancies which are lower than in countries like Cuba, Costa Rica or Chile. This data really tells us something critical. It tells us that prosperity — quality of life, life expectancy, health — is not a linear function of income. It points us in the direction of the kind of initiatives that we have to take and the places where they need to be taken.
It goes together with this idea, which is another core idea in the book, about balance. When you have a deficiency of something, then having a bit more of that makes sense. Growth makes sense. When you have an excess of something, having more of it actually takes you into a worse position. And the problem with capitalism is we tend not to see where that point of balance lies, we tend to miss it because it’s continually driving forward, continually expanding, continually lionizing the idea of more — when sometimes less is what’s needed.
We’ve been talking about a lot of really big concepts — a lot of interesting ideas of where we could go as a society and a lot of the challenges and difficulties that exist right now in the way that we’ve organized our economic systems. But to zoom in a little bit, what are some of the practical paths forward in order to begin moving towards that balance you’re talking about?
In my last book, Prosperity Without Growth, I presented a threefold distillation of this. First, establish the limits, because it’s the limits that tell you how you can afford to live. So we must make clear what the limits are: like the emission pathways that will lead us to a safe place in relation to climate, the limits of how much oil or gas we can afford to dig out of the ground, the limits around material implications of our lives, or how much can we afford to put into the ocean. We have to make those limits part of our accounting processes so that we can see the natural frame within which we live.
And then there is my second main theme which is to fix the economics, because the economics are profoundly broken in exactly that sense that we were talking about before. That, for example, the most important people in society are very poorly rewarded and mistreated by capitalism. And so, the economics that says that a financial sector worker deserves 1,000 times the income level of someone who is saving lives on the front line of the pandemic, is broken.
So, putting in place mechanisms that guarantee the basic services that we need in society, like health and education, putting in mechanisms that pay people decent salaries, putting in place mechanisms that perhaps provide, as we did in some countries during the pandemic, a kind of basic income that allows people to actually undertake care work in the home — unpaid work, that contributes massively to society. There are so many different ways of reconfiguring our economic incentives and they have to play a part in how we make this transition.
And then my third strand is to change the social logic. We live in a logic that dysfunctionally encourages us into endless anxiety in order to promote the sense that we are only complete if we go out shopping, if we consume, and that our only satisfactions are to be had through that role in society. It’s a poor understanding of our psychology. We deliberately inculcated it — we’ve encouraged that view of ourselves in order to have the people that we need within the system to [continually] go out shopping so we can continue to make stuff so that we can keep the economy going. [A new] social logic demands that we think differently about who we are; it demands that we reframe our idea of ourselves.
There’s a huge potential lying there waiting for us to lead more satisfying lives, lives of action and creativity and engagement and social concern that are deeply fulfilling and that offer us this space where we are no longer trashing the planet for the sake of the next latest material craze. So, in other words, I’m passionate about this idea that beyond capitalism is a richer world, a more fulfilling world — as well as one that is less damaging to the planet and to other people.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A California lawmaker is calling for the Biden administration to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Paycheck Protection Program in response to an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The program, known as the PPP, was established under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act – or CARES Act – on March 27, 2020. President Donald Trump announced at the time that the PPP would provide “unprecedented support to small businesses.” The program has injected more than $780 billion into businesses, including Reveal, since last April.
A Reveal analysis of more than 5 million PPP loans found widespread racial disparities in how those loans were distributed. In the vast majority of metro areas with a population of 1 million or more, the rate of lending to majority-White areas was higher than the rates for any majority-Latinx, Black or Asian areas.
Los Angeles and New York had some of the worst disparities in the nation: Businesses in majority-White areas received loans at twice the rate that majority-Latinx tracts received, at least one and a half times the rate of businesses in majority-Black areas and 1.2 times the rate in Asian areas.
On the morning of Sunday, May 2, Democratic U.S. Rep. Judy Chu was reading the Los Angeles Times, which co-published Reveal’s investigation. “I practically stood straight up and ran to the computer to say to the staff that we need to do something about this,” Chu told Reveal. From her Twitter account, Chu wrote: “For a year, I have warned that w/out better rules, PPP loans meant for ALL #SmallBiz will pass over communities of color. Now we have evidence that’s exactly what happened.”
That Monday, May 3, Chu wrote a letter addressed to Small Business Administration Administrator Isabella Guzman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urging “immediate action to address racial disparities in the administration of the Paycheck Protection Program.”
“PPP has been among the most impactful interventions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and has helped millions of small businesses to keep their doors open through this crisis,” Chu wrote. “But evidence that minority businesses have not been provided the opportunity to participate at the same level as white-owned firms demands our immediate attention.”
Decisions made by the SBA and the Treasury Department in implementing the program ultimately led to the racial disparities Reveal uncovered, according to interviews with equitable lending experts and a sharply critical report by a congressional select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. Banks were directed to prioritize existing customers, even though Black-owned businesses are less likely to have a banking relationship. Forgiveness requirements in the program’s critical first round centered on payroll costs, even though studies have shown that most Black business owners are sole proprietors. The program also initially excluded immigrant business owners who pay taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, instead of a Social Security number, blocking access for large numbers of Latinx, Asian and other immigrant proprietors.
Chu, a member of the House Committee on Small Business, urged the SBA and the Treasury to “conduct and report a comprehensive analysis of PPP’s performance in racial and ethnic minority communities and develop a plan to increase participation and outreach to underserved markets.”
Through the CARES Act, Congress ordered the SBA and the Treasury to issue guidance to lenders to ensure that the program “prioritizes small business concerns and entities in underserved and rural markets.” But the Trump administration exercised “a blatant disregard of the mandate of the CARES Act,” Chu told Reveal.
When the PPP launched last year, Chu said she heard from multiple small business owners in her district, which covers parts of Los Angeles and the western San Gabriel Valley, who could not get through to big banks. “I was getting all these calls from small business owners who were so desperate, who could not get even to step one,” she recalled. She wrote a letter at the time to the SBA and the Treasury expressing concern that PPP lenders were failing to assist businesses in underserved communities.
Chu’s district includes the predominantly Asian city of Monterey Park, where only about a third of businesses received PPP loans, compared with 61% in the predominantly White community of Playa del Rey just 30 miles away.
Ron Tang, owner of the bubble tea cafe One Zo, was one of them. A former tax manager, Tang said he had a good relationship with Bank of America; when his foot traffic dropped dramatically last year, he secured PPP funds with ease. But since then, the bank rejected his application twice due to a “tax ID discrepancy.”
“I called multiple times and sometimes they would say it’s with the SBA, sometimes they would say they’re reviewing my application,” he said. “I don’t really know who to blame. It’s more like … ‘Why is this happening to me at a time when we really need the funds?’”
In her letter, Chu noted that investigators from the SBA inspector general’s office and the Government Accountability Office had repeatedly told the small business committee that the “SBA under the Trump Administration was not taking seriously its responsibility to reach underserved businesses.” Since then, the Biden administration has made changes to the PPP that are already reaping benefits for very small business owners. In February, the SBA established a 14-day exclusive PPP loan application period for businesses with fewer than 20 employees. By March 5, minority business loan approvals had increased 20%, according to the SBA. Immigrant business owners can now apply with their ITIN numbers. In addition, Chu pointed out, the SBA recently launched a pilot program to strengthen outreach to underserved communities.
The PPP is now mostly out of funds, except for roughly $8 billion that was allocated to community financial institutions that typically focus on lending in communities of color. The application window closes May 31.
Los Angeles Times reporter Alejandra Reyes-Velarde contributed to this story. It was edited by Esther Kaplan and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org, and Mohamed Al Elew can be reached at malelew@revealnews.org. Follow Morel on Twitter: @lauracmorel.
Lawmaker calls for ‘immediate action’ to address racial disparities in PPP lending is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders made clear in an interview Sunday that he opposes the push by top Democrats to restore a tax deduction that overwhelmingly benefited the richest households in the U.S., saying such an effort “sends a terrible, terrible message” at a time of crippling economic pain for poor and working-class people.
“You have got to make it clear which side you are on — and you can’t be on the side of the wealthy and powerful if you’re going to really fight for working families,” Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in an appearance on “Axios on HBO.”
The tax break in question is known as the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which former President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers capped at $10,000 as part of their 2017 tax law. While the GOP tax measure was highly regressive — delivering the bulk of its benefits to the rich and large corporations — the SALT cap was “one of the few aspects of the Trump bill that actually promoted tax progressivity,” as the Washington Post pointed out last month.
.@jonathanvswan: What if Dems reinstate “the SALT, which is a tax break for rich people in blue states?”@SenSanders: “It sends a terrible, terrible message…You can’t be on the side of the wealthy and the powerful if you’re gonna really fight for working families.” #AxiosOnHBO pic.twitter.com/Ij20vg6VsA
— Axios (@axios) May 9, 2021
According to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), 62% of the benefits of repealing the SALT cap would go to the richest 1% and 86% of the benefits would go to the top 5%. ITEP estimated that temporarily suspending the cap would cost more than $90 billion in just one year.
“There is no state where this is a primarily middle-class issue,” the organization found. “In every state and the District of Columbia, more than half of the benefits would go to the richest 5% of taxpayers. In all but six states, more than half of the benefits would go to the richest 1%.
Nonetheless, prominent Democrats from blue states — which were disproportionately impacted by the SALT cap — are demanding full restoration of the tax break in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, disingenuously characterizing the cap as a major burden on the middle class.
While Biden did not include the SALT cap repeal in his opening offer unveiled in March, Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) are calling for a revival of the deduction.
As Common Dreams reported last month, Suozzi is part of a potentially influential faction of House Democrats that is threatening to oppose Biden’s infrastructure package if the SALT cap repeal is not included.
Though much of the New York congressional delegation has come out in favor of repeal — including progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said last month that she doesn’t “think that we should be holding the infrastructure package hostage for a 100% full repeal on SALT, especially in the case of a full repeal.”
“Personally,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “I can’t stress how much that I believe that is a giveaway to the rich.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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America’s very youngest citizens are hardly immune from the inequities exposed — and, in some cases, worsened — by the pandemic. And for infants and toddlers, the consequences could be particularly long-lasting given how crucial this period of development is, according to a new report released by ZERO TO THREE, an early childhood nonprofit. Members of this age group have always faced drastically different opportunities to grow and flourish based on where they live and their demographics, but these disparities became more pronounced during the pandemic, according to The State of Babies Yearbook 2021, which looked at dozens of data sets spanning health, education and family welfare. Among the areas where gaps have widened: regular pediatrician visits, maternal mental health and food insecurity.
“The pandemic has been painful for all of us, but it didn’t need to be so devastating for babies, toddlers, and their families,” said Myra Jones-Taylor, chief policy officer of ZERO TO THREE in a statement. “Because our nation has ignored the needs of young children for decades, COVID-19 was free to wreak havoc on the conditions that contribute to our babies’ development and our families’ stability.” This was even more pronounced for Black and Brown babies, and those from low-income families, she added.
As of 2019, when much of the report’s data were collected, more than half of babies in the country were children of color. While 18.6 percent of infants and toddlers nationally lived in poverty, that rate jumped to nearly 40 percent for American Indian/Alaska Native babies and more than 34 percent of Black infants and toddlers. American Indian/Alaska Native and Black babies and toddlers were also more likely to live in a family with no working parents. The report also included data from the Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development Early Childhood Household Survey, or RAPID-EC, which looks at the state of families with young children during the pandemic.
Brain development is most rapid in the first five years of life, meaning the well-being of infants and toddlers is particularly important. Children who are exposed to toxic stress and traumatic experiences — including those that can occur from living in poverty, having a parent with mental health challenges and experiencing hunger — can suffer from life-long detrimental effects. These experiences can change the brain’s architecture and have been found to correspond with health problems down the road, including depression, heart disease and diabetes.
Here are some of the main findings of the report:
- Pre-pandemic data show nationwide, 6.2 percent of women received late or no prenatal care, ranging from less than 2 percent in Rhode Island to more than 11 percent in New Mexico. Black and Hispanic women are more likely to receive late or no prenatal care compared to white women.
- Between 2018 and 2019, the United States ranked 33rd for relative child poverty out of 37 economically advanced countries.
- Prior to the pandemic, 9 percent of infants and toddlers did not have a well-child visit with a pediatrician in the previous year. These rates varied greatly by state, with only 85.4 percent of babies in New Mexico attending preventative well child visits, compared to almost 97 percent in Oregon. That number jumped significantly during the pandemic, with nearly 38 percent of families missing a visit, according to data from RAPID-EC.
- Among low-income mothers, slightly less than 25 percent reported less than optimal mental health prior to the pandemic, compared with 17.6 percent of mothers who are not low-income. During the pandemic, RAPID-EC found caregiver emotional distress increased early on and has remained high for low-income families, Black and Latinx families, single parent households and families with children who have disabilities, the report found.
- Almost 14 percent of families with babies had high food insecurity before the pandemic, a rate that had decreased from the previous year. During the pandemic, however, almost 27 percent of families have reported high food insecurity according to RAPID-EC data. This percentage is even higher in Black and Latinx families.
The report’s authors found some positive notes for infants and toddlers: since last year’s State of Babies yearbook, two states implemented Medicaid expansion, which improves parents’ access to care and can lead to lower rates of infant mortality. The number of states with Medicaid plans that allow, recommend or require maternal depression screenings during well-child visits also increased from previous years. Six new states now include maternal screenings in their Medicaid plans, which can be critical to identifying and addressing maternal depression early.
On a webinar to discuss the report’s findings, Patricia Cole, senior director of federal policy at ZERO TO THREE, said more federal attention is needed to reduce disparities and start infants and toddlers off on a stronger foot; those include paid family leave, expanding early Head Start, and greater attention to mental health from the youngest ages. “We really feel like now is the time for a big, bold baby agenda,” Cole said. “States need to step up and do their part and there needs to be a federal priority placed on our young babies.”
You can read the full report, including data for individual states and state rankings based on data, here.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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As federal lawmakers held a hearing Thursday on broadband equity, a new report details how the internet service provider industry, through hiked prices and disappearing lower-priced offerings, is exacerbating the digital divide.
Entitled Price Too High and Rising: The Facts About America’s Broadband Affordability Gap, the publication (pdf) from Free Press states that “the central fact is Americans pay too much for the internet.”
“By the start of 2020, nearly 80 million people still did not have adequate internet at home,” according to report author and Free Press research director S. Derek Turner. “Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people comprise a disproportionate number of those who are disconnected.”
The post Report Blasts Broadband Industry For Fueling Digital Divide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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This is part one of a series reported in collaboration with The Missouri Independent and co-published with The St. Louis American. Read part two.
Ten days after Michael Brown, it was 25-year-old Kajieme Powell. Two months later, it was 18-year-old VonDerrit Myers Jr. All in the St. Louis region.
Had it not been for the Ferguson uprising, the deaths of these Black men would have likely gone unnoticed, except for a small, dedicated group of activists who have been tracking police shootings since the 1960s. They’d long been troubled by the local police’s brutal treatment of Black residents and its culture of impunity, the opaque investigations and the often mind-boggling conclusions – such as the finding that the killing of 25-year-old Cary Ball Jr., shot 25 times at close range in 2013, was justified.
After Brown’s death on Aug. 9, 2014, the activists saw an opening.
They began drafting legislation to create a Civilian Oversight Board that would review the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s internal investigations into officers accused of excessive force, abuse of authority and discrimination. The group of seven city residents would also scrutinize the department’s investigations into officer-involved shootings and killings.
They’d gotten this bill passed in 2006, but the mayor had vetoed it.
This time, the reformers had some powerful new supporters – Ferguson protest leaders. For months after Ferguson, people were marching to City Hall and shutting down busy intersections almost daily, demanding police reform. Young, Black Ferguson frontliners chanting into bullhorns were soon joined by people who’d never protested before – teens marching alongside their teachers, mothers wheeling babies in strollers.
This time, the mayor not only refrained from opposing the bill, he added his name as a co-sponsor.
The Civilian Oversight Board bill passed April 20, 2015. Exactly six years later, former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd; that same day, criminal justice reformer Tishaura Jones was inaugurated as St. Louis’ mayor, becoming the first African American woman to lead the city.
While the young Ferguson activists cheered at the bill’s final vote, many of the longtime Black activists – who had been advocating to pass this legislation for three decades – were more sedate.
“I was almost moved to tears, even though I know there is a hard road ahead of us,” said Jamala Rogers, co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression, who helped write the bill.
St. Louis Alderman Terry Kennedy (from left), activist Jamala Rogers, Alderman Antonio French and Alderman Chris Carter confer over the civilian oversight bill at City Hall in April 2015. Credit: Wiley Price/The St. Louis American Since 2015, St. Louis police officers have shot 53 people, killing 27 of them, according to the Police Department. Yet the Civilian Oversight Board hasn’t reviewed a single one of those cases. And the Police Department has withheld nearly all of the complaints it receives against officers, leaving the board unable to fulfill its basic function.
“We don’t know what the nature of the complaint was,” said Kimberley Taylor-Riley, the oversight board’s commissioner. “We don’t know who it was against. We don’t know any of that information about any of those complaints.”
It’s been more than six years since Brown’s killing made St. Louis the epicenter of the most promising civil rights movement since the 1960s. Yet despite stacks of studies and seemingly unprecedented public support for change, St. Louis has not seen a single substantive victory for police reform, thanks in large part to an influential police union and a larger police apparatus that has stymied accountability.
Today, St. Louis continues to have the highest number of police shootings per capita in the nation and is home to a roiling public showdown over racism in policing.
The trajectory of the Civilian Oversight Board shows just how difficult it is to reform police departments from the outside, in St. Louis and across the United States.
But the challenges for the board and the hurdles faced by a long list of other police reforms have also provided a revolutionary lesson to the new generation of activists who came of age during Ferguson. They’re leading a new movement, one being watched around the nation, with a more ambitious agenda for confronting structural racism: Rather than trying to push reform from the outside, they’re audaciously taking control of the city’s institutions from the inside.
Tishaura Jones is sworn in as St. Louis’ 47th mayor April 20. She is the first Black woman to serve as the city’s leader. Credit: Wiley Price/The St. Louis American As a 24-year-old, Kayla Reed threw herself into activism after Brown’s killing, eventually becoming one of the reform movement’s leaders. In the beginning, she hunted down solutions to the problems she saw in each individual case of police brutality. And she quickly saw every reform she pushed for fail to fix anything.
“In Mike Brown’s case, there was no camera. And so people asked for body cameras. The officers were white. So people asked for more diversity,” she said. “There was no consequence for the officers. So people asked for a civilian oversight. But each of those solutions – more training, diversity, cameras, civilian oversight – only add more money to the police and can be derailed or controlled by the police union.”
Jones’ ascension to the mayor’s office stands as the movement’s crowning victory and is already leading to significant changes. Jones’ first executive order tackled the problems at the civilian board head on: She demanded that all complaints against police officers over the last five years be turned over to her office.
Police not turning over complaints
When the architects drew up the Civilian Oversight Board, they had a principal mission: to ensure the department was properly investigating complaints about police misconduct and excessive use of force that citizens regularly file.
It’s mostly unable to do that because the Police Department has not followed protocols outlined in the ordinance.
If people feel mistreated by a St. Louis police officer, the ordinance stated that they could find a “joint civilian complaint form” at all police facilities, which would be used by the Police Department and the board.
The police had only been providing people with a Internal Affairs Division complaint form, which stays at the Police Department.
By not using the proper form, the Police Department has effectively thwarted the intent of the oversight law. “I will never see your complaint,” said Taylor-Riley, the board’s commissioner.
The department did not respond to requests to comment for this story. The department did tell The Missouri Independent and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that it does not track the overall number of complaints.
A St. Louis Metropolitan police officer orders protesters to disperse outside City Hall in November 2014. Credit: Rebecca Rivas/The Missouri Independent However, there’s a way to get an idea of how many are actually filed. When a person fills out a joint civilian complaint form, a copy goes to both the Police Department and the Civilian Oversight Board, where each is stamped with case numbers from both entities. So, for example, the last complaint the board received in 2016 had the case numbers: COB 16-0017 and IAD 16-0407. That suggests it was the 17th case of the year for the board and the 407th case handled by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division.
Using that method, from 2016 through 2019, the board saw a total of 125 cases; the Police Department received more than 3,000 complaints in that time.
Put another way, the oversight board reviewed less than 5% of residents’ complaints against St. Louis police.
In that first executive order, Jones not only demanded to get all the withheld complaints, but she also took steps to ensure that the Police Department followed the law. She ordered the Police Department to use the joint civilian complaint form that the bill had called for, effective immediately.
In a report obtained by The Missouri Independent and Reveal, the Civilian Oversight Board found that the vast majority of complaints it has received are made by Black men ages 25 to 49 against white officers. The board found that the Police Department has been interviewing fewer numbers of complainants and officers in recent years.
In 2019, the board received 25 complaints. Of those complaints, the police interviewed only one person. Board members are supposed to be invited to these interviews, but the board says members weren’t invited.
In the past, when board members were able to sit in on the department’s interviews with the complainants, they were able to change the tone of the interviews, said John Chasnoff, co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression, who also helped write the bill that created the board.
“Early on, they were able to see that the police were treating complainants more like they were suspects and interrogating them to poke holes in their story, instead of being more receptive,” Chasnoff said.
No shooting investigations
Many activists saw the board’s true potential as a check against police’s self-investigations into police shootings. The endeavor has been a total failure in that regard.
From 2015 through 2020, there were 53 cases in which a city officer shot someone in the line of duty, according to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
Police killed 27 of those people. Not a single one of those shootings has made it to the Civilian Oversight Board in the nearly five years it’s been up and running.
When a shooting like this happens, the Police Department’s Force Investigation Unit opens an investigation. The civilian board was supposed to review the unit’s investigation once it’s completed. Did the police talk to all the witnesses? Is all of the evidence there?
But right now, the investigations aren’t getting past Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner, the city’s top prosecutor and one of the leading criminal justice reform prosecutors in the country.
She can rarely close investigations, she said, because some of the cases she receives from the Police Department are so incomplete.
She says the investigations first need to be moved out of the Police Department and into an investigative unit in her office. At that point, her office would prepare a report for the civilian board and the public.
“Where is it in our criminal justice system that a defendant commits a crime and all his friends, whether they’re well meaning or not, get to investigate whether they’re going to hold them accountable?” Gardner said.
In 2017, she told the Board of Aldermen that members of the Force Investigations Unit had instructed an officer not to speak with her prosecutors about a shooting case. Additionally, one of the unit’s members told prosecutors that he had a “duty” to protect his fellow officers, Gardner said.
Oftentimes when there’s a shooting, Gardner said in an interview, her office gets notified hours after the officer’s union attorney is called.
“The police union lawyer is already on the scene before the Circuit Attorney’s Office,” Gardner said. “That is not appropriate.”
That’s why Gardner has been pushing for legislation to establish an independent investigative unit within her office, to give prosecutors more authority at the crime scenes in these cases. The new unit would take officer-involved shooting investigations completely out of the Police Department.
“The police cannot investigate themselves,” she said.
The end goal
Gardner first pushed legislation to move investigations out of the Police Department back in 2018, and it’s been strongly supported by the activists who wrote the Civilian Oversight Board bill.
In a hearing, the police union’s attorney, Brian Millikan, warned that an independent investigative unit would have a hard time earning the trust of the police officers or persuading them to give “voluntary statements,” which are crucial in criminal investigations. Officers always volunteered to give statements to the Police Department’s internal unit, he noted.
“For these officers to continue to cooperate in the fashion that they do, they need to trust the system in which they are operating under,” Millikan said. “I understand the public needs to trust the system as well. But it’s not just the public.”
The measure never got past the first round of hearings. The same thing happened to another bill, proposed by Alderwoman Megan Green, aimed at curtailing the Police Department’s use of chemical munitions at protests and establishing protocols for how police should respond to protestors.
The union then ran an aggressive campaign against Green, labeling her a communist. In one Facebook post targeting her, the union declared: “BETTER DEAD THAN RED.” Another alderwoman took it as a death threat.
The union also fought the creation of the Civilian Oversight Board. At a raucous public hearing for the bill, dozens of officers stood in unison to oppose the watchdog measure, calling it “anti-police” legislation.
Officers then refused to provide their voluntary statements to the board once it was created. The union sued to try to prevent the board from having access to the statements officers gave to Internal Affairs investigators, but ultimately lost the suit.
Jay Schroeder, president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, said the union is unfairly accused of being anti-reform and of protecting bad officers.
“The purpose of the police union is to advocate for all its members,” he said. “Our mission statement for years was to obtain a union contract, collective bargaining rights and due process rights. That’s always been kind of our focus.”
Meanwhile, he couldn’t recall a single instance when the union has publicly denounced a police officer for misconduct.
Terry Kennedy is the longtime alderman who championed the civilian oversight bill and led the Black Aldermanic Caucus for many years. He grew up hearing stories about his enslaved great-grandparents – what they did in the struggle to “move the needle” for his generation.
Kennedy has spent his life trying to do the same for this new generation of activists, like Kayla Reed. And he understands that they have to come up with new tactics to meet the moment.
“Racism and white supremacy is adaptable,” Kennedy said. “As opposed to being so overt, it became more institutionalized. So the fight has to change.”
As Reed watched reform after reform die, she began to see where power truly resided and decided she’d been doing it all wrong.
She drew up a whole new plan back in 2016. Reed would build a movement that would become as politically powerful as the police union. Any prosecutor, alderman or mayor who wanted to get elected would need the movement’s endorsement. If they didn’t support reform legislation, they’d have to think about how it would impact her support.
They would take control of the reins of power. They would change policing as we know it. So police stop killing Black people.
“We spend too much money on police,” Reed said, “and it’s not keeping us safe. What does it mean to spend that much money on people? That’s not radical. That’s not revolutionary. That is common sense to me.”
Reveal reporter Trey Bundy contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue, Jason Hancock and Nina Martin. Kenya Vaughn was a contributing editor. It was fact checked by Liz Boyd and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
‘The fight has to change’: Why Ferguson activists ditched police reform is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
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As the U.S. rushes to vaccinate its population against the coronavirus, most counties with the sickest residents are lagging behind and making only incremental progress reaching their most vulnerable populations.
A ProPublica analysis of county data maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that early attempts to prioritize people with chronic illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and obesity have faltered. At the same time, healthier — and often wealthier — counties moved faster in vaccinating residents, especially those 65 and older. (Seniors are a more reliable measure of vaccination progress than younger adults, who are less likely to have been eligible long enough to receive their second shots.) Counties with high levels of chronic illnesses or “comorbidities” had, on average, immunized 57% of their seniors by April 25, compared to 65% of seniors in counties with the lowest comorbidity risk.
A similar gap has also opened for all other adults. The one-third of counties with the highest chronic illness risk have on average finished shots for 15% of their 64-and-under residents, four percentage points below the average for the healthiest one-third of counties.
In counties with high rates of chronic disease, residents are more likely to die prematurely from heart or pulmonary diseases, diabetes or illnesses related to smoking or obesity. Those conditions also increase a person’s risk of developing severe COVID-19.
People with chronic illnesses are especially important to vaccinate because their coronavirus infections are more likely to end in hospitalization and death, said Janet Baseman, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington. If counties with high comorbidities remain behind, she said, “then we are not accomplishing our objective, as communities or as a nation, of saving lives.”
Counties With the Highest Health Risks Have the Lowest Vaccination Rates Among Seniors
In the four months since public vaccinations began, clear disparities have emerged in how quickly the richest and poorest counties have delivered shots to their residents. Multiple health experts and officials say the numbers underscore a key strategic misstep under the Trump administration, which asked state and local governments to prioritize people with illnesses that would increase their chances of hospitalization or death, but provided no additional funding to support the efforts.
Many states chose a simpler approach, opening vaccine appointments to everyone 65 and older with minimal on-the-ground outreach to people with chronic illnesses. “It made some states go a little bit faster,” said Dr. Grace Lee, a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and an infectious diseases physician at Stanford Children’s Health. “But I think it really increased the inequities early on.”
When vaccinations started in December and January for the general population, the federal Department of Health and Human Services distributed free doses and supplies, but almost no money or staffing to administer the shots. State and local health officials had to decide who would first be eligible for the small amounts of vaccine then available and how to get doses into arms. They also had to watch for interlopers — many of them young, white and from other locations — who booked appointments they didn’t qualify for.
In counties with more chronic illness, identifying the neighborhoods and housing complexes where residents or critical workers most need the shots — and then actually getting them to accept vaccinations — can be complicated, time-consuming work. Health officials in several counties with high rates of chronic illness said they are making slow progress by focusing resources on small events and mobile teams instead of on sprawling mass vaccination sites.
ProPublica focused on comorbidities because they are directly related to increased risk of developing severe COVID-19. People with lower incomes are more likely to have comorbidities; urban counties with high average incomes tend to have fully immunized a larger share of their older residents than other counties. In addition to income, the analysis looked at the urban and rural divide, age demographics and differences between states’ overall vaccination rates.
While communities of color have disproportionately high rates of chronic illness nationally, the analysis found no relationship between counties’ racial demographics and coronavirus vaccination rates.
The rollout has largely relied less on government outreach than on individual initiative. People with flexible schedules, transportation and regular access to the health care system have been better able to get appointments on their own or with help from family and friends. Those with less support have fallen behind.
Separately, surveys by the CDC last year indicated that adults with underlying medical conditions were less interested in getting the vaccine than healthier adults. People surveyed who said they were unlikely to get vaccinated most often cited concerns about side effects and safety.
To date, more than 98 million people in the U.S. — including 37 million seniors — are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, while another 150 million adults have yet to receive a shot. During an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, President Joe Biden heralded the vaccination effort as “one of the greatest logistical achievements” in the country’s history.
The push continues even as demand for shots appears to be declining, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Providers injected more than 21.7 million doses during the second week of April, according to CDC data, as the supply of vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson increased significantly. That number declined to 19.2 million shots the next week, and preliminary figures indicate immunizations dropped even more sharply last week. (Federal authorities temporarily paused use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for 10 days to study a small number of blood clot cases potentially related to the shot. It has since been cleared for use.)
There probably aren’t yet enough fully vaccinated people in the U.S. to protect against another surge, Osterholm said, especially with the more transmissible coronavirus variants now prevalent. In Michigan, new cases again soared in April, setting records for daily COVID-19 hospitalizations.
“We’re not out of the woods yet in this country,” Osterholm said. “What happened in Michigan could still happen in a number of other states out there. Even with the level of vaccination they’ve had and the previous infections, look what still happened.”
Reaching the most vulnerable has been a top concern for many of the poorest cities and counties since vaccinations began.
In Baltimore, COVID-19 caused far more severe illness and death in the majority-Black city’s communities of color, where people with chronic illnesses are more common, according to Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, the city health commissioner. During the first month of the vaccine rollout, the Baltimore health department realized it needed different tactics for immunizing its seniors.
The city of Baltimore has the highest rates of diabetes, smoking and obesity of the seven counties in its metro area, and its premature death rate is nearly double that of its neighboring counties, data from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences shows. It ranks among the nation’s most at-risk jurisdictions from chronic illness. Other parts of the region, like the more affluent nearby Howard County, are among the healthiest.
CDC data shows just 55% of Baltimore City’s seniors were fully vaccinated as of April 25, 15 percentage points lower than the rate for residents 65 and older in larger Baltimore County, which surrounds the city.
Counties in the Baltimore Metro Area With the Lowest Vaccination Rates Among Seniors Have Some of the Highest Health Risks
Within Baltimore, Dzirasa said, the pandemic hit hardest in Black neighborhoods on the city’s east and west sides, where residents have long struggled against discrimination, poverty and chronic illnesses. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen the same thing again with vaccination rates,” she said.
The city health department knew that many of its most vulnerable seniors would have no transportation to vaccination sites, and that their senior living centers were less likely than facilities in wealthier communities to have relationships with pharmacies to secure doses.
In January, Dzirasa said, her staff partnered with hospitals and pharmacies to create mobile vaccine teams that could deliver shots directly to those most at risk of severe COVID-19.
The first step was to win residents’ trust with visits to centers from community health workers, who explained the vaccines, provided reassurance and scheduled appointments. The teams identified 117 senior living centers and have immunized residents one by one at almost every facility over the past three months.
“It’s definitely a slower approach,” Dzirasa said. “At these events, we’re doing anywhere from 75 to 150 people, tops.”
Baltimore has multiple mass vaccination sites that can each provide from hundreds to thousands of shots a day. A couple of months ago, all site appointments were booked, and ineligible people had to be weeded out, Dzirasa said. Now, those spots are increasingly unfilled, and Dzirasa expects gradual progress going forward.
The disparity in vaccination rates between counties with high rates of chronic illness and the rest of the country is partly the result of the Trump administration’s decision not to invest federal dollars in vaccine sites at the beginning, argues Lee.
“They launched this massive campaign and were like, ‘Good luck, you’re on your own,’” Lee said. “And not only do you have to deliver a very complicated series of vaccines, but on top of that we expect you to address inequities, all without any additional support.”
The Biden administration set up several mass vaccination sites in high-risk communities in February and has now sent federal workers, equipment or funds to operate more than 400 vaccination sites nationwide. But many counties with high rates of comorbidity are still working to make up for a slow start.
The winter COVID-19 surge was peaking when vaccine doses started to arrive in Wyandotte County, part of Kansas City’s urban core. Small deliveries containing about 2,000 doses arrived each week from the federal government, said Dr. Erin Corriveau, the county’s deputy medical officer.
At first, only health care workers and nursing home residents qualified to be vaccinated. Then, on Jan. 21, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly opened eligibility to everyone 65 and older, including more than 20,000 seniors in Wyandotte County.
“We’re going, ‘Oh my God, that’s a huge number of people,’” Corriveau recalled. The county decided to set its own eligibility rules, since it was still receiving just 2,000 doses a week.
Most new COVID-19 cases at the time were young adults. To help drive down case numbers, Corriveau said, the county temporarily narrowed eligibility to just residents 85 and older while adding critical workers whose jobs exposed them to greater infection risk.
Wyandotte County opened the shots to all seniors a few weeks later as case numbers dropped. But the demand for shots was modest, Corriveau said, especially compared to the clamor in other parts of the country, where older Americans struggled to find providers with available doses.
The county now runs three mass vaccination sites located on bus routes, with assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It keeps pharmacies stocked with vaccines, and dispatches “drop teams” to administer shots at small neighborhood operations. Doses are plentiful, but willing recipients are scarce. Corriveau said many of the county’s seniors are wary about the vaccines’ safety and have been unwilling to get the shots at large, impersonal sites.
“We’ve tried to make this vaccine as available as humanly possible,” she said. “We’re incentivizing vaccines with giveaways and food boxes and we’re doing Saturday hours and expanding our evening hours.”
Despite those efforts, only 56% of seniors in Wyandotte County were fully vaccinated as of April 25. A few miles south, in Johnson County, more than 83% were immunized.
The neighboring jurisdictions have little in common with each other. Wyandotte, meanwhile, stands out as being more diverse, with residents who suffer from far more chronic illness. Wyandotte’s rate of premature death is double Johnson’s rate, according to NIH data.
Tami Gurley, associate professor of population health at the University of Kansas Medical Center, said Johnson County has longstanding advantages that likely helped its residents get vaccinated so quickly.
“You have people with time, who can get on computers and sign up for multiple lists,” Gurley said. “They all have their own transportation, nobody’s relying on public transportation, it’s all private cars out here.”
The university medical center where Gurley works is located in Wyandotte and cares for its residents, she said. But many of its health workers live in other parts of Kansas City, including Johnson County. “That is where the doctors live, and the professors, and the people who tend to be more pro-vaccine to start with,” she said.
Wyandotte’s health officials are trying to reassure residents that the shots are safe and that communities of color can trust the county health department. “Frankly, there have been major, major issues of trust,” Corriveau said of residents’ view of local agencies, “which are warranted.”
She and her colleagues are increasingly asking trusted community leaders to stand in for epidemiologists. Throughout the pandemic, Rev. Tony Carter, Jr., senior pastor of Salem Missionary Baptist Church, has encouraged his congregation to test for the virus, follow health protocols and, in recent months, get vaccinated.
Carter’s church volunteered to host a Saturday neighborhood vaccine event on April 17, and nearly 50 people signed up for appointments to get the Johnson & Johnson shot. But several days before the event, federal authorities paused use of that vaccine as they investigated six cases of serious blood clots among the 6.8 million people who had received it. (The U.S. resumed use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine without limitations on April 23.)
The county switched to another vaccine, but half of the recipients canceled their appointments. Carter reassured his congregants that the vaccine would offer a way of eventually reuniting with family. About two dozen people kept their appointments and received their first vaccine dose. “Most of those people stayed because of their connection to the church,” he said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Pandemics don’t spread evenly. The spread depends on environmental conditions such as temperature and airflow, population density and size, and, as it turns out, privilege. Brutal capitalism has driven the disproportionate impact of COVID on marginalized communities, and it is now driving inequities in vaccine distribution.
Not surprisingly, the contours of COVID’s impacts have reflected pre-existing societal disparities — which are often shaped along gender, race and class lines. These disparities determine not only how a virus spreads, but also the impacts that the virus has on the individual communities that are exposed. It has been widely reported that Black communities have been impacted disproportionately by COVID, experiencing higher rates of hospitalization, infections and mortality; these trends have continued on into the third wave of COVID, and have inspired hundreds of cities and counties, as well as the Centers for Disease Control, to declare racism to be a public health threat. Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities have less access to health care and testing, access to information, economic stability and work conditions, all of which contributes to the virus’s disparate impact.
In addition to race, another significant social determinant of health is class. Essential workers and those who do not have the privilege of working from home are disproportionately impacted by COVID, as they are much more likely to be exposed to the virus. Black workers and most of the low-waged frontline workers have less access to sick leave and are less likely to have health insurance coverage, contributing to the disproportionate impacts of COVID.
“People in lower income neighborhoods are more likely to have COVID-19 and are at greater risk of COVID-19 deaths as compared to people in higher income neighborhoods,” Gregorio Millett, former scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and author of the paper “Assessing differential impacts of COVID-19 on black communities,” told Truthout.
Lisa Dubay, co-author of the Urban Institute research report titled, “How Risk of Exposure to the Coronavirus at Work Varies by Race and Ethnicity and How to Protect the Health and Well-Being of Workers and Their Families,” noted, “We thought it was really important to look at the intersection of race and exposure, because what we know is that the U.S. has a long history of structural racism and interpersonal racism…. That has resulted in long-standing occupational segregation that privileges whites and people with higher education.” Dubay noted that the lack of sick leave, living wages and health insurance drove COVID’s spread among low-wage workers, disproportionately workers of color.
Another population that has been disproportionately impacted by COVID is incarcerated people. According to research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, incarcerated people are infected by the coronavirus at a rate more than five times higher than the country’s overall rate. And as of April 16, more than 661,000 incarcerated people and staff have been infected. Amber Casey of the Washington State Department of Public Health told Truthout, “When those folks go back into their communities, which are often heavily policed communities, Black and Brown communities — the same communities that are heavily affected by COVID due to other factors — those communities are more likely to be exposed and it does really keep a reservoir of COVID circulating.”
Casey also works closely with folks experiencing homelessness and people who are using drugs — both of which are populations that have been impacted disproportionately by COVID. She points to how a sharp increase in drug overdoses has accompanied the pandemic in these communities. Casey and her department are currently trying to get as many vaccines as possible out to people experiencing homelessness and who are currently using drugs.
Indeed, now that the vaccine is quickly rolling out, an opportunity has emerged to remedy the inequities cemented by COVID — but instead, vaccine distribution has proven to be yet another area where disparities are made plain. The Biden administration has been fairly successful at making vaccine shots available — however, when it comes to equitable distribution, it’s a different story.
Research has shown that Black and Brown communities in the U.S., for example, are less likely to get access to vaccines for a number of reasons, including internet access for appointments, proximity to vaccine centers or clinics, and informational barriers.
As Truthout has covered in depth, similar patterns in vaccine equity also exist on the global scale. According to Krishna Udayakumar, the founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, just four regions — the U.S., China, India and Europe — account for 70 percent of all vaccinated people in the world. And this is not an issue of supply — it’s actually projected that by this summer, the U.S. will have an enormous oversupply of the vaccine. The issue is equitable distribution.
“High-income countries like Australia, Japan, the U.S. and Europe, for example, pre-purchased a lot of the vaccine before it was even manufactured,” Merith Basey of Free the Vaccine told Truthout. “That purchasing power has led to this concept of hoarding, which has left a lot of poorer countries — or even middle-income countries — behind.”
Free the Vaccine is a collective of volunteers from 29 countries campaigning for equitable global access to COVID vaccines. Without affordable access for everyone, they believe that the vaccine cannot do its intended job, and that since taxpayers have largely funded the development of these vaccines, they should be available for free to everyone.
According to Basey, one of the largest problems is that high-income countries are not sharing the intellectual property around the vaccines.
“There are [a lot of] countries around the world [that] could manufacture the vaccine locally and work to treat their own populations,” Basey said. “But because of the sort of capitalist frame of the current biomedical R&D system, it means that sharing isn’t happening.”
The United States has fully vaccinated roughly 25 percent of its population, but poorer countries like Brazil and Mexico, for example — which have some of the highest rates of COVID cases and deaths, have both vaccinated less than 10 percent of their populations.
“The world has a scarcity mindset right now,” Basey said. “But we have the recipe, we just need to share it — there’s more than enough to go around. The idea is to have a much more people-centered system rather than a profit-centered system.”
Countries like South Africa and India have led efforts to temporarily suspend patents on COVID vaccines, but these efforts have been blocked by the United States and other wealthy nations at the World Trade Organization. This comes as India is experiencing a massive wave of COVID cases and deaths, recording 315,000 new cases in just a single day, the highest daily toll since the start of the pandemic.
As wealthy nations like the United States continue to prioritize shareholder profit over people’s lives, we’re also seeing how global politics and imperialism has penetrated the rollout of COVID vaccines. For example, it has been reported that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer made demands to Latin American countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of future legal cases as part of their COVID-19 vaccine negotiations.
Groups like Free the Vaccine are doing important work to ensure global equity and access, but they are up against a corporate, global system that is unwilling and unlikely to make any substantial changes to a profit-focused agenda.
As we continue to see the stark disparities in how COVID impacts marginalized communities here in the U.S., as well as inequities in response to COVID globally, it’s become increasingly clear that our current global capitalist economic system is not prepared to deal with major crises adequately.
Moments of acute crisis such as this, as devastating as they are, can make space for new conversations and open up opportunities for change. As COVID lays bare the major structural problems in our current social, political and economic systems, we are seeing communities across the country and across the globe rise up to demand substantial reforms, and in many cases, a complete overhaul of entire structures. With the very real possibility of another pandemic on the horizon, it’s important that we fully understand the root causes that drive the inequities in our society so that we can avoid replicating these harmful and deadly patterns in the future.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This article was published in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.
Photos by James Bernal.For years, Annie Graham’s dream was to open her own business. She began piecemeal, hunting down merchandise at swap meets, thrift stores and garage sales, developing an eye for items with resale potential. Eventually, 15 years ago, she was able to rent a unit on Manchester Boulevard, in a predominantly Black area of Inglewood, which adjoins Los Angeles. Now, her business spans four storefronts.
“I started out with just a little square,” she said. “Just a square. And I kept working hard, and each time someone would move out, I would just go over, go over and go over.”
Ms. Ann’s features racks of colorful dresses and rows of sneakers and stilettos. A mannequin in the window features a ruffled purple dress. Another shop, The White House, features only white outfits for weddings and parties.
Graham knows the owner of nearly every shop in this stretch of Inglewood – Hair by Mari, Swank Men’s Fashion, a shoe store called TILT, the Styling & Profiling barbershop.
“Mainly this section from Fifth across Manchester is all Black-owned businesses here,” she said. “So we’re all fighting to help each other to stay in business.” She’s adapted to the pandemic like they all did. She began selling home decor. When she fell behind on rent at the storefronts and at home, Graham let go of her team of six, all independent contractors and most of them family members. The Easter finery she had stocked last spring is still on the racks. Now, she said, her customers mostly buy dresses for funerals.
Annie Graham has four storefronts on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood, Calif. One is The White House, featuring white outfits for weddings and parties. Credit: James Bernal for Reveal The federal Paycheck Protection Program, one of the largest financial bailouts since the Great Depression, promised to help businesses like Graham’s. In signing the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act – or CARES Act – on March 27, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that the PPP would provide “unprecedented support to small businesses” in order “to keep our small businesses strong.” The program has injected more than $770 billion into businesses, including Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times, since last April.
But a year after California shut down, Graham had yet to receive any government assistance – despite multiple attempts to apply. In fact, in Graham’s corner of Inglewood, only 32% of businesses got PPP loans.
Through the CARES Act, Congress ordered the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department to issue guidance to lenders to ensure that the program “prioritizes small business concerns and entities in underserved and rural markets.”
Yet a Reveal analysis of more than 5 million PPP loans found widespread racial disparities in how those loans were distributed.
Those disparities were visible across the nation. Reveal found that in the vast majority of metro areas with a population of 1 million or more, the rate of lending to majority-White areas was higher than the rates for any majority-Latinx, Black or Asian areas. In many metro areas, the disparities were extreme.
Which neighborhoods were neglected by the Paycheck Protection Program?
Explore where Paycheck Protection Program loans were distributed across U.S. states and territories in Reveal’s interactive map.
Los Angeles had some of the worst in the nation. Although communities of color were hit far harder by COVID-19, businesses in majority-White areas received loans at twice the rate that majority-Latinx tracts received, one and a half times the rate of businesses in majority-Black areas and 1.2 times the rate in Asian areas.
The New York metro area, which includes Newark and Jersey City in New Jersey, saw equally striking disparities, with White areas receiving loans at twice the rate of Latinx areas, 1.8 times the rate for Black areas and 1.2 times the rate in Asian areas.
In other metro areas, including Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas and Phoenix, businesses in majority-White areas also received loans at about twice the rate as those in majority-Latinx areas.
In the Philadelphia, Kansas City and Baltimore metro areas, businesses in majority-White areas received loans at 1.7 times the rate that businesses in majority-Black areas did. And in San Francisco, White areas got loans at 1.2 times the rate as Asian ones.
Shannon Giles, a spokesperson for the Small Business Administration, said the agency does not comment on third-party analyses of its data.
Last May, Reveal and 10 other news organizations sued the Small Business Administration for access to PPP loan data. A federal judge ordered the release of the records in November.
Reveal’s analysis is the first look at how PPP loans were distributed at the census tract level across racial groups. As the Treasury Department and SBA initially eliminated a standard demographic questionnaire from the PPP application, banks did not routinely collect information on the race or gender of borrowers. So Reveal looked at loan totals and business data according to the racial makeup of each tract.
Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the fair lending group National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said the disparities Reveal uncovered show that banks failed to live up to the goals of a 44-year-old federal law that requires them to equitably serve all communities where they do business.
The racial disparities in the PPP rollout may not be patently illegal, Van Tol said, because the law has limited mechanisms for accountability. “It requires leadership and someone from those agencies to say, ‘This was a problem.’ ”
But of the disparities, he said: “Is it fair? No. Is it equitable? No. Does it violate the spirit of the Community Reinvestment Act? Absolutely.”
The inequities of the PPP are etched along the landscape of Los Angeles. Travel along Manchester, a four-lane road stretching from South LA to the ocean, and the disparities come into sharp focus. To the west, the avenue empties out into the laid-back beach community of Playa del Rey. Businesses are struggling in this majority-White community, too, but most of them – 61% – have been bolstered by PPP assistance.
When Joey Ancrile, one of the partners at The Shack, posted on Facebook last summer that the iconic burger joint needed support, he said customers lined up around the block to order burgers. By then, The Shack was already approved for a $156,000 PPP loan and received an additional $109,000 in February. “The PPP loans have really saved us,” he said. “And, of course, the community. They showed up.”
The Shack, a burger joint in Playa del Rey, has received two substantial PPP loans. Credit: James Bernal for Reveal Across the street, Cantalini’s Salerno Beach Restaurant – a local institution founded in 1962 – got a $95,000 PPP loan last April and an additional $133,000 in January. It wasn’t easy: When owner Lisa Schwab first contacted her own bank, Wells Fargo, she said, “They were just buried.” But she then submitted a successful application with WebBank, an online lender. “There’s no way we would’ve survived without that money,” Schwab said. “It was a lifeline.”
So at the neighborhood place, named after her grandparents, Schwab is still serving up the recipes her grandmother taught her – ravioli, eggplant parmesan, gnocchi.
“I had a good support team,” she said. “There are a lot of people out there that don’t and they were trying to navigate some pretty difficult waters.”
Lisa Schwab (left/top), the owner of Cantalini’s Salerno Beach Restaurant in Playa del Rey, says her PPP loans were “a lifeline.” Fifteen minutes east on Manchester is a predominantly Black area of Inglewood, where business owners got PPP loans at roughly half the rate of Playa del Rey. Graham, whose dress shop is here, first tried applying for a PPP loan at her bank, Wells Fargo, just like Schwab. But she found the online process complicated and couldn’t successfully submit an application.
In May, she heard that a company owned by former basketball star Magic Johnson had invested $100 million with MBE Capital Partners to fund PPP loans for minority- and women-owned businesses. So Graham applied with the New Jersey-based fintech company.
On June 15, an MBE representative emailed Graham about some missing paperwork. She needed to submit payroll documents, IRS forms 940 and 941, it read. But Graham, as a sole proprietor, did not file them. Like 96% of Black business owners, she didn’t have employees on payroll.
On June 23, MBE declined her application. The documents she submitted, the email read, “did not support the loan request.”
She mailed a letter to MBE the next day. “I am a small, minority, woman-owned business,” she wrote. “It was my understanding that your mission was to help and assist businesses like mine.”
“For me not to be able to get any help, it’s hurtful, that’s all I can say,” she said.
In an interview with Reveal, MBE’s president, Carra Wallace, acknowledged that the lender should have reached out to Graham to help her revise her application. But she said the company was overwhelmed as it reviewed roughly 20,000 PPP requests. Reveal’s analysis shows that MBE ultimately extended loans to majority-Black neighborhoods at a far higher rate than most other lenders.
“We’re a small business that is a minority-owned business ourselves that all of a sudden got asked to participate and help out and do something good for our community,” Wallace said. “We didn’t have the resources to spend an hour on the phone with somebody. We needed you to go online, read the directions and upload the right information so that we can process it through.”
Herminia Reyes operates Alfredo’s Mexican Food in South LA. She says she’s relied on delivery services and her drive-thru window during the pandemic. She was shut out from accessing PPP loans last year. Credit: James Bernal for Reveal Farther east on Manchester lies a predominantly Latinx stretch of South LA, where the picture worsens. Here, 10% of businesses received PPP support – six times less than in Playa del Rey. The experience of Herminia Reyes, who took over Alfredo’s Mexican Food less than a year before the pandemic hit, is typical. She pivoted to delivery services and relied on her drive-thru window. But as an immigrant who pays taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or an ITIN, instead of a Social Security number, she was shut out by the PPP last year. She hasn’t received any loans or grants, she said.
“I haven’t had any help from the government because I’m an immigrant,” she said. “I felt discouraged.”
The PPP also failed to reach Daniel Sanchez, owner of Giann’s barbershop, two miles farther east. Just 10% of businesses in his Florence neighborhood got loans.
“The bills, they have to get paid,” he said. “And I did not have help from anyone.”
The first round of the PPP, totaling $349 billion, opened up just days after the CARES Act was signed – and was depleted within 14 days. Lenders had to prepare for the onslaught before the Small Business Administration had even issued guidelines. That rush widened the gap between who was approved and declined for PPP loans. Any obstacle, such as missing paperwork or a lack of an existing relationship with a bank, risked leaving a business last in line.
By the end of round two in August, for an additional $321 billion, the costs of that bungled rollout were clear. A Reveal investigation found that businesses in Republican states yet to experience the brunt of the pandemic were more likely to receive funds in the program’s first round. The Washington Post found that most money from the first two rounds had gone to large businesses, with about 600 big companies and national chains receiving $10 million, the maximum. McClatchy and the Miami Herald found that banks raked in $18 billion in fees for handing out the loans – without risking any of their own capital.
In October, a congressional select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis issued a sharply critical report on the program’s implementation. Congress had instructed the administration to prioritize underserved communities and “economically disadvantaged individuals,” according to language in the CARES Act.
The SBA, Treasury and the country’s biggest banks failed to implement this directive, the subcommittee found. Despite what JPMorgan Chase called “almost daily guidance” from the SBA, no lenders interviewed by the subcommittee recalled receiving any guidance on prioritizing underserved communities. Several banks had fast-tracked the PPP process for wealthier customers “at more than twice the speed of smaller loans to the neediest small businesses,” according to the report. Banks’ larger clients “often benefitted from a faster, more personalized experience.”
The subcommittee also found that the American Bankers Association, citing a call with Treasury officials, told its members to direct PPP lending to existing customers. At least one major bank knew this would create a “heightened risk of disparate impact on minority and women-owned businesses,” according to an internal Citibank memo. The New York Federal Reserve Bank has found that most Black business owners don’t have an existing banking relationship.
Although Treasury later denied giving that guidance, the report found that several major banks had moved forward with the directive. The Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The SBA declined an interview. In response to a request to outline steps the agency took to prioritize underserved communities last year, spokesperson Shannon Giles wrote: “The SBA continues to support efforts to benefit the smallest businesses and underserved communities and address potential barriers to access to capital. It also has called on its lending partners to redouble their efforts to assist eligible borrowers in these communities.”
“This was a government program,” said Van Tol, of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “We wouldn’t have said you can only get your stimulus check if you happen to have a banking relationship with a bank that’s going to offer a stimulus check. But that’s how the PPP program played out.”
Even business owners of color with banking relationships struggled to gain access. “When they said small business, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me. I’m a small business,’ ” said Lara Curtis, owner of Mingles Tea Bar in Inglewood. She called her bank, Capital One, but the lender did not begin processing applications until April 15, the day before the first PPP round was depleted. (Curtis was later approved for $2,600 with online lender Square.)
Edward Flores owns an eatery on Olvera Street, a historic district lined with Mexican restaurants and artisan shops. He took over Juanita’s Cafe, founded by his grandmother in 1944, three decades ago.
“It’s one of the oldest remaining places in LA that’s been untouched,” Flores said.
When Los Angeles shut down, so did Olvera Street. With sales down catastrophically, Flores said he cut his operating hours and laid off his staff. When the city allowed restaurants to do takeout, Flores went to the cafe as early as 4 a.m. to cook small batches of food himself, clocking in 13-hour days. “There was one day that I recall that I sold $11.25,” he said.
He’s banked at Bank of America, the largest PPP lender in the nation, for decades. But Flores said he didn’t think the bank would help.
“They’re going to show me the door,” he said. “I don’t know who wants to loan money to a business that’s failing.”
He wasn’t the only proprietor in the historic district to miss out on the massive federal aid program – only 21% of businesses in the Olvera Street area got PPP loans last year, around a third the rate of Playa del Rey.
Edward Flores (left/top) owns Juanita’s Cafe, an eatery opened by his grandmother on LA’s historic Olvera Street (right) that never received PPP support. Seven miles east, in a majority-Asian corner of Monterey Park, the rate was only slightly higher. Here, about a third – 37% – of businesses received PPP loans. Ron Tang, owner of the bubble tea cafe One Zo, was one of them. A former tax manager, Tang said he had a good relationship with Bank of America; when his foot traffic dropped dramatically last year, he secured PPP funds with ease. But since then, the bank rejected his application twice due to a “tax ID discrepancy.”
“I called multiple times and sometimes they would say it’s with the SBA, sometimes they would say they’re reviewing my application,” he said. “I don’t really know who to blame. It’s more like … ‘Why is this happening to me at a time when we really need the funds?’ ”
Malik Muhammad runs a bookstore at a mall in Baldwin Hills Crenshaw. He turned to Wells Fargo, the bank he’d relied on since the 1990s, for help. The owner of Malik Books, which specializes in African American books and literature, submitted his online application in early April.
For weeks, he waited for a response. On June 2, he received an automated email from Wells Fargo that read: “We cannot confirm that all applications will be submitted and processed by the SBA before the funds are depleted, and we anticipate that demand will exceed available funding.” And that was it. Like most businesses in his predominantly Black neighborhood, only 32% of which got 2020 loans, the PPP initially left him out in the cold. (Muhammad later received a small round two PPP loan through Square.)
“I didn’t even get a follow-up from them whatsoever,” he said. “I know we’re not big business, but we deserve a call.”
Malik Muhammad runs Malik Books at a mall in LA’s Baldwin Hills Crenshaw neighborhood. His first attempt at a PPP loan was unsuccessful. Credit: James Bernal for Reveal In the Los Angeles area, Wells Fargo, the nation’s fourth-largest PPP lender, effectively starved communities of color of PPP money. The bank lent to businesses in majority-White neighborhoods at more than twice the rate it lent to businesses in majority-Black and Latinx neighborhoods.
In Miami, San Francisco, New York, Phoenix and Dallas, the bank also lent at higher rates in White census tracts than Latinx or Black ones.
The bank declined Reveal’s interview request, but spokesperson Manuel Venegas said in a statement that the lender was aware of the disparities. In response, Venegas said the bank supplied capital to community development organizations and launched an email campaign in February 2021 – almost a year after the PPP began – targeting Wells Fargo’s clients in communities of color “to bridge those awareness gaps and help facilitate these owners getting the support they need.”
JPMorgan Chase, which, according to SBA data, lent the most PPP money last year at $29 billion, produced similar disparities. In New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, it approved loans to businesses in White-majority communities at more than twice the rate as in Latinx and Black neighborhoods.
In a statement, JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Anne Pace claimed the lender had served communities of color in proportion to their numbers in Los Angeles. But she did not dispute the disparities affecting majority-Black and Latinx communities in particular and acknowledged that the bank prioritized existing customers. “Under the program rules, the most efficient way to get funds to as many struggling businesses as possible was to initially focus on our existing clients with a business deposit account,” Pace said.
Together, the top five lenders in the LA metro area – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Cross River Bank, Wells Fargo and Customers Bank – made enough loans to cover nearly a quarter of businesses in majority-White census tracts. The same lenders extended loans covering about 20% of businesses in Asian tracts, 16% of businesses in Black tracts and 11% of businesses in Latinx tracts, according to Reveal’s analysis.
Some of the widest lending disparities in the metro area came from Los Angeles-based City National Bank, which extended loans in White-majority neighborhoods last year at four times the rate of majority-Black neighborhoods and nearly seven times the rate of Latinx neighborhoods. City National did not dispute Reveal’s findings, but spokesperson Debora Vrana noted that the bank had done “extensive outreach” about PPP loans to partners serving communities of color.
No lender was more dominant in implementing the PPP than Bank of America, which facilitated the most PPP loans in the country – 343,500 – for a total of $25.5 billion. It sent loans to White communities in the LA area at nearly twice the rate it did to majority-Latinx and Black communities. In such major metro areas as New York, Miami, San Francisco, Dallas and Phoenix, the bank’s lending to majority-White tracts also outstripped its lending to majority-Latinx or Black tracts.
When asked about the wide disparities Reveal found in Bank of America’s numbers, Dan Letendre, a senior vice president focused on serving low-income communities, blamed the loan program’s design.
“We did recognize that the Paycheck Protection Program design would present challenges for many of our clients, and in particular for very small businesses,” he said. “When the program was designed, the view was, ‘How does the economy or system get money to employees who can’t go to work and are therefore likely to be unemployed?’ Which I think was valuable.”
With sole proprietorships more common in communities of color, he said, “they did see less money.”
While it’s true that the program was initially unfavorable to sole proprietors, “it’s also fair to say that there were problems with the way banks were implementing the program,” said Kevin Stein, deputy director of the California Reinvestment Coalition. “The blame could be applied in both places.”
Banks, under the Community Reinvestment Act, must affirmatively meet the credit needs of communities where they operate. But banks can meet this mandate in part by farming out the work to community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, that work closely with underserved communities. Letendre said Bank of America provided more than $850 million in credit to CDFIs that went toward roughly 10,000 PPP loans.
The reliance by banks on CDFIs and so-called minority depository institutions, the congressional report found, “failed to adequately address the needs of minority and women-owned small businesses.” And most CDFIs were shut out of the first round of PPP funding entirely because Treasury required that lenders have a historical lending volume of over $50 million to participate. Facing criticism, the SBA and Treasury set aside $60 billion for community lenders, including $10 billion for CDFIs, during round two last year.
Still, as one CDFI explained to the congressional subcommittee: “CDFIs felt like an afterthought in PPP.”
On a recent afternoon, Mark McKenna sits at the desk in his bedroom and stares at the three computer monitors before him. Headphones on, he makes calls to business owners applying for PPP, or those he suspects may qualify. “Ron, how are you?” he says in an upbeat voice. “This is Mark McKenna from Prestamos.”
McKenna is a business development officer for Prestamos – “we lend” in Spanish – a CDFI founded by the Phoenix-based nonprofit Chicanos por la Causa. Over the past year, he’s spent countless hours processing PPP applications.
With most of its clients in Arizona, Nevada and California, Prestamos approved more than 900 PPP loans totaling some $26 million last year, outperforming most other lenders in Latinx communities. Like other CDFIs, Prestamos received funding from such major lenders as Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
After a year of processing applications, McKenna possesses an intricate understanding of why so many small business owners were shut out by the PPP. Many banks didn’t proactively reach out to sole proprietors, he said. And the name of the program itself – Paycheck Protection Program – confused many sole proprietors, who assumed they didn’t qualify because they didn’t issue paychecks.
In addition, the SBA’s forgiveness restrictions initially disadvantaged sole proprietors who needed to cover rent and utilities instead of payroll.
Some business owners, like Herminia Reyes, the owner of the Mexican restaurant in South LA, lacked a Social Security number and were barred from applying altogether.
Still others told Reveal that they hesitated to take out a loan in the middle of economic uncertainty – a hesitancy that may have been exacerbated by the restrictions on qualifying for forgiveness. Daniel Sanchez, the barbershop owner, said he was concerned about defaulting on a loan and ending in bankruptcy.
“I just believe you save your money, pay them (a bank) to take care of your money, and that’s that,” he said.
Daniel Sanchez owns Giann’s barbershop in the predominantly Latinx community of Florence, where very few businesses got PPP loans. Credit: James Bernal for Reveal There are other challenges.
Many small business owners don’t consistently maintain their financial documents and don’t have the computers or scanners they need to send those documents to banks. McKenna, who is based in Tucson, Arizona, often found himself asking whether a neighbor or relative has a computer a client can borrow or simply asking clients to take photos of their ID and bank statements with their phones.
“I can’t even tell you how many people didn’t even bother applying because they didn’t have those capabilities,” he said.
It was another massive government investment in the middle class that ingrained racial wealth gaps that persist in the United States today.
Faced with a housing crisis in the 1930s, Congress established the Federal Housing Administration and tasked it with facilitating mortgage lending in an effort to create jobs and expand homeownership. But the agency refused to insure mortgages in predominantly Black neighborhoods – neighborhoods rated as “hazardous” credit risks on color-coded federal maps.
These discriminatory lending practices, known as redlining, were never completely reversed. In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to serve all communities regardless of income. But there were major flaws in the federal law: It lacks strong enforcement mechanisms – and doesn’t explicitly mention race. In 2018, Reveal found that Black and Latinx households were still denied conventional mortgages at far higher rates than their White counterparts.
But despite the banking system’s consistent failures in serving communities of color, Congress designed the PPP to run through commercial lenders.
“So when you have a crisis like COVID, like a pandemic, when you say, ‘OK, we’re going to put together a recovery program,’ … and you run that recovery program through that same system, you’re going to see the same result, right?” said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition. “You’re not going to see an equitable recovery.”
In September, the Federal Reserve announced a proposal to reform regulations in the Community Reinvestment Act to better serve the law’s “core purpose.” One of the considerations is how to better address “ongoing systemic inequity in credit access for minority individuals and communities.”
“What is happening is a real reckoning around race in this country,” Gonzalez-Brito said. “It’s not enough, frankly, for bank CEOs to say Black lives matter. … It’s not enough for banks to put together racial equity philanthropic initiatives. … It has to be policy changes and systems changes within their own practices if we’re actually going to make a difference in the way that they’ve been functioning for generations.”
The Biden administration made a few changes to the PPP that are already reaping benefits for very small business owners. In February, the SBA established a 14-day exclusive PPP loan application period for businesses with fewer than 20 employees. By March 5, minority business loan approvals had increased 20%, according to the SBA.
“The SBA is working to ensure the economic aid is accessible to all that are eligible, including those hit hardest, while protecting program integrity and ensuring as quick distribution as possible of the aid,” said Giles, the SBA spokesperson.
Sole proprietors can now apply by reporting their gross income instead of net, resulting in larger loan amounts. And business owners with ITIN numbers, like Reyes, the restaurant owner, can now apply. The current round of PPP lending closes out May 31.
For many businesses, these changes came too late. As the October congressional report found, “the PPP can no longer assist owners and employees of businesses that closed as a result of previous implementation failures.” A New York Federal Reserve Bank study found that Black business ownership declined sharply – 41% – in the first few months of the pandemic, two and a half times more than White businesses. Latinx and Asian business ownership also dropped at higher rates than White ownership, 32%, 26% and 17%, respectively.
Could more equal PPP lending have made a difference? If every community in Los Angeles had received PPP support at the rate that White neighborhoods did, some 79,000 more businesses in majority-Asian, Black and Latinx communities could have gotten loans, according to Reveal’s analysis.
As with redlining practices from decades past, the PPP’s disparate lending patterns risk affecting communities of color for generations, said Kevin Stein, of the California Reinvestment Coalition. “What are the main ways that people build wealth? It’s through homeownership and then it’s through small business ownership.”
For family-run businesses that closed, Stein added, “there’s a great likelihood that they will be unable to build wealth in this generation.”
Gonzalez-Brito, now based in Oakland, grew up in Los Angeles and said she worries about her hometown’s future. “When I go back, it’s going to look so different,” she said. “We’re going to lose all these small businesses that have been there. And who is going to replace them?”
On Olvera Street, Edward Flores’ cafe was approved for a $108,000 loan under a separate SBA economic disaster program. That loan is not forgivable, and a statement has already arrived in the mail.
“I’m fairly certain that we’re going to survive,” he said. “That’s probably what a lot of businesses are just trying to do – is just survive.”
On Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood, Annie Graham, the owner of Ms. Ann’s, is hanging on by a thread. She received a $15,000 California Small Business COVID-19 relief grant – but “my rent ate that up immediately,” she said – and was also approved for an economic disaster loan. She applied for the PPP again, this time through the CDFI Lendistry, which did not ask her for payroll documents. She was approved in March for nearly $15,000.
“I built my business on faith and strength, not on what somebody else can do,” she said. “So that’s why I’m trying to hold on.”
Reveal community engagement producer David Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times reporter Alejandra Reyes-Velarde and freelancer Sarah Cohen contributed to this story. It was edited by Esther Kaplan, Soo Oh, Jack Leonard and Jennifer Goren and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org, Mohamed Al Elew can be reached at malelew@revealnews.org, and Emily Harris can be reached at eharris@revealnews.org. Follow Morel and Harris on Twitter: @lauracmorel and @emilygharris.
This story was produced with the support of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships and Big Local News at Stanford University.
Rampant racial disparities plagued how billions of dollars in PPP loans were distributed in the U.S. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
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The federal Paycheck Protection Program, one of the largest financial bailouts since the Great Depression, promised to provide, in the words of then-President Donald Trump, “unprecedented support to small businesses.” Since its launch in April 2020, the program has injected more than $770 billion into the nation’s businesses, including Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, Congress ordered the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department to issue guidance to lenders to ensure that the program prioritized underserved markets.
Yet a Reveal analysis of more than 5 million PPP loans issued in the program’s first two rounds, in 2020, found widespread racial disparities in how those loans were distributed.
After successfully suing the federal government, with 10 other news organizations, for detailed PPP data, Reveal calculated the proportion of businesses in every census tract that received PPP loans in 2020. In the map below, each tract is coded according to its majority racial group. A dark shade indicates a high loan rate; businesses in pale areas were largely left out by the massive forgivable loan program.
Methodology
Once the Small Business Administration released detailed data from the Paycheck Protection Program, Reveal began to analyze the first two rounds of the data, covering all program loans for 2020. Reveal asked Geocodio, a commercial geocoding service, to provide geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) and associated census tracts for those loans. We then aggregated the loan data by census tract for our analysis.
In order to generate PPP loan rates by tract, Reveal had to settle on a way to calculate how many businesses in each tract would have been eligible to apply. In the end, Reveal merged two sources of data to come up with the best estimate of businesses by census tract: (1) a commonly used count of business addresses from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Postal Service and (2) a count of self-employed workers from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
The Postal Service provides HUD with quarterly data on residential and business addresses aggregated to the census tract level. We used data from the fourth quarter of 2019 to reflect business addresses before the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect economic activity.
According to Small Business Administration data, sole proprietors, independent contractors and self-employed individuals made up more than one-fifth of PPP loans nationwide last year. Our count of self-employed workers by census tract comes from the American Community Survey 2015-2019.
Both business addresses and self-employed counts include some businesses that would not qualify as small; however, 99.9% of businesses in the United States are considered “small” according to the Small Business Administration, so the impact on our findings would be negligible.
Using racial demographic data by census tract from the American Community Survey, we classified a racial group as the majority if that group made up more than 50% of the census tract’s population; if a tract had no majority, we labeled the tract “no majority.” Census tracts labeled “N/A” had a population of 25 or less and thus were excluded from our analysis.
Reveal explored other databases, including the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns and Nonemployer Statistics, to model the count of businesses at a neighborhood level. The disparities remained constant.
This story was produced with the support of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships and Big Local News at Stanford University. Download our data and view our full methodology at biglocalnews.org.
This story was edited by Soo Oh and Esther Kaplan and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Mohamed Al Elew can be reached at malelew@revealnews.org.Which neighborhoods were neglected by the Paycheck Protection Program? is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
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Congress spent hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue small businesses hurt by the pandemic. But Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money disproportionately went to White neighborhoods, leaving communities of color behind.
Small businesses are the heart of Los Angeles’ many neighborhoods. Reporter Laura C. Morel talks with business owners around Los Angeles who either received PPP money or faced insurmountable hurdles to get one of the forgivable loans. Morel talks with a Latinx barber in the Florence neighborhood, where just 10% of businesses got PPP loans. In a predominantly Black area of Inglewood, we meet clothing store owner Annie Graham, who couldn’t get a PPP loan last year, even from a lender who hooked up with Magic Johnson to specifically help minority- and women-owned businesses access the government lending program. In Graham’s neighborhood, 32% of businesses got PPP loans. Meanwhile, in the majority-White neighborhood of Playa del Rey, 61% of businesses got PPP loans. The disparity among neighboring communities is striking.
We end with an interview with reporter Gabriel Thompson about fast food franchises that received PPP money. One McDonald’s owner in Chicago got half a million dollars, but workers there filed multiple complaints with OSHA because they felt they were not protected from COVID-19.
This show is guest hosted by Sarah Gonzalez of Planet Money.
Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.This post was originally published on Reveal.
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A project which asked working class people to keep diaries during the first coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown is nearly complete. It’s now nearly ready for release as a graphic novel. But the project of lockdown diaries needs your help. It’s fundraising to get these crucial pieces of class and social history published.
Looking from the inside out
Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It was founded by Dr Lisa McKenzie. She’s a working-class academic and sociologist who’s also an ethnographer. That’s someone who studies human culture and society; kind-of like an anthropologist. The difference is an ethnographer gathers and then presents the information from the point of view of the person/people being studied.
McKenzie’s approach always aims to be inclusive. She includes working-class people in the research process rather than just looking from the outside in at them. An excellent example of this is her groundbreaking book Getting By. McKenzie spent several years interviewing, studying, and observing the residents of the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham. It was the estate she grew up on. The book smashed the establishment’s classist and racist narratives and tropes about life on council estates. Because McKenzie painted a picture of a community, its characters, and its values that the system rarely allows outsiders to see.
McKenzie has now turned her attention to life during lockdown. And the results could make for equally groundbreaking reading.
Lockdown Diaries
McKenzie launched the Lockdown Diaries at the start of the pandemic. She was worried about how life for the poorest people in the UK would be documented. That is, she was worried that other people would co-opt and narrate the lived experiences of working class people. McKenzie wanted them to tell their own stories. So, she contacted people she had worked with previously on other projects. McKenzie also put call-outs on social media. As she wrote for the London School of Economics (LSE):
I recruited 38 individual working-class diary writers. Some of them wrote for four weeks, while mothers who were home-schooling did five-seven days. I was sent pictures, images, traditional diaries, doodles, and short video diaries. They add up to an enormous amount of rich data from those first weeks of lockdown.
But for McKenzie, the project was about a lot more than just diaries.
The academic route
She told The Canary:
Initially I wasn’t really thinking about what I would do with this. At the beginning of lockdown, like everyone I was watching the telly a lot. And I realised that the same voices had got all the air space. Working class people were either being spoken about or not at all. I sat there wondering what was happening to the foodbank users that would be running out of food or couldn’t get out their houses. I saw the valorisation of the same groups nurses, medics but not others supermarket workers. And I knew from experience that working class voices would be absent now, and totally disappear in a year.
So, I just thought: ask people to write me diaries. I went to the university I lecture at and got ethical clearance. It was going to be a bog standard piece of academic research (it never was but I told myself that).
Shut-down
But getting Lockdown Diaries going wasn’t that simple. McKenzie said that she couldn’t get funding for it:
When I couldn’t get any academic funding to do the academic thing, I realised that I didn’t want working class voices removed by the academic process. So, I thought I’m going to self-publish a beautiful graphic novel; one that pays tribute to our humour, sadness and resilience.
So, Lockdown Diaries was born. The project is currently on Kickstarter. It needs funding of around £12,500 to properly publish it and pay people; not McKenzie though, who’s doing the project for free. You can pledge here. And it’s her approach to the project that partly got it to this point.
The trust issue
McKenzie is different to most of her peers. Being from a working-class background gives her credibility with the communities she works with. And she has always stayed true to her roots. This is crucial. Because as most people from poor backgrounds know, trust of outsiders and people from the system is a major issue. You’re all too often burned by the people who are supposed to be supporting you. As she wrote in Getting By:
Even though I had lived on the estate for over 20 years, the women [McKenzie wanted to speak to] did not welcome me into their lives with open arms, They were initially sceptical… More importantly, most people in St Ann’s were acutely aware that asking questions in the neighbourhood usually led to the neighbourhood being represented negatively, or ‘outsiders’ using local knowledge for their own benefit.
Respect
McKenzie was confident that the people would trust her to handle Lockdown Diaries with care and sensitivity. She told The Canary:
I think people trust me. I’m so far away from the normal academic and haven’t let working class people down so far. That probably means I’m a crap academic…! But it also means there was trust. On a personal note, if there was or would be any danger of disrespecting the diary writers, I would have pulled the whole thing. Which is why I’m not glad I’m doing this totally independently and away from the university. It’s on me. And I have always taken my responsibility and love for my class seriously; far more than to the university.
Moreover, trust isn’t the only potential issue McKenzie could’ve faced.
Time poverty
Much like trust, anyone who’s poor knows that time’s not your friend, You never have enough of it. Things you would like to do get put-off because of things you have to do. The idea of ‘choice’ is often out of reach. And the means to get yourself out of income poverty are restricted by time. This is called time poverty. The system which causes people to be time poor often doesn’t recognise it. But it’s a real thing – as many poor, working class people will tell you.
McKenzie made Lockdown Diaries so accessible that none of this was an issue. She told The Canary:
Because I only asked for a maximum of 28 days, I think it was manageable. Some of the mothers who were home schooling only did 5-7 days. But that was enough. I had one diary sent by text everyday, because he didn’t have access to a computer. Some diaries came as images… I had some diarists whose English was a second language. So, they chose to send me photos, some of which came as pictures of actual writing. It all really showed the diversity of who we are.
So, the participants wrote their diaries. And when McKenzie got them, her reaction was telling.
“Overwhelmed”
She told The Canary:
Initially I couldn’t read them. I was living on my own and going through the same stuff. But when I started to read them, I was overwhelmed emotionally. When someone writes to you they write in a far more personal way than an interview. They often started with “Dear Lisa”. And it broke me to be honest. A year on, I’m reading them again and honestly, they are incredible. The humour, misery but also massive resilience is all over them. I have people from East London to rural Wales and everywhere in between. A range of people, of different ages. But all of them incredible writers and documenters.
A graphic novel
McKenzie shared a preview of Lockdown Diaries in her LSE column. The project is going to be a graphic novel. And the artist Social Commontating has already turned one family’s lockdown diary into strip art:
There are things that are similar between McKenzie’s book Getting By and the Lockdown Diaries. One of them is that poor, working class people get to tell their stories. And they’re presented in a way which means none of these people’s truths are lost or misrepresented. Because all too often, this isn’t the case.
Deplatformed
McKenzie told The Canary:
I definitely think that since 2008 there has been a gradual decline in working class people having any platform at all. And then it seemed to drop off a cliff after 2013. The middle class have every single space tied and locked up. This means a project like this can only happen through solidarity; from beginning to end.
It cannot be done any other way, because there are too many middle class gate keepers. They tell us what our stories and lives need to look and sound like; what is acceptable and what isn’t. And then we become sieved of everything we are. Finally, we become a pure character of who and what the middle class can cope with around working class people. We need to be the pure victim or the pure enemy: the right-wing football-gammon Brexiteer – or the single mother trying her best working three jobs and advocating education and social mobility to her children. That’s what my intent is in everything I do: to not let the middle class tell our stories and narrate who we are.
Constant exhaustion
Being poor and working class is exhausting:
- The fear you feel every time you put your card into a cashpoint; not knowing if you’ve got any money or not.
- Counting how many sheets of toilet paper you use so you can save a quid on next week’s shopping.
- The devastating feeling when you know your kid wants something bought for them but they daren’t ask you.
- Hiding a brown envelope until you can find the courage to open it.
- Automatically ducking down and holding your breath when someone knocks at the door in case it’s bailiffs.
But what’s also exhausting is the zero representation you have.
Time to take back our spaces
Poor, working class people rarely see themselves in academic, media, or public life. And if they are shown, it’s often stereotypes. Feeling like no-one outside your own community understands or properly reps you is isolating, demoralising, and frustrating. It also makes you angry seeing people who are not working class (but say they are) speaking on ‘your behalf’. So Lockdown Diaries aims to change this.
McKenzie summed-up her feelings about Lockdown Diaries:
I just that I hope this type of DIY research and publishing will be taken seriously by ‘them’. Because this is the only way to make sure minority and working class voices are not cleansed and cleaned by the process.
Knowing McKenzie, no filters will be needed. Lockdown Diaries should be a groundbreaking, heartfelt, and important project. And moreover, it will mark an important moment in the history books: one where working class people’s voices were properly heard.
You can pledge to the Lockdown Diaries Kickstarter here.
Featured image and additional images via Social Commontating/Lisa McKenzie
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Cedar Rapids, Iowa — Terri Domer knows well what a brewing storm looks like.
Domer, 62, an Iowa native, has spent her life watching thunderstorms gather and tornadoes dash across rolling hills. Last August, when the midday sky darkened over the riverside homeless encampment where Domer and four other people spent most nights — built on a sandy bank near downtown, under tall trees — she quickly set about covering up their supplies.
A campmate said Domer was overreacting and left for a walk. “Suit yourself,” she told him.
Domer was busy weighing down a tent when she heard a shout: “I was wrong!” She turned to spot her companion racing back to camp. The sky behind him was “black,” Domer said — darker than it had been just moments earlier, darker than she’d ever seen it.
The derecho hit with a fury, winds whipping up sand and snapping limbs overhead. Domer rushed for cover, pulling a tent canopy over her head. Tornadoes typically come and go in minutes. But the derecho, a straight-line windstorm, was relentless. All around Domer, branches and whole trees crashed to the ground.
“I kept thinking, ‘When is it going to stop?’” Domer said. She said a prayer that she would live.
It’s an immutable truth of the climate crisis that the most vulnerable are hit first and hardest. At a time of rising homelessness in the U.S. and as climate-related disasters become common — wildfires in California, monster hurricanes that thrash the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, an arctic blast in Texas — the rule holds.
“We’re definitely seeing more homelessness, more housing disruption, as a result of these disasters,” said Steve Berg, programs and policy director at the Washington-based National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Climate change didn’t directly cause the Midwest derecho last year or any of those other disasters. Scientists are clear, however, that a warmer planet makes extreme weather more likely and more ferocious. For people experiencing homelessness, like Domer, the storms make matters only more difficult. Others are made homeless. In both cases, government agencies and nonprofits provide support, but increasingly the needs exceed their capacity.
Together, these experiences constitute a grim warning that the climate emergency is here already, draining resources and devastating lives.
There are an estimated 580,000 people experiencing homelessness in America, based on a single-night count in January 2020 — the fourth straight year homelessness had increased, according to a study released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was the first year since HUD began collecting data that the number of homeless people with children had gone up. And, as usual, people of color remained starkly overrepresented compared with the U.S. population overall.
Crucially, that’s all pre-pandemic data, and the reality is likely to be worse than we know. Millions lost work because of Covid-19, and even as the economy recovers, there remain 8.4 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic hit. Eviction moratoriums have helped, advocates say, but as some of those expire soon, the situation could grow more dire still.
The homeless population in Cedar Rapids numbers in the hundreds. It’s a far cry from the tens of thousands in larger cities, like Los Angeles, but the derecho’s lingering impact here is a microcosm of the various crises that can befall homeless groups in the aftermath of extreme weather.
When the windstorm finally did let up, about 45 minutes after it had begun, Domer’s campsite was in tatters: tents ruined, stoves and lanterns simply gone and just about everything else soiled with wet grime.
What struck Domer most, however, was the quiet. Gone were the normal afternoon sounds of the city. Even the nearby corn processing plant, a reliable source of ambient churning, was silent.
“I realized the whole town had been hit, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” Domer said.
The derecho swept across multiple states that day, leaving widespread and often severe damage in its wake. The Cedar Rapids area fared worst, with winds reaching 140 mph, the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane. Two-thirds of the city’s famously lush tree canopy was gone, much of it displaced onto streets and homes. And the power was out. In some parts of town, it would be weeks before it returned.
For the homeless, natural disasters prove torturous for more than the obvious fact that it’s worse to be outside than inside during a storm.
Only one-quarter of the homeless population is considered “chronically homeless,” meaning homeless for more than a year or experiencing repeat bouts of homelessness. At any given time, then, the vast majority of homeless people, including some who are chronically homeless, are scraping their way back toward stability. After disasters, backslide is all but inevitable.
Encampments are destroyed. Resources, often hard-won, are lost. If infrastructure is damaged, a job might become more difficult or impossible to get to.
Furthermore, many people who are homeless wrestle with untreated medical or mental health conditions that disasters might worsen. Domer, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, said the derecho triggered substantial anxiety and depression, which she’s still coping with. Christian Murphy, who was also on the riverbank during the storm, said he worries that Cedar Rapids’ devastated tree stock will lead to lower air quality, complicating trouble he has already with breathing.
After the derecho, a short distance from Domer’s and Murphy’s encampment, Kari Fisher surveyed the damage to the duplex where she lived with her husband and six children, ages 1 to 10.
When the storm hit, Fisher had been home-schooling, a new responsibility due to the pandemic but one she enjoyed. Structural damage to the home was clear; in the unit opposite Fisher’s, a tree had smashed into the kitchen. City officials declared the home unfit for habitation, but with nowhere else to go, Fisher’s family stayed. Power was shot for good, so for months they got by using plastic coolers and a propane camping stove. (Thanks to the downed trees, Fisher jokes, they also had plenty of wood.)
In November, police cited the family for unlawful habitation. (Fisher is fighting the citation; she faces possible jail time, even though the family had continued to pay rent.) They were directed to Willis Dady, a homeless services nonprofit, which moved the family into a Hampton Inn & Suites north of town, using federal emergency funds made available to the city.
Fisher expected they’d be there for a couple weeks. Six months later, fully eight months on from the derecho, they’re stuck. In two hotel rooms, it’s Fisher, her husband, an ex-husband who has a disability, seven children — Fisher gave birth to a boy in February — and two dogs. In the same Hampton Inn & Suites, there are dozens more like Fisher, and it’s not the only hotel in town still housing people made homeless by the storm.
“It feels like sardines,” Fisher said. “It’s not sustainable.”
While her husband works, Fisher spends days searching Zillow, Zumper, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for available homes. On rental application fees alone, the family has spent $4,500 — dipping ever further into diminished savings — but nothing comes through. With so many people looking, prices are high. By the time most units are listed, they’re already gone.
“We’re in a hole,” Fisher said. “No matter how much I do, no matter how many phone calls I make, we’re still here.” Her “worst nightmare” is that the money supporting their hotel stay will run out before the family finds new shelter.
“I’m waiting for it,” she said. “And when that happens, it’s ‘OK, what are we going to do now?’ A tent at a campground? I can’t raise children in a minivan.” As of mid-April, the family hoped to move into a trailer.
Fisher’s situation, advocates said, is characteristic. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — the first major storm in the U.S. that scientists linked to climate change — disasters have been routine drivers of new homelessness.
In Houston, for example, homeless rates fell year over year starting in 2012. In 2018, the year after Hurricane Harvey, they ticked back up. Last year, 11 percent of the city’s unsheltered homeless population said they had become homeless because of the hurricane or another natural disaster, according to a survey by Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless.
The problem isn’t just that homes are destroyed. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, America is short nearly 7 million affordable housing units. During an extreme weather event, affordable housing — more likely to have been built in disaster-prone areas in the first place — is especially vulnerable and often hit the hardest, shrinking the already limited inventory. Pricier homes aren’t immune to destruction, of course, so families who are financially better off might also find themselves in need of short-term, lower-cost options. Demand peaks at the same time that options are depleted the most.
“Disasters of this magnitude really trickle out,” said Ana Rausch, program operations director at the Coalition for the Homeless. After Harvey, she said, “our regular housing of the homeless pretty much came to a halt, because we were trying to house people in the disaster shelters. And not all of those individuals were homeless.”
The pattern goes like this: Disasters push people who had been housing secure toward insecurity. People who were already insecure or severely burdened by housing costs are pushed to the edge of homelessness. And, finally, people who were already homeless are pushed further back in the long wait for limited resources.
The web of government agencies and nonprofits designed to help, meanwhile, is stretched to the max.
In Cedar Rapids, Willis Dady typically serves 500 people in a year, including those who are actively homeless and those who are at risk of becoming homeless. Now, given the combined effects of Covid-19 and the derecho, 500 people need assistance every day, said Alicia Faust, the organization’s executive director. The staff has risen to the occasion, working overtime, extending shelter hours and taking on more clients than ever, but still it’s hard to keep up.
To fully meet the demand, Faust said, she would need 16 full-time homelessness prevention case managers, working 30 to 35 cases apiece. Willis Dady has three.
Bandwidth issues like that are a nationwide problem, said Berg, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. And that’s in part because the government responses to homelessness and disasters have both tended to treat symptoms of problems and not their root causes.
“There’s always a response to the emergency,” Berg said. “But there isn’t an overall response to people becoming homeless or the [already homeless people] impacted by this weather.”
When it comes to homelessness, that is, the response is overwhelmingly oriented toward people already in crisis — not the broad economic currents that underlie homelessness, including soaring rent costs, stagnant wages and the dearth of affordable housing. As for disasters, the government mobilizes in their aftermath, but it hasn’t yet taken robust, transformational action to curb climate change and foster resilience.
Several recent and proposed policies could be cause for hope, however. And in some cases, solutions to homelessness and the climate crisis might be one and the same.
Between coronavirus relief measures passed during the Trump administration and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed last month, nearly $80 billion was allocated to HUD, the Treasury Department and various federal grant recipients to fight homelessness and housing instability, a HUD spokesperson said in an email. Moreover, the White House’s newly announced $3 trillion-plus infrastructure plan includes funding to build and retrofit 1 million affordable and energy-efficient housing units.
“The Administration’s plan will extend affordable housing rental opportunities to underserved communities nationwide, including in rural and tribal areas,” the HUD spokesperson said. The plan would also “flexibly support communities in creating housing for people experiencing homelessness and the housing insecure.”
Another promise of Biden’s infrastructure proposal and Climate Action Plan: millions of jobs, as the administration seeks to build out America’s clean energy infrastructure.
Advocates for the homeless expressed cautious optimism. New affordable housing is a clear win, while the benefits of upgrading and retrofitting existing units are twofold: Just as energy efficiency is good for the planet, it lowers utility costs for renters. As for jobs, many people who experience homelessness find work in construction already. If enough training is packaged with the green jobs in Biden’s plan, as the administration says it will be, those jobs could be an apt fit and a much-needed path to stability.
Indeed, after the derecho, several members of the Cedar Rapids homeless community found work helping with the cleanup effort. Some continue to work in construction-related jobs as part of a Willis Dady employment initiative.
Domer, as it happens, has a background in road and home construction, with a former specialty in woodwork. She is in her 60s, and both shoulders give her trouble, so those days are probably behind her — she hopes to find work soon driving a cab. But plenty of people she knows, Domer said, would jump at the opportunity. At a time when many are still struggling with the storm’s repercussions, it could be a way to finally move on.
“Anything would help,” Domer said. “The pandemic was already tough, and then a derecho. We’re still trying to figure out what normal looks like.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Woman claims asylum housing staff ignored pleas for help when she was in pain while 35 weeks pregnant
A woman whose baby died is suing the Home Office for negligence over claims that staff at her asylum accommodation refused to call an ambulance when she was pregnant and bleeding.
The woman, who has asked to be named Adna, sought asylum in the UK in January 2020 after fleeing Chad. She was seven months pregnant when she was brought by police to Brigstock House asylum-support accommodation in Croydon.
Related: ‘I felt humiliated’: parents respond to NHS maternity care racial bias inquiry
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) have effectively blocked poor countries from accessing affordable COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The proposal on the table from India and South Africa — to waive the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) — would have forgone patents to significantly expand global vaccine production. Over 100 countries supported the proposal before it was blocked in March, and on April 14, more than 170 Nobel laureates and former heads of state and government sent an open letter urging President Joe Biden to back the waiver. Despite growing pressure, the U.S. has made no promises ahead of the next WTO meeting on April 22.
This move is the latest nail in the coffin for vaccine equity. Just 10 countries have so far acquired 75 percent of the vaccines, while much of the geopolitical Global South has yet to receive a single dose. A now-viral map of global vaccine roll-out starkly demonstrates that vaccine access is running parallel to economic inequality. While COVAX — an initiative co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization — aims to supply vaccination for at least 20 percent of a participant country’s population, footing the difference is just too costly for many countries. Limited stock and supply bottlenecks mean less than 2 percent of global COVID-19 vaccines supply have gone to African countries. The World Bank projects it will take $12 billion for the continent to sufficiently vaccinate and interrupt virus transmission.
It has been described as a “vaccine apartheid,” spurring broad-based calls to fight the trend, most formally by a coalition called The People’s Vaccine, a group of civil society organizations endorsed by health experts, heads of state and economists, advocating for fair allocation of the vaccines, sold affordably and made available for people free-of-charge.
Research shows that until a critical global population is vaccinated, all countries remain susceptible to outbreaks and variants. The COVID-19 crisis, beyond its health toll, has already caused a massive economic crisis, education system break-down and political unrest around the world. A study commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation projects than “vaccine nationalism” could cost rich countries up to $4.5 trillion. The study accounts for trade and international production network relations, showing that relatively open economies stand to lose up to 3.9 percent of their GDPs if their trading partners lag on vaccine access. Why then, if global vaccine access is in their self-interest, did the U.S., U.K. and EU go to such lengths to prevent it?
The answer is found in the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and neoliberal policies. Edward Said wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” The United States leans heavily on political rhetoric of international cooperation, moral clarity and human rights. On March 11 — the same day the U.S. blocked the TRIPS waiver at the WTO — President Biden gave his first prime-time address, declaring that, “We know what we need to do to beat this virus; tell the truth, follow the science, work together.” Education and liberation to a T. Yet it can hardly be said that the U.S. followed its own advice at the WTO. Instead, the U.S. did what we can expect imperial powers to do: plunder.
Scholar Asli Calkivik writes that it is at the periphery that “the international system reveals its logic.” When we move to periphery — to the stake of countries in the Global South — as this case requires us to, we see with new clarity the hierarchies of the current world order.
From the start, the precursor to the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was one of many post-World War II multilateral institutions created by Allied states, and its current form as the WTO was instituted in a next wave of globalization efforts in the 1990s. Long-time criticism of the WTO’s governance structure shows that the U.S. and Europe have disproportionate decision-making power among WTO membership, which has led to neoliberal policies creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries. Corporate Europe Observatory notes that bargaining among member countries in the TRIPS case was left to working parties that lack transparency, with no minutes recorded, freedom of information requests denied, and no boundaries on the participation of pharmaceutical executives like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), who have spent millions lobbying to kill the proposal. In this sense, we should not expect the WTO to rule in the favor of equity; it was never designed to.
If we rely on institutions that insist on this world order, we can project only a narrow range of futures, variations of nationalistic hoarding, scales of death and destruction — none of them leading to actual health or flourishing for communities on the political margins. Arundhati Roy wrote that COVID-19 “offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” If, as she proposes, this pandemic is to be “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next,” this TRIPS decision must spur us to walk through it.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The head of the World Health Organization estimated in a recent address that of the more than 700 million coronavirus vaccine doses that have been administered across the globe, just 0.2% have gone to people in low-income nations — inequity that experts warn will persist unless rich countries end their obstruction of an international effort to suspend vaccine patents.
Speaking to the media on Friday, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus warned that “there remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines” as pharmaceutical companies cling to their monopoly control over technology that was developed with large infusions of public money.
“On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500,” said Tedros. “Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500.”
Tedros went on to lament the struggles of the global vaccine initiative COVAX, which he said “had been expecting to distribute almost 100 million doses by the end of March” but has instead only sent out 38 million due to “a marked reduction in supply.” COVAX has partnered with several major pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca and Pfizer, in an effort to ensure access to vaccines in developing countries.
“The problem is not getting vaccines out of COVAX; the problem is getting them in,” said Tedros.
These numbers seem staggeringly unfair.
We need to come together for a #PeoplesVaccine now.https://t.co/2nZa8u0liR https://t.co/KC30vEBVpT
— The People’s Vaccine (@peoplesvaccine) April 10, 2021
The Associated Press reported Saturday that “as many as 60 countries, including some of the world’s poorest, might be stalled at the first shots of their coronavirus vaccinations because nearly all deliveries through the global program intended to help them are blocked until as late as June.”
“COVAX, the global initiative to provide vaccines to countries lacking the clout to negotiate for scarce supplies on their own, has in the past week shipped more than 25,000 doses to low-income countries only twice on any given day. Deliveries have all but halted since Monday,” AP noted. “During the past two weeks, according to data compiled daily by UNICEF, fewer than two million COVAX doses in total were cleared for shipment to 92 countries in the developing world — the same amount injected in Britain alone.”
According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of vaccination data, “the world’s least wealthy continent, Africa, is also the least vaccinated. Of its 54 countries, only three have have inoculated more than 1% of their populations. More than 20 countries aren’t even on the board yet.”
The ongoing struggles of COVAX and the inadequacy of bilateral vaccine agreements have only served to heighten calls for more sweeping action at the international level to redress inequities that could prolong and intensify the global pandemic.
One effort, led by South Africa and India, to temporarily lift vaccine-related intellectual property rights has gone nowhere due to wealthy World Trade Organization members such as the United States and the United Kingdom, whose opposition has left vaccine production largely under the control of major pharmaceutical corporations.
Proponents say South Africa and India’s patent waiver — supported by more than 100 nations around the world and predictably opposed by the pharmaceutical industry — would accelerate production and distribution of doses by allowing manufacturers to replicate vaccine formulas.
Terrible: At current global vaccination rate, the world will reach herd immunity in 4.6 years
We must work together to end vaccine inequity https://t.co/qRrko7Jnfr pic.twitter.com/cswe1jR2GE
— Faheem Younus, MD (@FaheemYounus) April 5, 2021
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), wrote in a blog post Friday that “getting the world vaccinated is not about some feel-good gestures, like a few billion dollars for COVAX.”
“It means pulling out all the stops to produce and distribute billions of vaccines as quickly as possible. To do this, we need the cooperation of the whole world and the elimination of all the barriers to the production and distribution of vaccines,” Baker argued. “This would mean suspending intellectual property claims over these vaccines. From a moral standpoint, this should not be a tough call since governments paid for so much of the development costs.”
“What are we going to do if a new and more deadly vaccine-resistant strain develops in Zambia or Burma? I don’t want to hear another chorus of ‘who could have known?’ from our intellectuals who missed another huge one,” Baker continued. “Let’s get it right this time, even if it means having to do things a little differently. Our leaders are not forced to take a vow of incompetence.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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We can now properly analyse the effect of a four-year-old Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy. It’s caused poverty to increase. And the policy may also have caused an increase in abortions. But exclusive research by The Canary has also found birth rates among the poorest women have dramatically fallen; potentially also due to the policy. Yet so far, the DWP maintains that there isn’t a problem.
The two-child limit
The two-child limit is a DWP policy. The then Tory government brought it in on 6 April 2017. It meant the DWP would only pay Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit for two children in a family; any more than this the DWP would not count in benefits calculations.
The policy has been controversial. A court ruled in June 2017 that the policy was “discriminatory” against single mothers with children under two. Then, in April 2018, another court said the cap was unlawful. This was in relation to young carers. The so-called ‘rape clause‘, where women have to prove they’ve been raped to get an exception to the two-child limit, also sparked outrage.
Now, four years on, the long-term effects of the two-child limit are clear.
Massive growth
The Canary reported in 2018 that the number of households likely to be hit in the future by the cap would explode. In April 2018, just under 71,000 households were subject to the limit. Now, as of April 2020, the number has rocketed to 250,000:
In April 2018, around 200,000 children were affected. Now, this figure is over 900,000:
Meanwhile, the DWP has effectively cut over £5bn from people’s social security with the policy. And the real-world impact is very concerning.Increasing poverty
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) data on poverty, there has been a four percentage point increase in the number of households below average income where three or more children live; up four percentage points from 43% to 47%. That’s nearly a 10% increase:
As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) wrote:
estimates suggest that by the end of this Parliament, more than 600,000 families are likely to be subject to the limit, pushing an estimated 1.3 million children into, or deeper into, poverty.
The CPAG also looked at abortions.
Increasing abortions
It found that there was a “sharp” overall increase after 2017:
In 2016 in England and Wales there were just over 185,000 abortions. By 2019, this had increased by 11.74% to just over 207,000.
But crucially the CPAG said that abortion rates for women who already had two or more children increased “most rapidly” after 2017:
The Canary analysed the birth rates for women by socioeconomic status; that is for the richest and poorest women.
Poor people: not having kids
Our research found that birth rates fell generally. This was comparing 2017 and 2019 figures. The biggest falls have been among the poorest households. In the table below, 1.1 is the richest, 8 is the poorest:
We cannot directly say that the falls are due to the two-child limit. But given the effect of the policy on abortion and poverty rates – this additional impact is likely. Moreover, the reduction in birth rates in the poorest groups is sudden.
As The Canary previously reported, between 2013 and 2016 birth rates in groups 5-8 fell overall by 0.9%. Now, between 2017 and 2019 this accelerated to a 12.4% fall. But this drop also correlated with the 11.74% increase in abortions. Because the poorest women are having abortions at over twice the rate of the richest:
There is no comparative yearly data for abortion rates per socioeconomic status prior to the two-child limit being introduced. But abortion rates had been rising across all groups between 2013-2018. It appears from the data that between 2018 and 2019, increases in abortion rates were most marked in the poorest groups (a 0.9 point increase in the poorest versus a 0.4 point increase in the richest):
The DWP says…
The Canary asked the DWP for comment. A spokesperson told us:
Universal Credit has provided a vital safety net for six million people during the coronavirus pandemic and is supporting people back into work through our comprehensive Plan for Jobs.
In 2020, 85% of all households had two or fewer children, which is reflected in our policy. There are appropriate exemptions in place.
But the DWP’s own research shows that these exemptions are tiny. In April 2018, the number of households with three or more kids the DWP gave an exemption from the limit to was just over 2,800. By April 2020, the number was around 12,500; an average of 4.75% of households hit by the policy across the UK. This is actually a reduction on 2018, where the percentage was around 8% of the total households having an exemption.
Intentional eugenics?
The two-child limit has been perhaps the Tories’ most noxious policy. It’s hard not to look at it and think that the DWP and government intentionally designed it to stop poor people having children. Because as the CPAG noted:
If these findings are related to the two-child policy, it is horrifying. China’s one-child policy was driven by burgeoning birth rates. We have sub-replacement fertility. There is no other country in history that has adapted social security policy to increase child poverty to reduce fertility or encourage abortion. It is a completely outrageous assault on liberty.
The word for this would be eugenics. And successive Tory governments and the DWP have meted it out, without recourse.
Featured image via The Canary and Wikimedia
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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One of the most pervasive myths about incarceration is that it makes a society safer. Now, a leading journalist who focuses on the criminal legal system has taken on that question in her new book.
Victoria Law is a prolific reporter who is perhaps best known for spending years in the trenches exploring the experiences of women in prison. Her work always centers the voices of impacted people, while maintaining a broad lens on mass incarceration and digging deep into a wider variety of issues related to prison and jails.
Having just released a joint book with Truthout editor Maya Schenwar in July of last year, Prison By Any Other Name, Law already has another book on offer. This new work, “Prisons Make Us Safer”: and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration, is designed as a primer. While promoted as a rudimentary guide to the issue of mass incarceration, this volume provides both basic facts and figures while tackling some of the more complex carceral debates in an accessible way. With clear-cut analysis and a plethora of factual information, Law addresses issues like private prisons, the idea of releasing everyone convicted of a nonviolent offense, the perception that immigration has nothing to do with mass incarceration, and the notion that only cisgender Black men are incarcerated. I had the pleasure of interviewing her about the book for this article. She touched on all those issues and provided an especially rich analysis of why we need to pay so much more attention to women and transgender folks who are incarcerated.
James Kilgore: What inspired you to write this book, and how did you find the energy to do it after just having published Prison By Any Other Name?
Victoria Law: I see the two books as complementary. “Prisons Make Us Safer” is a primer for people just beginning to think about incarceration while Prison By Any Other Name is for readers who have already identified mass incarceration as a problem and are thinking about ways to shrink the prison population. That book is to warn against reforms that might seem like they decrease the numbers of people in physical jails and prisons, but actually expand similar systems of surveillance and control to homes, communities and other institutions.
I know you are a voracious reader, so I am wondering as you wrote this book, what authors or activists came into your mind as sources of inspiration for this work?
Angela Y. Davis has inspired all of my work. I’m also heavily influenced by the continued work of Beth Richie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, to name just a few amazing abolitionists who are organizing and documenting their work.
Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s Love WITH Accountability was pivotal to rethinking about safety from family violence, particularly child sexual abuse.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has long highlighted responses to intimate partner violence in activist communities; her work, along with that of Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions and Ejeris Dixon, who started the Safe Neighborhoods Campaign in Brooklyn, illustrates initiatives happening right here and right now to building a world that doesn’t rely on prisons and punishment.
Your book is about myths that prop up and perpetuate mass incarceration. Can you tell us a bit more about these myths? How do they work? Are they like a Trumpian “Big Lie” or do they contain some kernels of truth?
One of the most widespread myths is that we need prisons to keep us safe(r). It’s a myth we’ve been fed since childhood from school seminars about safety, to crime shows and daily news hours. Every abolitionist has been asked, repeatedly, some variant of “How will we stay safe?” The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and approximately 25 percent of its prison population. If prisons kept us safe, then the U.S. should be the safest nation in the world. That’s obviously not the case but it’s a persistent myth that tugs at people’s fears about violence and safety.
Some other myths acknowledge that prisons are problematic, but then blame the bloated prison populations on the private prison industry (which incarcerates approximately 8.5 percent of the nation’s prisoners and 73 percent of those detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or private corporations that utilize prison labor. Some myths shift the onus of mass criminalization and incarceration away from systemic failures — such as endemic racism, poverty and cut-away social safety nets — to the individual.
These myths take reality — for example, that Black people are disproportionately targeted and incarcerated — and twist a distorted explanation — that they commit more crimes, not that the U.S. has a long history of racism that manifests today in current structural inequalities, including the systemic racism inherent in policing as well as the perpetual under-resourcing of communities of color.
These myths justify the continuation of mass incarceration as a catch-all solution to all of society’s problems. If we don’t debunk these myths, then we end up either continuing down the same path of perpetual punishment (without any real safety) or else fall for proposed reforms that don’t address root causes of problems or ensure safety.
Probably more than any other journalist, you have researched and written about gender issues in relation to mass incarceration, especially about the experience of women in prison and jail. How did that work inform how you tackled this book?
Women make up roughly 10 percent of the nation’s incarcerated population. Not only do women experience all the abuses facing incarcerated men, their gender allows the prison system — and a constellation of other institutions — to inflict additional injustices and violence on them. For instance, the majority of people in prison have children. When a father is imprisoned, he’s likely to have family members who will care for his children. He may not always see or hear from them, but he’s less likely to worry about losing them to foster care. When a mother is incarcerated, her children are five times more likely to end up in the foster care system. Until recently, however, navigating family court and custody issues were not considered prison issues because it wasn’t an issue that affected the majority (incarcerated fathers).
Similarly, including the experiences of trans women (who are often confined in men’s facilities) highlights the transphobic violence inherent in incarceration. Trans people experience all the violence and harassment that cisgender people do; but they also face additional forms of discrimination, harassment and violence based on their gender identities.
By centering women (both cisgender and trans women), I include experiences that might otherwise not be thought of as prison issues but illustrate the insidious ways that mass incarceration devastates not only individual lives, but also families and communities. Centering women’s experiences also pushes readers to think about how gender and gender identity complicate some of the myths about safety, fear and imprisonment.
You devote considerable attention to the myths that surround domestic violence, both in terms of those who do harm and those who are harmed. Why do you think the myths surrounding these issues are so important?
Among people incarcerated in women’s prisons, past abuse — family violence, sexual violence and/or domestic violence — is so prevalent we now have a term for it: the abuse-to-prison pipeline. Until recently, this was a largely ignored pathway. For instance, there’s some anecdotal evidence that many women imprisoned for the death of their partner or ex-partner had experienced sustained abuse from that partner. But there’s no government data on what percentage of women incarcerated for murder or manslaughter had been abused by the person they killed. That’s in large part because of the way our adversarial criminal legal system works — a prosecutor’s job is to convict (or wring a guilty plea from a defendant), not to examine the underlying causes for why harm or violence happened.
It’s only because of the sustained efforts of advocates, including currently and formerly incarcerated abuse survivors, that we’re starting to see this pathway recognized — and legislative efforts being made to provide consideration for the role domestic violence might play. But it’s been a long and slow slog. New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2019. The law allows a judge to consider the role of abuse in the crime when sentencing an abuse survivor and mete out a less harsh sentence than the state sentencing guidelines recommend. The law also allows survivors to apply for resentencing if abuse was a significant factor. But it took advocates nearly 10 years to convince lawmakers to pass this bill.
Even today, if a survivor brings up domestic violence in court, prosecutors (and often judges) dismiss these claims. We saw this last year, at the start of the pandemic, when Tracy McCarter, a Black nurse, was arrested and held for six months awaiting arraignment for the death of her estranged husband. At the start of the pandemic — when nurses were badly needed in New York City’s hospitals, and Rikers Island, the city’s island-jail complex, was a hot spot of infection — prosecutors opposed allowing McCarter to be released pending trial. The district attorney’s office could have looked at McCarter’s statements about the abuse she had suffered — as well as her estranged husband’s past acts of violence — and taken that abuse into consideration both in arguing against her release and, six months later, deciding whether to charge her with murder (which carries a higher sentence), manslaughter, a lesser charge, or no charge at all. But that’s not the way that our criminal legal system works — there’s little incentive for an assistant district attorney to believe a defendant’s claims of abuse, let alone decrease the severity of the charges or drop them altogether.
You offer both restorative justice and transformative justice as vehicles for addressing the harm and violence that our society typically responds to with punishment and incarceration (or even the death penalty). Can you briefly summarize the difference between the two and why you see them as so central to the elimination of mass incarceration and the creation of a different type of society than what racial capitalism has to offer?
Restorative justice is a process centering the needs of the survivor rather than simply seeking to punish the person who caused harm. The process also includes people who have been indirectly affected, such as family members and other loved ones. This typically involves a facilitated meeting in which survivors are able to talk about the long-lasting effects of the harm caused and what they need to begin healing, including actions the harm-doer(s) can take. The harm-doer is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions and work to repair the harm. In our existing court system, the person accused of harm is encouraged to deny, downplay and dismiss the consequences of their actions.
Transformative justice centers the needs of the survivor while also working to transform the conditions that enabled the harm. It also doesn’t rely on policing, imprisonment or other types of punishment.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that I, a small Chinese woman, am walking down the street and am attacked by a man yelling anti-Asian slurs. I hit him with the meat cleaver I have in my purse.
In a restorative justice process, we would (eventually) have a facilitated meeting in which I talk about the effects of the harm he has done to me — I’m now more concerned about being attacked because of my ethnicity, my gender and my size, and feel anxious every time I have to leave my house. I want to know why he’s targeting Asians and help figure out what needs to happen to decrease the chances that he’ll do so again. What resources are available to help him ensure that he won’t do so? And what do I need to feel restored to my previous sense of safety?
In a transformative justice process, we would go deeper to examine the conditions that encouraged this attack. This includes all of what I said above, but we would also identify — and try to change — conditions that led to this harm in the first place. This would involve asking why he is attacking Asians: is it because he’s bought the Trumpian Kool-Aid that Asians are responsible for COVID? Does he have mental health issues that are entangled in racism — and if so, how do we transform that? Also, what are the conditions that have made me fearful enough to carry a meat cleaver in my purse?
Under the current system, we’d both be arrested, jailed and no one would ask, “What are the conditions that need to be changed?” Racists would continue to attack Asians; some of us would fight back, but the root causes would remain unaddressed.
Please note that this is a hypothetical example. While the threat of anti-Asian violence is ever-present these days, I do not carry either a meat cleaver or purse when I go out.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Even if the movement for reparations someday transforms the profound economic disparities that fall along racial lines in this country — addressing income disparities, the wealth gap, housing and health care inequities, and unemployment disparities — a fundamental problem of anti-Black racism still won’t be solved.
What remains is a fundamentally ontological problem: the reality of the being of whiteness, and its denial of Black humanity within white racist America.
White privilege, white immunity from systemic racism, white forms of racist habitual embodiment, white claims to “innocence,” gatherings of white religious practitioners at monochromatic white places of worship, and predominantly white institutions where white students walk around their predominately white campuses feeling wanted and at ease — these are manifestations of white ontology, white modes of being.
As Judith Butler writes, entering and assimilating into white institutions and white worlds “is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?”
My sense is that Butler is pointing to something that is deeper than racial economic rearrangements, even if they are for the greater good. For me, there is that nagging sense that white ontology or white being can remain a problem even if economic parity is achieved. Martin Luther King Jr. expresses this same idea in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? where he writes:
Often white liberals are unaware of their latent prejudices. A while ago I ran into a white woman who was anxious to discuss the race problem with me. She said: “I am very liberal. I have no prejudices toward Negroes. I believe Negroes should have the right to vote, the right to a good job, the right to a decent home and the right to have access to public accommodations. Of course, I must confess that I would not want my daughter to marry a Negro.”
Notice how the white woman’s liberal political stance, her views regarding equity or fairness, reflects a sense of inclusion regarding Black people. Yet, there is the sudden denial, the racially twisted sense of anti-miscegenation that is demonstrative of how she sees Black embodiment: ersatz, inferior, ugly, disgusting, wretched, disposable, hypersexual and ungrievable — the nigger! This white woman does not challenge economic equity so much as she unconditionally and vehemently rejects ontological equity, where whiteness, especially white female embodiment, is off limits to Black men. It is whiteness as a mode of superior ontology that is asserted, where white people are deemed the apex of civilization, the initiators and creators of history and time itself, where Blackness “sullies” the purity of whiteness, where Blackness is “sin” and whiteness is “salvation.”
Yet, it is my deep suspicion, perhaps even my deep pessimism, that white people are not up to the task of engaging in an insurrection at the level of white ontology. The weight of what is to be done regarding white ontology will involve white people risking everything. James Baldwin writes, “The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of [Black people]; it is not too much to say that [they] who [have] been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk.” It is this psychic risk that will require white daring, and the relinquishment of the illusion of white safety: I am “secure” because I’m distant from Black people and I know them as “criminals” and “disgusting.” White “safety” is predicated upon a lie, one that reinforces white people’s mythical “purity” vis-à-vis Black “impurity” and “danger.”
This necessity of white daring, where white people collectively refuse such a myth, forces me to doubt that my full humanity as a Black person will ever be recognized in North America, a country founded upon both genocide and anti-Black violence and brutality, especially as white “safety” is purchased at the expense of keeping Black people at an ontological distance, as those who are monstrous and wretched.
I want to approach this question of white ontology — and how to challenge it — from the vantage of religion.
Etymologically, religion comes from religare, which means “to bind.” One way of interpreting this is that religion binds us to God. Yet, there is a tension that needs to be revealed in the form of a disquieting, perhaps a dangerous, question: What does it mean to be white and to be religious? In what way is the phenomenon of “binding to” (that is, religare) a site of deep ethical tension or contradiction vis-à-vis whiteness? After all, to be white, regardless of one’s religious orientation, is to be linked to, to be tied to, to bind to white power, white privilege, white hegemony, to be shaped by forms of white hubris and white solipsism, and to be bound to a psychic life of deep white opacity regarding one’s own racism, where one does not know the limits of one’s own racism. To be white is to be bound to forms of perpetuating racialized injustice.
Therefore, to talk about religion and whiteness in the same breath, one must point out the profound aporias, the deep religious and theological challenges and contradictions. Many white people, religious or not, love to quote King when faced with their own white racism. They are quick to cite him as a prophet who stressed the importance of Kumbaya moments that are ideologically color-evasive. Yet, it was King who wrote, “I’m sorry to have to say that the vast majority of White Americans are racists, either consciously or unconsciously.” And while giving a talk in 1967 at the American Psychological Association’s Annual Convention in Washington, D.C., King stated, “White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject.”
What is King getting at? I think that he recognizes something that is structurally ontological about whiteness. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s voice is crucial within this context. He wrote, “One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.” It is the deployment of “and,” the insertion of a conjunction, that I think is important to thematize when we specifically raise the issue of the ontology of whiteness as a phenomenon that has deep anti-religious and anti-theological implications given its structural violence, or what might be called its structural sinfulness. I define whiteness as the transcendental norm, which means that whiteness is structurally binary; whiteness tears us apart. To be white is to be a person as such, a human as such, unraced, unmarked and unnamed; but to be Black, Indigenous, and a person of color, is to be raced, marked, named, deemed the subhuman, the sub-person. Yet, as Rabbi Heschel wrote, “To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart.” Whiteness, then, problematically, belies the spirit of religare.
If we are to confront whiteness from a religious vantage, it is necessary to ask some uncomfortable questions: What if there is no white innocence? What if such a construction is a farce? What if whiteness is structurally binary and thereby creates a situation where the “binding” is violent? In this situation, whiteness is both paradoxically ontologically distant, but needs Black people and people of color to conform to certain racist stereotypes: “dangerous,” “criminal,” “deviant.”
It is necessary to unsettle distinctions between “good” and “bad” whites, a distinction that I think obfuscates the deeper realities of whiteness itself as oppressive. After all, Baldwin reminds us when referring to white people, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” As we focus on the forms of spectacular white racism that we all witnessed when so many white people stormed the Capitol or when white people went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right,” we must simultaneously confront whiteness itself, in all its forms. Perhaps its innocence is the pressure that causes Black asphyxiation: “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!”
Critical pedagogy scholar Barbara Applebaum writes, “The white complicity claim maintains that all whites, by virtue of systemic white privilege that is inseparable from white ways of being, are implicated in the production and reproduction of systemic racial injustice.” Notice that Applebaum links systemic white privilege, white ways of being and systemic racial injustice. Given the history of whiteness, its phantasmatic creations, its distortions, its lies, bad faith, its epistemological ignorance and its expansionist (and, I would argue, consumptive) logics, I think that we can conclude with critical whiteness historian David Roediger that, “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.”
If this is true, then we need to demand that white people, regardless of their religious affiliations or religious sensibilities, face a reality that is far more disconcerting, unnerving, alarming and even traumatic. This means, among other things, if you are white you mustn’t be like Odysseus who dared to be adventurous and yet remained safe by tying himself to the mast of a ship. You must allow the Sirens to sing to you without plugging up your ears with wax. You ought to allow for unpredictable spaces of openness, an openness that is capable of fracturing calcified norms and unproductive sedimented practices, and white-embodied orientations. You must be prepared to speak parrhesia, or courageous speech, and engage in acts of courageous listening. You must be daring; you must be vulnerable, which means that you must be open to be wounded; you must be open to rethink how you are already touching others — indeed, touching others while leaving traces of pain and suffering. You must be willing to think about how your whiteness is not atomic or discrete under a false white neoliberal ontology, but how your whiteness constitutes an ontology of no edges; where your whiteness is always already haptic — and violently so.
For me, this means that white people — especially liberal religious white folk who see themselves as beyond the muck and mire of white racism — must practice kenosis, which is a kind of death in the form of emptying: a death to white stubbornness, a death to white denials, a death to white epistemological ignorance, a death to white arrogance, a death to white narcissism, a death to white goodness, a death to white fears, a death to white color evasion, a death to white privilege, a death to white denials, a death to white self-righteousness, a death to white illusions of safety, a death to heroic whiteness, a death to claims of white non-complicity; indeed, a death to white innocence, a death to all of those white tricks that white religious people play to convince themselves that they are fine, that they are the “good ones,” the “righteous ones,” the uncomplicated white allies.
Rabbi Heschel reminds us that, “The history of interracial relations is a nightmare.” Yet, for some of us, it is a nightmare that can cost us our lives. If you have any doubts, then ask George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark, Danny Ray Thomas, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Eric Harris, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Samuel DuBose, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, and so many others. W.E.B. Du Bois, in a speech that he delivered in Peking, China, at the age of 91, sums up an important message that all too familiarly speaks to Black life in North America. Du Bois said, “In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.”
Du Bois also wrote, “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question — How does it feel to be a problem?” This is a case where white people have problems, but Black people are problems. Yet, I want to ask a different question: How does it feel to be a white problem? Or, better yet, how does it feel to be white in a society where whiteness is “Pharaoh-like” and where Black bodies suffer from forms of social death and civil death?
So, what is necessary and what must be done? Surely, it must involve religious white people risking themselves. As Baldwin says, “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself.” This is suggestive of what Butler theorizes as an insurrection at the level of ontology. If religious white people cannot risk themselves — that is, risk their whiteness or white ontology, then how can they be capable of giving? Indeed, isn’t the very structure of white giving almost always about white people, white goodness, white noblesse oblige, white heroic efforts at civilizing “those savages”?
It seems to me that whiteness needs to revolt against itself, to disarticulate itself, assuming that this is even possible, from assumptions and institutions that undergird its power. Whiteness must be untied from forms of relationality that are anti-Black — whether consciously or unconsciously. Whiteness, not white people, must be forsaken, abolished. What is needed is a requiem for the death of whiteness, and a birth of something radically new and radically human.
When it comes to the disposability of Black bodies, what we need are no illusions about the history of white supremacy, especially the kind that is uneventful, mundane and everyday — the kind that shows itself each Sunday morning in places where white bodies commune together, and bond together, where Black bodies are de facto absent through iterative white practices of exclusion. Within the context of how I think about the complexity of whiteness and white people engaging in the process of attempting to undo or untie whiteness, the concept of arrival is complicated. Often white people will read a book by a Black author or author of color and claim that they have “seen the light,” that they are “woke.” They think that all the work has been done. This reminds me of some religious people who assume that through practicing a set of rituals they are now “holy” or “flawless” in their religious commitments to goodness and righteousness. They forget that an honest religious life consists of a continuous striving, a constant reaffirmation. So, too, when it comes to undoing and challenging the subtleties of whiteness, there is no place of being “whole,” “complete,” or where one has finally arrived. Unless, of course, one is talking about whiteness, which is often full of itself.
My sense is that when white people stress arrival vis-à-vis their “anti-racism,” this can function to keep them from further exploring the depth and complexity of their whiteness. Kenosis in relationship to white racism involves diligence. There is no single and total kenotic moment or emptying of white racist sedimentations, assumptions, images and affects. This is why it is crucial to nurture a disposition to be un-sutured, a disposition to crack, re-crack, and crack again the calcified operations of white ontology, one’s white gaze. In this way, despite white people’s ties to white racism, perhaps there are times when one’s white being dilates and takes the form of an ontological generosity, one that is also critical of its acts of giving, its openness.
This speaks to what French-Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant had in mind when he wrote, “Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth — mine.” Yet, he warns us, “But thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter course, without ‘prizing me open,’ without changing me within myself.” This is why he added, “Thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought.”
To trouble such sterility, the question that religious white folk should ask Black people and people of color is: “Who art Thou?” The purposeful structure and implication of this question are related to the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray as she critiques the power of the male gaze and its reduction of the female “other.” However, I deploy the question within this context to demonstrate its power to both disrupt white rigidity and un-suture whiteness. While “Who art Thou?” is a question that is implicative of moral generosity, it can also counter the consumptive dynamics of white care, white giving, where alterity or “otherness” is eclipsed precisely by the act of white generosity, that act of giving. This is a case where the “other” is not treated as exceeding one’s care, where one’s generosity functions as a form of imprisonment.
Read radically, however, “Who art Thou?” ought to trouble one’s sense of white enclosed or impervious self-identity, where the “other” is not totally legible within the framework of white giving, but also where there is the self-reflexive question: “Who am I?” In this case, one is confronted with one’s own porosity, where one becomes importantly illegible to oneself, where one is also excessive and not frozen in the act of touching without also being touched.
White people, as Baldwin would say, must stand and confront history, do battle with forms of historical creation that have gotten us to this place, a place where whiteness (and white people) refuse or fail to be undone, fail to lose themselves to an address that comes from outside of themselves, from Black people and people of color. It is this refusal that is at times done in the name of religion itself.
Baldwin says, “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” bell hooks says love involves telling the truth to ourselves and to others. Black theologian James Cone says, “Love is a refusal to accept whiteness. To love is to make a decision against white racism.” So, where are those religious white people who are refusing to accept whiteness in the name of love?
King says racism is “like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness.” If Black lives really matter to white people, especially religious white people, I would like to see their white rage overflow in the streets of this nation shouting: “My whiteness is a lie! My innocence is the crime!”
I desire to see white people in massive droves lay down the armory of white privilege, white innocence, and be in crisis. Crisis, as I am using the term, is a form of metanoia, a kind of perceptual and psychic breakdown. It isn’t about an immediate repair but involves tarrying within spaces of breakdown, recognizing the full weight of one’s investment in whiteness.
I want to see a U.S. where white lives cease to matter only because they are white, where whiteness is in crisis, where white religious folk stand before their congregations and scream, “I refuse to live behind the craven mask of whiteness!” And I would like for them to do this without being assured, where there is no “safety.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The growing global concentration of wealth has made basic data on household savings, the trade deficit, and overseas assets increasingly unreliable.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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The people who sew clothes for major apparel giants are facing widespread hunger and destitution as a result of falling income and job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic—even as many of these corporations continue to turn a profit.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Democracy has always been fragile in the United States, but at the present moment, it has moved from being imperfect to collapsing under the rubric of a failed state. The threat of authoritarianism is no longer on the horizon. It has arrived, forecasting a bleak future haunted by the poisonous ghosts of a poisonous past.
The Republican Party no longer hides its racism and boldly engages in widespread voter suppression. As of February 27, 253 restrictive voting bills in 43 states have been either introduced or pre-filed, mostly by Republicans.
As Robin D.G. Kelley has brilliantly argued, Republicans have made clear that they endorse the white supremacist notion that “the United States [should] be a straight, white nation reminiscent of the mythic ‘old days’ when armed white men ruled, owned their castle, boasted of unvanquished military power, and everyone else knew their place.” It is crucial to mention that these bills are also aimed at preventing youth from voting as well. Republicans have also argued openly that voter suppression policies are meant to enable permanent minority rule for them, the end point of which is a form of authoritarianism.
This contemporary appropriation of the tools of a fascist politics is exacerbated by the undermining of a public vocabulary and modes of civic literacy capable of critically addressing the profound structural changes produced by neoliberalism’s practice of deregulation, privatization, devaluation of the welfare state, and deterioration of public goods such as the educational system, the health care system and the welfare state. Neoliberalism in this instance reveals its fascist values given the violent nexus between the carceral state and what has been called racial capitalism with its long history of “colonial dispossession and racial slavery.”
The threat of violence once associated with fringe extremist groups has found a home in a Republican Party that now endorses the political, ideological and social conditions that have given rise to a number of violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Racialized violence now runs through American society like an overcharged electric current.
Fascist politics has emerged out of a form of neoliberal capitalism that does more than engage in privatization, deregulation and commodification in the interests of financial markets. It also shapes the identities, values and subjectivity of individuals
Three Fundamentalisms Undergird Neoliberal Fascism
A crucial challenge for progressives is to counter the underlying conditions that cause the collective consciousness to incorporate elements of fascist politics. This would mean interrogating the ensemble of institutions, meanings, ideologies and pedagogical practices that create formative cultures that promote a mix of intersecting fundamentalisms. Such a task is crucial for rethinking and reclaiming definitions of power, education and politics that are central to the creation of a “new sensibility” capable of embracing a public imagination synonymous with the imperatives of democratic socialism.
Three intersecting formative cultures or fundamentalisms have strongly shaped the emergence of a new political formation that I call neoliberal fascism. These three fundamentalist formative cultures both normalize the unthinkable and create the conditions for morally compromised lives willing to become complicit with the ugliness of cultural formations steeped in an authoritarian politics of disposability and a racialized form of neoliberal capitalism.
Free-Market Fundamentalism
The first of these formative cultures is a free-market fundamentalism that functions educationally to rewrite politics and define the obligations of citizenship through the ethos of consumerism, commercializes all social relations, defunds public goods such as schools, and separates economic activity from social costs. Moreover, free-market fundamentalists wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract and the welfare state, and in doing so, limit the scope of agency for millions to what can be called the politics of survival. Under such circumstances, people spend their daily lives fighting for the bare necessities of life.
One consequence is a mode of agency in which time is a liability rather than an enabling force for developing one’s capacity to be a critically engaged and informed citizen. All personal, political and social relations are now defined in market terms, rendering matters of meaningful agency, identity and dignity subject to the market’s totalizing rule. As Naomi Klein points out, human dignity expressed as the right to “basic security in your job … some certainty that you will be taken care of in old age [and not] be bankrupted by illness, and that your kids will have access to the tools they need to excel” have been dismissed by many conservative politicians and pundits as privileged policies for “welfare queens” and freeloaders rather than as human rights. Of course, the real issue here is the political and ethical aversion on the part of neoliberals, centrists and conservatives to redistribute wealth and restructure power in order to address real problems caused by inequality.
As Wendy Brown has noted: “casting markets and market conduct as appropriate for all human and organization — neoliberal reason has a specific antipathy to politics, and even to democratic power sharing (apart from voting). It treats politics and democracy as at best ruining markets and at worst leading toward tyrannical social justice programs and totalitarianism.” In a society marked by staggering inequalities, people cannot define their lives outside of the market’s limited boundaries. Undermining all notions of the social, neoliberalism has become the enemy of democracy and social justice and must be resisted at all costs.
White Evangelical-Led Religious Fundamentalism
The second cultural formation that functions as a toxic pedagogical force in American culture is a brand of religious fundamentalism that “has turbocharged the support among Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war.” Largely made up of white evangelical Christians and other Christians, this form of religious fundamentalism has become a solid mainstay of the Republican Party as it has moved into an ideological position that is aligned with extremist anti-democratic authoritarian policies, values and practices. Not only does it collapse the line between religion and the state, but it also advocates a theocratic model of politics that Chris Hedges has labeled as an American form of fascism. The most extreme elements of the white-evangelical movement embrace a militaristic ideology that is central to radical extremists’ groups such as the “boogaloo” boys who view themselves as participants in a holy war. Former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy at the Department of Homeland Security Elizabeth Neumann argues that Christian nationalism has become pervasive among white evangelicals. She states that increasingly, large segments of this group view “America as God’s chosen nation [and] believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage.”
This extremist religious movement functions as an educational and political force that legitimizes the worst forms of bigotry, wages war on reproductive rights and same-sex marriages, pushes creationism in the schools, is anti-science, and perpetuates a rigid moralism and messianic view of the world that promotes a disdain for critical thinking and progressive forms of education. At the same time, it has played a crucial role in supporting Trump’s toxic policies that include putting immigrant children in sordid detention centers, imposing a reign of terror on people of color, bungling the COVID-19 response, and supporting the intersection of anti-intellectualism, antisemitism and systemic racism. This is a conservative movement that lives in circles of certainty, and adherents believe that they are fighting a war between the forces of evil and good. This is more than a perilous binary; it is also a prescription for a lethal form of ignorance that supports both a form of Christian nationalism and a white nationalism aligned with the toxic notion of “blood and soil.” Hedges makes a compelling case in labeling white Christian leaders as fascist by pointing to their call to make “America a Christian state,” the cult of personality that they support, their authoritarian denial of equal rights to non-Christians and their belief in “cleansing power of apocalyptic violence.”
The Fundamentalism of Manufactured Ignorance
The third cultural formation is a form of manufactured ignorance and militarized illiteracy that works through numerous registers to empty language of meaning and eliminate the standards for distinguishing right from wrong, historical memory from historical amnesia, and social responsibility for ethical and political irresponsibility.
As Karen J. Greenberg makes clear, the suppression of history, memory and language opens the doorway to fascism and “a state of unparalleled heartlessness and greed.” It also erases those echoes of the past that should shed light on and sound the alarm bells when select groups are dehumanized and treated as unknowable and undesirable. Under the Trump regime, a culture of lying normalized a world where truth was not only undermined but lost its legitimacy. In the age in which the truth is relegated to fake news, argue Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, “everything that matters is denied and everything that embodies evil is reinvented.” This was a form of illiteracy sanctioned at the highest levels of the former Trump administration and is the outgrowth of a society inundated with a militarized culture of commands, ignorance, consumerism and immediacy.
Post-truth is a conceptual signifier that operates in the service of violence against the ethical imagination and the standards at work in producing civic literacy and the institutions that support it. Increasingly, meaning has been emptied out of its critical and moral referents and subjected to the dual vocabulary of the market and war. This is a language that reduces people to commodities and feeds a society of the spectacle through a language that trades in violence, a friend/enemy distinction, and rewrites history in the discourse of the powerful; that is, a discourse of white supremacy.
The signposts for a cultural formation of ignorance are evident in the long-standing attack on public schooling, teachers and unions, with “education” being reduced to the market imperatives of neoliberal capital. Defunded and turned into testing centers and efficiency mills, public schooling as a democratic public sphere has been privatized, degraded and broken, furthering a culture of ignorance and illiteracy. Market values instrumentalize education and find critical thinking dangerous. In a culture dominated by corporations and the profit motive, political passions and moral convictions have become a liability. Moreover, the United States is now hostage to a culture of immediacy driven by social media. Knowledge now begins with tweets, Facebook postings and endless streams of selfies on Instagram. Many Americans no longer read, choosing instead to scan selected bits of information, disconnected from broader narratives.
Under the rule of corporate controlled power, the apparatuses of social media often strip knowledge of any substantive context and accelerate time at a pace that prevents both contemplation and experience from crystalizing into a politics of thoughtfulness and responsibility. Ideas, values, and ideologies that offer a sense of critical agency and civic and social imagination have no room in a society in which reason, truth, science and informed judgments are viewed with contempt. Destabilized perceptions and normalized fictions have now become the dominant currency of politics.
As the capacity for political speech withers, there is a breakdown of shared values and the widening abyss of malignant normality, moral depravity and civic illiteracy. Under the reign of market values, ignorance thrives in a society in which all matters of responsibility are individualized. Under neoliberal capitalism, human connections give way to an ethos of individualism that views all problems as personal failings. This constitutes a war on the ethical imagination as individuals increasingly under the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism become prisoners of their own experiences.
To Resist Neoliberal Fascism, We Must Make Education Central to Politics
As C. Wright Mills has made clear, under such circumstances, it is difficult for individuals to translate private into public issues and see themselves as part of a larger collective capable of mutual support. The erosion of public discourse and the onslaught of a culture of manufactured ignorance have allowed the U.S.’s Nazi problem to emerge with renewed vigor, and one lesson to be learned from the current assault on democracy regards the question of what role education should play in a democracy. As Wendy Brown observes, democracy cannot exist without an educated citizenry. It “may not demand universal political participation, but it cannot survive the people’s wholesale ignorance of the forces shaping their lives and limning their future.”
Max Horkheimer was right in 1939 when he suggested that it was impossible to talk about fascism without talking about capitalism, especially as it works relentlessly “to transform democratic citizens into totalitarian subjects” through what he and Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. Moreover, the educational force of neoliberal culture now prepares its willing subjects from the inside, molding their desires, anxieties and identities through psychological domination. The misery created by neoliberal capitalism bears down not only on the body, but colonizes the mind through the force of a formative educational apparatus that emerges out of the crisis of democratic institutions, civic values and political culture.
Education has always been the substance of politics, but it is rarely understood as a site of struggle over agency, identities, values and the future itself. Unlike schooling, education permeates a range of corporate-controlled apparatuses that extend from the digital airways to print culture. What is different about education today is not only the variety of sites in which it takes place, but also the degree to which it has become an element of organized irresponsibility, modeled on a flight from critical thinking, self-reflection and meaningful forms of solidarity.
Education now functions as part of the neoliberal machinery of depoliticization that represents an attack on the power of the civic imagination, political will and a substantive democracy. It is also functioning as a politics that undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice that gets people to think critically about their own sense of agency in relation to knowledge and their ability to engage in critical and collective struggle.
Under Trumpism, education has become an animating principle of violence, revenge, resentment and victimhood as a privileged form of identity. Political illiteracy has moved from the margins to the center of power and is now a crucial project that the Republican Party wants to impose on the wider public. As the philosopher Peter Uwe Hohendahl has noted, the real danger of authoritarianism today “lay in the traces of the fascist mentality within the democratic political system.”
We must therefore raise questions about not only what individuals learn in a given society but what they have to unlearn, and what institutions provide the conditions to do so. Against such a pedagogy of closure, there is the need for a critical pedagogical practice that values a culture of questioning, views critical agency as a condition of public life, and rejects voyeurism in favor of the search for justice within a democratic, global public sphere.
Such a pedagogy must reject the dystopian, anti-intellectual and racist vision at work under Trumpism and its underlying racist currents, its thrill for authoritarian violence, and its grotesque contempt for democracy. In doing so, there is the need for educators and other cultural workers to provide a language of both criticism and hope as a condition for rethinking the possibilities of the future and the promise of global democracy itself. At the same time, it must struggle against the concentration of power in the hands of the few who now use the instruments that use cultural politics as an oppressive ideological and pedagogical tool.
This is a crucial pedagogical challenge in order for individuals to become critical and autonomous citizens capable of interrogating the lies and falsehoods spread by politicians, pundits, anti-public intellectuals and social media while being able to imagine a future different from the present. The will to refuse the seductions of false prophets, neo-fascists mentalities and the lure of demagogues preaching the swindle of fulfillment cannot be separated from learning how to be self-reflective, self-determining and self-autonomous.
The overarching crisis facing the United States is a crisis of the public and civic imagination, and this is a crisis that at its core is educational. Such a crisis suggests closing the gap between educational/cultural institutions and the public by creating the ideas, narratives and pedagogical relations necessary for connecting the shaping of individual and collective consciousness to the conditions necessary for individuals to say no, understand the causes of systemic violence and free themselves from the social relations put in place by neoliberal capitalism.
If the civic fabric and the democratic political culture that sustains democracy are to survive, education, once again, must be linked to matters of social justice, equity, human rights, history and the public good. Education in this sense frees itself from the technocratic obsessions with a deadening instrumental rationality, a regressive emphasis on standardization, training for the workplace and the memorizing of facts.
On the contrary, to make the political more pedagogical, education must affirm in its vision and practices the interdependence of humanity and embrace hope against indifference. In this sense, education is not just a struggle over knowledge, but also a struggle about how education is related to the power of self-definition and the acquisition of individual and social forms of agency. More specifically, education is a moral and political practice, not merely an instrumentalized practice for the production of pre-specified skills.
Matters of education are crucial to developing a democratic socialist vision that examines not only how neoliberal capitalism robs us of any viable sense of agency, but also what it means to think critically, exercise civic courage and define our lives outside of the pernicious parameters imposed by the veneration of greed, profits, competition and capitalist exchange values. Education is a place where individuals imagine themselves as critical and politically engaged agents.
James Baldwin was right in stating at the end of his essay “Stranger in the Village” that, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
At the heart of Baldwin’s message is that the state of a country’s morality and politics can be judged by the degree to which education becomes a central force in producing a political culture and public imagination that expands the notion of freedom, social justice and economic equality as part of the long march towards a democratic socialist future. At a time when the fascist ghosts of the past have once again emerged and the monsters are no longer lurking in the shadows, we must reclaim the public imagination and develop the mass educational and political movements that make such a future possible. The forces of resistance and radical collective movements are once again on the march, and it is crucial to remember that education opens up the space of translation, breaks open the boundaries of common sense, and provides the bridging work between the self and others, the public and the private.
Against the dictatorship of ignorance and the destruction of the public imagination is the need for a politics of education that interrogates the claims of democracy, fights the failures of conscience, prevents justice from going dead in ourselves, and imagines the unimaginable.
Any struggle against the dictatorship of ignorance will not only have to take matters of education seriously in the effort to address the current crisis of consciousness, it will also have to bring diverse movements together in order to build a common agenda under the rubric of creating critically engaged populace willing to fight for a democratic socialist society. We owe such a challenge to ourselves, to new and younger generations, and a future global socialist democracy waiting to be born.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In this special episode of “Working People,” we chat with internationally acclaimed author and bestselling historian Rick Perlstein. As a child of the bourgeoisie himself, Rick offers a unique view into the interior lives of society’s “upper crust” and the stories its members tell themselves to justify their class position.
Additional links/info below…
- Rick’s website and Twitter page
- Jason Saltoun-Ebin, HuffPost, “‘The Invisible Bridge’: 10 or So Questions with Rick Perlstein“
- Maximillian Alvarez & Bama Athreya, “Uber vs. Aslam, California’s Prop 22, & Fighting for the Global Rights of Gig Workers – LRPN Livestream”
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
- Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song”
- Carroll, “Billionaire”
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The post How the bourgeoisie thinks appeared first on The Real News Network.
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A new analysis by IRS researchers and academics published Monday morning estimates that the richest 1% of U.S. households don’t report around 21% of their income, often using complex tax avoidance strategies that allow them to outmaneuver the federal government’s increasingly rare audits of the wealthy.
Led by two IRS researchers as well as Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, the new paper (pdf) finds that 6 percentage points of the richest households’ unreported income “correspond to undetected sophisticated evasion” such as offshoring, pass-through businesses, and other avoidance tactics.
“From a policy perspective, our results highlight that there is substantial evasion at the top which requires administrative resources to detect and deter,” the authors write. “We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% and that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually.”
“There has been much discussion in the United States about the fact that the audit rate at the top of the income distribution has declined,” the paper continues. “Our results suggest that such low audit rates are not optimal.”
This isn’t a loophole. This is tax evasion.
The IRS doesn’t enforce tax laws when it comes the ultra-wealthy. https://t.co/rzqwZNTovB
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) March 22, 2021
ProPublica reported in 2019 that in recent years, the IRS has audited the poor at around the same rate as the richest Americans, who have been the principal beneficiaries of years of budget cuts and staff shortages at the federal tax agency.
When the IRS actually conducts them, random audits “do not capture most tax evasion through offshore accounts and pass-through businesses, both of which are quantitatively important at the top,” according to the new analysis. As a result, the paper’s authors note, the incomes of the wealthiest people in the U.S. and the country’s overall inequality are significantly underestimated.
Reck of the London School of Economics told the Wall Street Journal ahead of the paper’s official release that the findings show “there is more revenue than you might have thought at the very top.”
“What’s needed,” argued Reck, “is a broader strategy that involves increased scrutiny of pass-through businesses [and] investments in the comprehensive audits that the IRS does in its global high-wealth program.”
Last month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced legislation that would provide the IRS with $100 billion in additional funding over a decade so the agency can more closely examine and crackdown on tax evasion by the richest Americans. The bill would invest in improvements to IRS technology, require audits of the richest individuals and corporations, and implement more strict income reporting requirements.
Khanna’s office estimates that the Stop Corporations and Higher Earners From Avoiding Taxes and Enforce Rules Strictly (CHEATERS) Act would bring in $1.2 trillion in federal revenue over 10 years.
“We know our tax system is broken, and it’s long past time we start fixing it,” Khanna said in a statement. “The ultra-wealthy play by different rules than the rest of us.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Just over two months into the new year, 2021 has already seen a flurry of public banking activity. Sixteen new bills to form publicly-owned banks or facilitate their formation were introduced in eight U.S. states in January and February. Two bills for a state-owned bank were introduced in New Mexico, two in Massachusetts, two in New York, one each in Oregon and Hawaii, and Washington State’s Public Bank Bill was re-introduced as a “Substitution.” Bills for city-owned banks were introduced in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and bills facilitating the formation of public banks or for a feasibility study were introduced in New York, Oregon (three bills), and Hawaii.
In addition, California is expected to introduce a bill for a state-owned bank later this year, and New Jersey is moving forward with a strong commitment from its governor to implement one. At the federal level, three bills for public banking were also introduced last year: the National Infrastructure Bank Bill (HR 6422), a new Postal Banking Act (S 4614), and the Public Banking Act (HR 8721). (For details on all these bills, see the Public Banking Institute website here.)
As Oscar Abello wrote on NextCity.org in February, “2021 could be public banking’s watershed moment.… Legislators are starting to see public banks as a powerful potential tool to ensure a recovery that is more equitable than the last time.”
Why the Surge in Interest?
The devastation caused by nationwide Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 has highlighted the inadequacies of the current financial system in serving the public, local businesses, and local governments. Nearly 10 million jobs were lost to the lockdowns, over 100,000 businesses closed permanently, and a quarter of the population remains unbanked or underbanked. Over 18 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, and moratoria on rent and home foreclosures are due to expire this spring.
Where was the Federal Reserve in all this? It poured out trillions of dollars in relief, but the funds did not trickle down to the real economy. They flooded up, dramatically increasing the wealth gap. By October 2020, the top 1% of the U.S. population held 30.4% of all household wealth, 15 times that of the bottom 50%, which held just 1.9% of all wealth.
State and local governments are also in dire straits due to the crisis. Their costs have shot up and their tax bases have shrunk. But the Fed’s “special purpose vehicles” were no help. The Municipal Liquidity Facility, ostensibly intended to relieve municipal debt burdens, lent at market interest rates plus a penalty, making borrowing at the facility so expensive that it went nearly unused; and it was discontinued in December.
The Fed’s emergency lending facilities were also of little help to local businesses. In a January 2021 Wall Street Journal article titled “Corporate Debt ‘Relief’ Is an Economic Dud,” Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Lawrence Goodman, president of the Center for Financial Stability, observed:
The creation of the corporate facilities last March marked the first time in history that the Fed would buy corporate debt… The purpose of the corporate facilities was to help companies access debt markets during the pandemic, making it possible to sustain operations and keep employees on payroll. Instead, the facilities resulted in a huge and unnecessary bailout of corporate debt issuers, underwriters and bondholders….This created a further unfair opportunity for large corporations to get even bigger by purchasing competitors with government-subsidized credit.
….This presents a double whammy for the young companies that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. They are the primary source of job creation and innovation, and squeezing them deprives our economy of the dynamism and creativity it needs to thrive.
In a September 2020 study for ACRE called “Cancel Wall Street,” Saqib Bhatti and Brittany Alston showed that U.S. state and local governments collectively pay $160 billion annually just in interest in the bond market, which is controlled by big private banks. For comparative purposes, $160 billion would be enough to help 13 million families avoid eviction by covering their annual rent; and $134 billion could make up the revenue shortfall suffered by every city and town in the U.S. due to the pandemic.
Half the cost of infrastructure generally consists of financing, doubling its cost to municipal governments. Local governments are extremely good credit risks; yet private, bank-affiliated rating agencies give them a lower credit score (raising their rates) than private corporations, which are 63 times more likely to default. States are not allowed to go bankrupt, and that is also true for cities in about half the states. State and local governments have a tax base to pay their debts and are not going anywhere, unlike bankrupt corporations, which simply disappear and leave their creditors holding the bag.
How Publicly Owned Banks Can Help
Banks do not have the funding problems of local governments. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve reduced the interest rate at its discount window, encouraging all banks in good standing to borrow there at 0.25%. No stigma or strings were attached to this virtually free liquidity – no need to retain employees or to cut dividends, bonuses, or the interest rates charged to borrowers. Wall Street banks can borrow at a mere one-quarter of one percent while continuing to charge customers 15% or more on their credit cards.
Local governments extend credit to their communities through loan funds, but these “revolving funds” can lend only the capital they have. Depository banks, on the other hand, can leverage their capital, generating up to ten times their capital base in loans. For a local government with its own depository bank, that would mean up to ten times the credit to inject into the local economy, and ten times the profit to be funneled back into community needs. A public depository bank could also borrow at 0.25% from the Fed’s discount window.
North Dakota Leads the Way
What a state can achieve by forming its own bank has been demonstrated in North Dakota. There the nation’s only state-owned bank was formed in 1919 when North Dakota farmers were losing their farms to big out-of-state banks. Unlike the Wall Street megabanks mandated to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is mandated to serve the public interest. Yet it has had a stellar return on investment, outperforming even J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. In its 2019 Annual Report, the BND reported its sixteenth consecutive year of record profits, with $169 million in income, just over $7 billion in assets, and a hefty return on investment of 18.6%.
The BND maximizes its profits and its ability to serve the community by eliminating profiteering middlemen. It has no private shareholders bent on short-term profits, no high-paid executives, no need to advertise for depositors or borrowers, and no need for multiple branches. It has a massive built-in deposit base, since the state’s revenues must be deposited in the BND by law. It does not compete with North Dakota’s local banks in the retail market but instead partners with them. The local bank services and retains the customer, while the BND helps as needed with capital and liquidity. Largely due to this amicable relationship, North Dakota has nearly six times as many local financial institutions per person as the country overall.
The BND has performed particularly well in economic crises. It helped pay the state’s teachers during the Great Depression, and sold foreclosed farmland back to farmers in the 1940s. It has also helped the state recover from a litany of natural disasters.
Its emergency capabilities were demonstrated in 1997, when record flooding and fires devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota. The town and its sister city, East Grand Forks on the Minnesota side of the Red River, lay in ruins. The response of the BND was immediate and comprehensive, demonstrating a financial flexibility and public generosity that no privately-owned bank could match. The BND quickly established nearly $70 million in credit lines and launched a disaster relief loan program; worked closely with federal agencies to gain forbearance on federally-backed home loans and student loans; and reduced interest rates on existing family farm and farm operating programs. The BND obtained funds at reduced rates from the Federal Home Loan Bank and passed the savings on to flood-affected borrowers. Grand Forks was quickly rebuilt and restored, losing only 3% of its population by 2000, compared to 17% in East Grand Forks on the other side of the river.
In the 2020 crisis, North Dakota shone again, leading the nation in getting funds into the hands of workers and small businesses. Unemployment benefits were distributed in North Dakota faster than in any other state, and small businesses secured more Payroll Protection Program funds per worker than in any other state. Jeff Stein, writing in May 2020 in The Washington Post, asked:
What’s their secret? Much credit goes to the century-old Bank of North Dakota, which — even before the PPP officially rolled out — coordinated and educated local bankers in weekly conference calls and flurries of calls and emails.
According Eric Hardmeyer, BND’s president and chief executive, BND connected the state’s small bankers with politicians and U.S. Small Business Administration officials and even bought some of their PPP loans to help spread out the cost and risk….
BND has already rolled out two local successor programs to the PPP, intended to help businesses restart and rebuild. It has also offered deferments on its $1.1 billion portfolio of student loans.
Public Banks Excel Globally in Crises
Publicly-owned banks around the world have responded quickly and efficiently to crises. As of mid-2020, public banks worldwide held nearly $49 trillion in combined assets; and including other public financial institutions, the figure reached nearly $82 trillion. In a 2020 compendium of cases studies titled Public Banks and Covid 19: Combatting the Pandemic with Public Finance, the editors write:
Five overarching and promising lessons stand out: public banks have the potential to respond rapidly; to fulfill their public purpose mandates; to act boldly; to mobilize their existing institutional capacity; and to build on ‘public-public’ solidarity. In short, public banks are helping us navigate the tidal wave of Covid-19 at the same time as private lenders are turning away….
Public banks have crafted unprecedented responses to allow micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), large businesses, public entities, governing authorities and households time to breathe, time to adjust and time to overcome the worst of the crisis. Typically, this meant offering liquidity with generously reduced rates of interest, preferential repayment terms and eased conditions of repayment. For the most vulnerable in society, public banks offered non-repayable grants.
The editors conclude that public banks offer a path toward democratization (giving society a meaningful say in how financial resources are used) and definancialization (moving away from speculative predatory investment practices toward financing that grows the real economy). For local governments, public banks offer a path to escape monopoly control by giant private financial institutions over public policies.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In December 1985, a movement of doctors committed to overcoming Cold War divisions in the interest of peace, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As doctors, they argued, they had the duty to confront the grave threat to human life posed by impending nuclear war. The movement’s co-presidents, Yevgeny Chazov from the Soviet Union and Bernard Lown from the United States, accepted the Peace Prize on behalf of the movement. In his Nobel address that evening, entitled “A Prescription for Hope,” Lown said, “Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.” This apparently irresolvable affirmation captures the idealism and realism of Lown’s activist message. It conveys the challenge that his life poses to the rest of us. Lown died on February 16 at the age of 99.
Bernard Lown was a person of the 20th century. When he was a youth in the 1930s, his family emigrated from Lithuania to Maine as antisemitism and Nazism took hold of Europe. Many of his relatives did not survive the onslaught of fascism. The political, technological and human horrors of modern genocide were thus a personal experience for Lown. Later, Lown became a pioneering cardiologist who used 20th-century science and technology in the service of health. He was responsible for numerous innovations in patient care, including the invention of the direct current defibrillator, which successfully used electrical shock to treat deadly heart arrythmias. He was committed, in his words, to both “mastering the science” and “practicing the art of healing.” As an activist, he organized many of his colleagues around the world to confront the enormity of the Cold War, perhaps the defining political conflict of the century in view of its global fallout. In 1961, he founded Physicians for Social Responsibility at his home near Boston, Massachusetts, and, in 1980, IPPNW, both of which addressed the crisis of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
As Lown later wrote in his memoir of the doctors’ movement, Prescription for Survival, “The doctors made millions of people aware of a frightening reality: medicine had nothing to offer in the case of such a war.” The aim of IPPNW, he wrote, “was to promote citizen diplomacy to cut through the fog of dehumanization that blocked awareness of our shared plight and threatened to bring about our mutual extinction.… We believed that there was no greater force in modern society than an educated public, activated and angered, to effect change.”
In the course of the struggle against nuclear war, Lown’s perspective became globalized. The human costs of exorbitant military spending and the consequences of nuclear war were global. He recognized that growing, global inequality was a world-shaping process that yielded not only disastrous outcomes for human health but also the conditions for political morbidities propagating violence. But the globalization and interconnectivity that marked the closing decades of the 20th century shaped Lown’s vision, too. The organizations SatelLife and ProCor, founded by Lown, used satellite and internet technologies to create access to medical information for health workers in developing countries and a global forum of health workers focused on the prevention of cardiovascular disease.
Lown’s notes for an unfinished essay read, “In my lifetime three issues have catapulted the world to a doom’s day scenario. The nuclear threat, Climate Change, and the growing inequality conflated with the morbid colonial legacy of the North South divide are the three issues that could make life unlivable on this planet.” Each issue could be called epoch-defining, each he sought to address, and they remain with us into the coming years.
Though distinctly a person for his time, Lown was oriented towards the future. His was always a message that mingled hope with challenge. In a 2010 address, marking the launch of the Bernard Lown Scholars in Cardiovascular Health Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Lown said, “In an epoch of quavering certitudes, we need to cultivate moral vision as well as a moral commitment. This is the categoric imperative of our age. Otherwise the barbarisms of the 20th century will spill over into this millennium.”
A proliferation of wars and the turn of a new century in an explosion of terrorisms, the resurgence of fascism around the globe, and a worsening pandemic of inequality warn that “barbarism” has proven durable. A pandemic of a different sort ravages health and exacerbates inequality of all kinds. “What, if anything,” Lown asked in a 2013 essay on the disastrous consequences of anthropocentric climate change and the inaction surrounding this global threat, “can we learn from the nuclear brinkmanship that threatened to incinerate planet Earth a mere quarter century ago?”
The lesson is that of the “Prescription for Hope”: of seeing and doing.
Lown understood a courageous “new way of thinking” — that nuclear proliferation was not ordained, that the self-imposed, destructive confines of the arms race could be transgressed — as the way out of the deadly Cold War that threatened extinction. But, at the same time, the action of IPPNW and a host of other peace groups were required for the transgression of the “possible” and inauguration of the “impossible.” Lown observed in 2015, “A life time of organizing has taught me that no radical transformative change can occur without a people’s movement, fueled by an agenda, whatever else is addressed, [that] does not ignore the numerous injustices that plague their daily lives.”
Bernard Lown’s life and example challenge us to pursue what he called a “renaissance of perception” and to affirm it through activism, which he called “a certain antidote to hopelessness by making the impossible seem achievable.” The “Prescription for Hope” remains with us 35 years later, as we contend with the trials of our time. Those who see the invisible can do the impossible. The question for our century is the same as it was in his: whether those who see will choose to do.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
