My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I’ve written about B before. She’s a homeless woman I knew through my project. But here’s a little reminder of her backstory:
B lost both her legs in a subway accident. When I met her, she was living in a medical homeless shelter and panhandling daily in a wheelchair. B has four kids who, for a while, were living with her ex. It was not a good scenario. Very long story short: The State eventually took the kids away from him and temporarily placed them with B’s mother.
As I got to know B, I genuinely cared for her as a friend. We both looked forward to chatting whenever I’d bring packages full of supplies geared to fit her specific needs. I bore witness to B’s journey and encouraged her as she dealt with mean-spirited passers-by and with a mountain of obstacles, e.g. housing, child services, medical bureaucracy, lawyers, etc.
There’s one story about her I haven’t yet shared, so here goes…
As I did my best to console her, B told me she was missing her Dad.
Quick story: Before her accident, she lived in a house with her kids and extended family — including her Dad. B would be cooking in the kitchen and hear him enter because his steps made a very distinct sound when he entered (something to do with the design of the floor, I think). He’d often hug her and remind her that he was proud of how she looked out for everyone.
After her Dad died, she recalled being in the kitchen — cooking a family meal with tears streaming down her face. Suddenly, she heard a familiar sound. Her Dad, she believed, had just “entered” the kitchen. B told me that she experienced a hug.
That day when I found her crying in her panhandling spot, she wished so badly she could feel her Dad’s hug again.
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As she’s telling me this sad tale, a young man approaches seemingly out of nowhere. White guy, slim, maybe mid-20s — totally underdressed for the cold weather. As he walked over to B, I scoped him out.
He was not wearing a jacket, wore sandals but no socks, and seemed to be empty-handed. What I mean is that no one walks down a Manhattan street without some combination of keys, wallet, and phone on them. He had none of these items and the pockets of his lightweight sweatpants showed no sign of holding anything.
While I was doing this protective/detective work, the young man was asking B if he could pray with her. She looked over at me and then said “yes” to the stranger. He reached out to take her hand as I warily watched. He picked up on my skepticism and smiled — extending his other hand to me. Suddenly, I reluctantly found myself in a prayer circle.
The young man did not recite a formal prayer. Rather, he freestyled about [wait for it] B’s father. I don’t recall the exact words but it was something like, “I sense an older man, your father maybe. He’s looking out for you. Things look bad now but he wants you to know he’s watching and a big change is coming.”
My jaw dropped and B sobbed.
After sharing a few more words, the young man said to B, “I hope that helped.” He thanked us for indulging him, turned, and basically vanished into the midday crowd.
B and I stared at each other for quite some time.
When I eventually pointed out all the odd things I had noticed about the young man, B smiled and cried at the same time. “Thank you, Daddy,” was all she said as she looked upward.
Coda: In a matter of fewer than two months, the social system wheels were suddenly and unexpectedly churning in her favor. B was soon reunited with her children, fitted for prosthetic legs, and off the streets.
The post That Time a Homeless Woman’s Prayer was Answered… first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As of Wednesday, around 30 million people across the United States will have their family’s food assistance slashed, despite high prices and expert warnings about a “hunger cliff.”
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were initially increased at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although Republicans in 18 states had already ended the emergency allotments (EAs), households in the other 32 states along with Washington, D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have continued to receive them.
However, the increased SNAP benefits are set to end Wednesday because of the omnibus spending package from December—federal lawmakers traded the temporary pandemic-era boost for a permanent program to feed children in the summer.
“Poverty is a policy choice in this country.”
“We’re really going to struggle,” Deanna Hardy, a mother of two in Marshfield, Wisconsin, told ABC News. “We’re going to have to end up going back to cheaper items like noodles and processed stuff because the meat, the dairy, fruits, and veggies. It’s expensive.”
“I don’t think the cuts could have happened at a worse time,” added Hardy—whose family relies on a fixed income and will see their benefits drop from $960 to $200 per month. “When the extra payments began, food prices were nowhere near where they are now.”
As Tracy Roof, an associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond, recently wrote for The Conversation:
Many advocates for a stronger safety net say that SNAP benefits are too low to meet the needs of low-income people. They are warning of a looming hunger cliff—meaning a sharp increase in the number of people who don’t get enough nutritious food to eat—in March 2023, when the extra help ends.
At that point, the lowest-income families will lose $95 in benefits a month. But some SNAP participants, such as many elderly and disabled people who live alone and on fixed incomes and who only qualify for the minimum amount of help, will see their benefits plummet from $281 to $23 a month.
A trio of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) experts pointed out earlier this month that “a study estimated that EAs kept 4.2 million people above the poverty line in the last quarter of 2021, reducing poverty by 10%―and child poverty by 14%―in states with EAs at the time. The estimated reduction in poverty rates due to EAs was highest for Black and Latino people.”
CBPP president Sharon Parrott warned Axios Tuesday that the cuts will “allow very high levels of poverty to remain in the country.”
Noting the outlet’s report, Public Citizen President Robert Weissman declared that “a decent society would not let this happen.”
\u201cExpanded SNAP benefits end today and will push 32 million Americans off a \u201chunger cliff.\u201d\n \nBut hey! It\u2019s all good because, according to Moody\u2019s Analytics, people not being able to buy food will reduce inflation. \ud83d\ude44https://t.co/nOby2GVNpw\u201d— Patriotic Millionaires (@Patriotic Millionaires) 1677612540
The looming cuts are a reminder that “poverty is a policy choice in this country,” Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy executive director for the Center for Law and Social Policy, told Axios. “For a while, we decided we were going to make a different policy choice.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) agreed and demanded action by federal lawmakers.
“Tomorrow, SNAP benefits will drop back to pre-pandemic levels,” she tweeted. “That means $171 less each month for 520,000 Washington families struggling to make ends meet. Ending these increased benefits will cause more food insecurity and poverty.”
“It’s unacceptable,” Jayapal added. “Poverty and hunger are policy choices. It’s time we step up and do more.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction.
On the night of January 7th, Tyre Nichols was two minutes from home when members of that squad pulled him over. Probable cause: reckless driving (if you believe the official story). Five Scorpions, all of them trained use-of-force specialists, proceeded to take turns hitting him with everything they had, including boots, fists, and telescopic batons.
The 29-year-old photographer died three days later. Cause of death? “Excessive bleeding due to severe beating.” A body-cam snuff film of sorts was later released, showing some of Nichols’s last moments. The video transcripts speak for themselves.
Officer to Tyre:
“You’re gonna get your ass blown the fuck up. Oh, I’m gonna knock your ass the fuck out!”
Tyre to officers:
“OK. You guys are really doing a lot right now…”
— “Lay down!”
— “Stop! I’m just trying to go home.”
— “Spray him! Spray him!”
— “Stop! I’m not doing anything.”
— “Tase him! Tase him!”
Tyre cries out:
“Mom! Mom!”
Officer to Tyre:
“Watch out! I’m gonna baton the fuck out of you!”
— “Dude, hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Mom…”
Plainclothes Paramilitaries
Welcome to America’s emerging predator state.
Memphis is anything but an outlier. There are thousands of “elite” teams like that city’s Scorpion unit and they come in all calibers, shapes, and sizes. They range from specially trained teams in small-town police departments to sprawling “anti-crime” squads in big cities like Atlanta and New York, not to mention federal tactical units like the Border Patrol’s BORTAC and counter-terrorism task forces like the one that killed Manuel Terán in Georgia last month.
Beyond the scary names, such specialized units tend to share some other characteristics. In their warlike tactics, their strategic outlook, and their often-violent subculture — if not always in their uniforms — they are virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts in the military. In their “wars” on crime, drugs, and terror, they work with a similar playbook imported from U.S. combat missions overseas but seemingly stripped of any reference to the rules of war.
They conduct themselves, in other words, as plainclothes paramilitaries in America’s urban war zones (or what they like to call “hot spots”). Like Army Special Operations forces, they are regularly charged with the execution of “time-sensitive,” “clandestine,” and often “unilateral” missions — with or without the support of the local population — using “assurance, deterrence, and coercion” to fight the enemies of the state and exert control over “hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments.”
What’s more, these units operate with a legal guarantee of “qualified immunity” for violence against civilians. In other words, despite the recent Memphis exception, they normally have near-total impunity when it comes to violent offenses which, had they been committed in another country, might be classified as war crimes, crimes of aggression, or even crimes against humanity.
For offenses of this nature, the United States is itself an international hot spot. In the course of a given year, according to one recent study, our law enforcement agencies were responsible for 13% of all fatalities caused by the police globally, even though Americans make up just 4% of the world’s population. And as investigative journalism has revealed, specialized units like the Scorpions are responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of those deaths.
Take the New York City Police Department. Since 2000, its own use-of-force reports show that nearly one in three police killings have been by non-uniformed officers, especially “anti-crime” plainclothes units with paramilitary training and a long-standing reputation for terrorizing communities of color.
Nearly a decade before the slaying of Tyre Nichols, there was, for instance, the murder of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old street vendor, “neighborhood peacekeeper,” and father of six. His life was snuffed out thanks to a police chokehold after he was stopped for selling “loosies,” unlicensed cigarettes, on a Staten Island street corner in the summer of 2014. (In the end, the only person to serve jail time in Garner’s death was the young filmmaker of color who had the courage to record the encounter.)
Like the officers in the South Bronx who gunned down Amadou Diallo outside his home as he reached for his wallet, the ones in Queens who sprayed Sean Bell with 50 bullets on his wedding day, and the ones in Brooklyn who opened fire on a mentally ill man named Saheed Vassell in 2018, those responsible for Garner’s murder were members of the infamous “anti-crime” units whose work would become a blueprint for Scorpion-style policing.
The force’s predatory philosophy is often summed up in a single sentence lifted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1936 (satirical) short story, “On the Blue Water.” Officers of the peace have been known to quote it, to wear it to work, and to plaster it on the walls of their precincts: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
In the words of one New Yorker, a nurse from Crown Heights who witnessed the killing of Vassell, “The undercovers think they have the authority to do anything they want. They hunt [people] — like us black people — down… They act tough… like they’re from a gang. But they’re only like that because they have a badge.”
A History of Violence Against Women
In December 2019, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, rolled out its version of the Scorpion unit. It was labeled the Place-Based Investigations Squad (PBI) and put under the aegis of its police department’s Criminal Interdiction Division.
Following paid consultations with “problem-oriented” academics and police executives from other cities, the Louisville Metropolitan department implemented a then-little-known practice called “Place-Based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories,” or PIVOT. In the end, this would prove but a variation on an already all-too-familiar theme of hot-spot policing first pioneered by “police scientists” in Minneapolis some 30 years before George Floyd’s murder. (In fact, the use of the term “hot spots” can be traced back to the early years of World War II.)
Under this model, police assets were to be specially directed toward a handful of hot spots or “chronically violent urban locations.” That such places were home to populations of disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and immigrant Americans will no longer shock anyone; nor that they overlapped strikingly with areas of concentrated impoverishment and “planned abandonment”; nor that an influx of heavily armed strangers was undoubtedly the last thing such communities needed from the government. All of this was beside the point. The “marginal deterrent effect” — the minimal difference such hot-spot policing purportedly made in the calculations of would-be criminals — was enough to keep most critics quiet.
Three months after the rollout, the Place-Based Investigations Squad would play an integral part in the police raid that took the life of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman and emergency-room technician at the University of Louisville, accused of no crime, but executed anyway by three Louisville police officers standing in the hallway of her own home. Officers from the PBI Squad had requested and obtained five search warrants with “no-knock” clauses, including one for Ms. Taylor, acting on what one would later call a “gut feeling.”
Within moments of the officers’ arrival at her apartment on the night of March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor lay dying, felled by six of 32 shots fired into her home. It would be 20 minutes before she even received medical attention — 15 minutes too late to save her life. Although four officers have now been federally charged for civil rights violations, and three stand accused of lying on the affidavit they used to secure the warrants, a grand jury ultimately failed to return a single indictment for the officers who opened fire.
That night in 2020, Ms. Taylor joined a long litany of Black women, robbed of their lives while simply trying to live them by those supposedly tasked with their protection. According to the latest count, some 280 women have been slain in encounters with law enforcement over just the past five years. Researchers have found that women made up nearly half of all police-initiated contacts and Black women were three times more likely than white ones to experience the use of force during a police-initiated stop.
“Elite” police units have played an outsized role in such state-sanctioned femicides.
Take the case of India Kager, 27, a Navy vet killed by a tactical team in Virginia Beach in 2015, as she sat in her car with her four-month-old baby in the back. Or consider Atlanta’s RED DOG (short for “Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia”) Unit. On November 21, 2006, plainclothes officers from that narcotics squad — having lied under oath to obtain a no-knock warrant — barged into the home of Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old grandmother, and promptly gunned her down. Drugs were then planted near her body in a sorry attempt at a cover-up.
Disbanded or Rebranded?
We’ve been here before: Officers are charged with second-degree murder. Sweeping reforms are promised. Controversial units are “deactivated,” their officers reassigned to other bureaus.
We saw this with the Amadou Diallo protests and the New York Police Department’s Street Crimes Unit in the early 2000s. We saw it with Atlanta’s RED DOGs after the killing of Kathryn Johnston. We saw it with Louisville’s PBI Squad in the months following the murder of Breonna Taylor — and we’re seeing it now in the aftermath of the assault on Tyre Nichols.
Count on this, however: as time passes and attention subsides, reforms are abandoned, charges are dropped, or the defendants found not guilty by juries of their peers. And special ops teams are rebranded and brought back to life under different names.
Today, Atlanta’s “Titans” have replaced the “RED DOGs” of old, while the very police executive who ran the old unit, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, was made commissioner of the Memphis police department. The city of Memphis has also sought guidance from Ray Kelly, who was New York police commissioner during a particularly trigger-happy period in that department’s history (including the deaths of Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Ramarley Graham, and Kimani Gray).
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, himself a veteran of a plainclothes police unit, is touting his “Neighborhood Safety Teams” (along with another elite strike force inherited from his predecessors, the “Strategic Response Group”) as the basis for a whole new approach to policing. In truth, they are simply picking up where the Street Crimes Unit left off. The only real differences: longer guns, modified uniforms, and body cameras that can be turned on or off at will.
The names change, but the strategy (such as it is) remains the same and the body counts only climb higher.
“Collateral Damage” and the War at Home
Yet such police killings are not truly local matters. The final piece of the puzzle is the national security state, itself a predatory entity and the source of much of the surplus that supplies the police with significant military-grade weaponry and the bipartisan consensus that keeps the dollars flowing.
Local police agencies would not have anything like the arsenals they have today — ones that would be the envy of many of the world’s militaries — without the largesse of the Pentagon’s popular 1033 program. For years, it has been arming police departments around the country in a distinctly military fashion, sometimes even with weapons directly off the battlefields of this country’s distant wars. Thanks to that program, the Memphis police department has managed to obtain a significant stockpile of high-powered rifles and multiple armored personnel carriers, while the State of Tennessee alone has received $131 million worth of weaponry from the Department of Defense.
Meanwhile, paving new ground, the Special Operations Bureau of the San Francisco Police Department has procured unmanned, remotely piloted killer robots with names like TALON and DRAGON RUNNER. It is now advertising its intent to use them as a “deadly force option” in criminal apprehensions and other incidents like “riots, insurrection, or potentially violent demonstrations.”
None of this would be possible without the support of politicians from both parties. The 2023 budget agreed upon by both parties, for instance, promises $37 billion in new spending on law enforcement — with double-digit percentage increases in discretionary funding for local police departments, above and beyond the nearly $1 trillion for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. As a “moral statement,” that document bears a striking resemblance to its predecessors, backing the blue with billions of public tax dollars, while bearing witness to the priorities of a government on the warpath against enemies domestic and foreign.
Zooming out, we can see this kind of predatory policing for the national crisis it really is.
In recent decades, according to a definitive study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, more than 30,000 American civilians have lost their lives in encounters with law enforcement, a figure perhaps best compared to the rates of “collateral damage” in war-torn places like Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, or the Sahel. And whatever we call them, “elite” units like the Scorpions have played a leading role in that carnage. From their basic training to their advanced technology and heavy weaponry, they are increasingly cast as the protagonists in what has become America’s homeland theater of war, producing content of spectacular violence as this country’s war machine turns inward.
At a time when significant crossover can be seen between law enforcement and the white nationalist militia movement, it should be obvious that police departments are, among other things, playing a dangerous game with democracy. With Donald Trump and his crew still going full Blue Lives Matter and the Biden administration failing to pass meaningful police reform, count on another bloody harvest of police violence in 2023 and 2024. In the event of sustained civil conflict, there is little mystery about which side some elite police units would choose to fight on or who would find themselves in the scopes of their semi-automatic rifles.
Still, the predator state is not invincible, nor is its ascendancy inevitable. After all, the claims of police departments to legitimacy rest upon the support of elected officials who remain vulnerable to popular pressure, while the very existence of such paramilitary units depends on their access to the public purse. In a very real sense, then, they can still be fired, or at least defunded.
For now, in the absence of consequences, the hunt for humans goes on uninterrupted and that’s likely to continue as long as so many Americans remain willing to put up with it.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.
These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty and segregation of the inner cities; America’s Gospel of Instant Gratification; commercial TV; school sports; the restlessness of American society itself; its ingrained anti-intellectualism and ambivalence toward knowledge; youth’s distrust of the adult world and the school; youth culture and its rejection of tradition; technology’s negative impact on learning; Facebook; the eclipse of reading; youth’s literal-mindedness; its lack of intellectual curiosity; its inability to ask significant questions; its disinclination to develop a critical mind; the system of American education itself.
To repeat, these are factors over which teachers have no control, but which have an enormous impact upon student learning or not learning. The issue of teacher responsibility for student performance must be placed within this broader social context of what has been happening outside the American classroom for the last 40 years. Only in this way will the discussion about student learning become more realistic, and honest, and why singling out teachers alone distorts the true nature of both the problem and its solution.
When there are too few teachers in a school, and those few are overwhelmed by large classes and have no time to provide individualized attention for students — many of whom come to school deeply troubled and alienated with any number of emotional and psychological problems having nothing to do with the school — is it any wonder that students find it hard to focus and learn?
The emotional, familial, and social problems of many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help that the paltry resources of the school cannot begin to address them. These underfunded schools often lack even the essential services of counselors, social workers, and nurses because of draconian budget cuts.
What makes matters still worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being annually denied billions in vitally needed tax dollars diverted to charter schools, with no accountability as part of a right-wing political agenda. This is nothing less than the nationwide destruction of public schools by privatizing them for personal gain and rewarding charter-friendly legislators and governors with campaign contributions taken from that same taxpayer funding that should be going to support public-school students. And if that weren’t enough, insult is then added to injury when these cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for carrying on in the face of impossible odds.
Rather than blaming these woefully underfunded public schools for “failing” their children, one should consider the war zone within which many of these schools are located: decaying neighborhoods, virtual armed camps where students must live amidst gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness. How can one realistically expect children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.
The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.
It is for this reason that blaming the “failure of schools,” as suggested by the film Waiting for Superman, is a willful distortion of what inner-city schools are up against thanks to this entrenched policy of government neglect, which the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge, let alone examine. This polemic against America’s inner-city public schools is a bare-faced lie that conceals the real reason for the “failure” of these schools: the deep and ingrained class and racial divisions in our nation’s history as borne out by city riots over the past 50 years. What is happening in the seething cauldron of our inner cities is hardly conducive to students learning.
How much easier to wax moralistic and blame public schools as the villains, the helpless victims of these racist policies of social injustice, rather than these policies themselves — or even to change them! But what politician would dare take this on! That would mean real moral leadership and honest reform, not the crowd-pleasing posturing of pseudo-reform that demonizes teachers and blames them for the responsibility that government abdicated decades ago. It is the systemic culture of poverty and segregation that accounts for the lack of student progress within our inner cities, not teachers who can do only so much given government’s washing its hands of the inner city.
The solution to these appalling conditions of inner-city poverty is not moral exhortation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington and state capitals — a new Marshall Plan. Those who sit at the Table of the Mighty have always known that this is the only answer to these seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities. What is wanting, as always, is the political will. Instead of hectoring teachers to do more and more with less and less, genuine reform will only begin when government redirects its resources to rebuild our nation’s inner cities and support the public schools within them.
If we can find billions to bail out big banks and billions more for dubious military adventures abroad, we certainly can find billions to invest in our own people and children! If we really cared about our children and their chances for a good education, we would move heaven and earth to ensure that this happens. Children are our only real immortality, and if we don’t care about them, whom do we care for? What are we about as a nation? What are we about as human beings?
But, then, it’s always more profitable to Haliburtonize the cities abroad we destroy in war only to later rebuild them than to turn our own cities into environments worthy of the dignity of the human beings who live there, and where schools and schoolchildren can flourish. Until that happens, talk of reform will be dismissed by teachers as empty, self-serving political bombast, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but sound bites for the six o’clock news, launching pads for those with aspirations to higher office or the White House.
Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these inner-city schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes, and offer rich and diversified programs that will challenge and help them to grow as students and persons. Preaching self-help rhetoric of feel-good uplift to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today smacks of imposing guilt trips on these victims of government inaction.
Until those in power dare to show true leadership by helping the poor rather than protecting the rich, until they live up to their oath of office by caring for all our citizens and not just the few; until they use their power to effect positive change rather than undermining teachers who work against hopeless odds to do the impossible, until this happens, we won’t be Waiting for Superman, but Waiting for Godot.
The silence of public officials about these decades of government neglect — the true cause of the plight of our inner cities and their public schools — is only all-too-understandable, because they would be indicting the very system they represent. Instead, they condemn the first responders — teachers — who daily must pick their way through the smoldering debris of past inaction. In their attempt to appease a public clamoring for quick-fix solutions to longstanding problems, politicians cast about for scapegoats, a measure always more convenient, and popular, and cheaper, than addressing root causes, which would mean real reform.
It is the perennial stock-in-trade tactic of those who would rather demagogue the burning issues of the day by deflecting public attention from underlying structural causes, because they lack the moral courage of facing the truth, the mark of true statesmen and women.
It is a strange sort of paradox that a nation which demands improved public schools is unwilling to pay for them. Indeed, it even remains silent when governors and legislators annually cut billions from public-school budgets and give this funding to charter schools, which refuse to have their books audited, are not public schools, and cherry-pick every child who applies to them.
For too long, the teaching profession in America has been dismissed as an intellectual proletarian class, much as the Romans viewed their educated Greek prisoners of war, whom they enslaved and brought back to Rome as tutors for their children. Teachers are routinely reviled for the important work they perform as unworthy of a professional salary, despite years of experience and advanced degrees. And, yet, they continue to educate on behalf of a nation that begrudges what it pays them. No wonder students doubt the value of learning, when they see that many in the trades earn more than their teachers. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson students learn in our schools.
Yet teachers continue to educate while politicians break down their authority with sustained public criticism and then wonder why teachers command little respect. Nowhere in the world are teachers held in such low esteem as in America, an eloquent testimony to our national character. Yet teachers continue to educate those whom past centuries never dreamt capable of being educated — everyone, and then these teachers, beset on all sides by misunderstanding, budget cuts, public vilification, and lack of parental support, are routinely condemned when they don’t succeed!
And, finally, teachers must now endure the crowning indignity of a punitive evaluation, a weapon wielded by politicians who have the temerity to claim, after decades of government inaction, that teachers themselves are the problem, and, depending on their students’ test scores, they’ll be one step closer to losing their jobs!
Children should be tested by their teachers on material taught by their teachers, and teachers should be evaluated by their school administrators as they always have been in the past. To do otherwise is sheer lunacy since standardized testing, as is well known, doesn’t measure teacher effectiveness, but the parental income and home environment of students as research clearly shows.
The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. Teachers alone are expected to overcome the effects of poverty, segregation, and racism upon students who live within the demoralized world of the inner cities.
In desperate holding actions, hoping against hope for government to come to the rescue, teachers never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by that same government, which, rather than thanking them for their heroic efforts against impossible odds, now turns on them for “failing their students.”
The post Why America Demonizes its Public-School Teachers first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.
These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty and segregation of the inner cities; America’s Gospel of Instant Gratification; commercial TV; school sports; the restlessness of American society itself; its ingrained anti-intellectualism and ambivalence toward knowledge; youth’s distrust of the adult world and the school; youth culture and its rejection of tradition; technology’s negative impact on learning; Facebook; the eclipse of reading; youth’s literal-mindedness; its lack of intellectual curiosity; its inability to ask significant questions; and its disinclination to develop a critical mind.
To repeat, these are factors over which teachers have no control, but which have an enormous impact upon student learning or not learning. The issue of teacher responsibility for student performance must be placed within this broader social context of what has been happening outside the American classroom for the last 40 years. Only in this way will the discussion about student learning become more realistic, and honest, and why singling out teachers alone distorts the true nature of both the problem and its solution.
When there are too few teachers in a school, and those few are overwhelmed by large classes and have no time to provide individualized attention for students — many of whom come to school deeply troubled and alienated with any number of emotional and psychological problems having nothing to do with the school — is it any wonder that students find it hard to focus and learn?
The emotional, familial, and social problems of many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help that the paltry resources of the school cannot begin to address them. These underfunded schools often lack even the essential services of counselors, social workers, and nurses because of draconian budget cuts.
What makes matters still worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being annually denied billions in vitally needed tax dollars diverted to charter schools, with no accountability as part of a right-wing political agenda. This is nothing less than the nationwide destruction of public schools by privatizing them for personal gain and rewarding charter-friendly legislators and governors with campaign contributions taken from that same taxpayer funding that should be going to support public-school students. And if that weren’t enough, insult is then added to injury when these cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for carrying on in the face of impossible odds.
Rather than blaming these woefully underfunded public schools for “failing” their children, one should consider the war zone within which many of these schools are located: decaying neighborhoods, virtual armed camps where students must live amidst gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness. How can one realistically expect children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.
The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.
It is for this reason that blaming the “failure of schools,” as suggested by the film Waiting for Superman, is a willful distortion of what inner-city schools are up against thanks to this entrenched policy of government neglect, which the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge, let alone examine. This polemic against America’s inner-city public schools is a bare-faced lie that conceals the real reason for the “failure” of these schools: the deep and ingrained class and racial divisions in our nation’s history as borne out by city riots over the past 50 years. What is happening in the seething cauldron of our inner cities is hardly conducive to students learning.
How much easier to wax moralistic and blame public schools as the villains, the helpless victims of these racist policies of social injustice, rather than these policies themselves — or even to change them! But what politician would dare take this on! That would mean real moral leadership and honest reform, not the crowd-pleasing posturing of pseudo-reform that demonizes teachers and blames them for the responsibility that government abdicated decades ago. It is the systemic culture of poverty and segregation that accounts for the lack of student progress within our inner cities, not teachers who can do only so much given government’s washing its hands of the inner city.
The solution to these appalling conditions of inner-city poverty is not moral exhortation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington and state capitals — a new Marshall Plan. Those who sit at the Table of the Mighty have always known that this is the only answer to these seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities. What is wanting, as always, is the political will. Instead of hectoring teachers to do more and more with less and less, genuine reform will only begin when government redirects its resources to rebuild our nation’s inner cities and support the public schools within them.
If we can find billions to bail out big banks and billions more for dubious military adventures abroad, we certainly can find billions to invest in our own people and children! If we really cared about our children and their chances for a good education, we would move heaven and earth to ensure that this happens. Children are our only real immortality, and if we don’t care about them, whom do we care for? What are we about as a nation? What are we about as human beings?
But, then, it’s always more profitable to Haliburtonize the cities abroad we destroy in war only to later rebuild them than to turn our own cities into environments worthy of the dignity of the human beings who live there, and where schools and schoolchildren can flourish. Until that happens, talk of reform will be dismissed by teachers as empty, self-serving political bombast, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but sound bites for the six o’clock news, launching pads for those with aspirations to higher office or the White House.
Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these inner-city schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes, and offer rich and diversified programs that will challenge and help them to grow as students and persons. Preaching self-help rhetoric of feel-good uplift to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today smacks of imposing guilt trips on these victims of government inaction.
Until those in power dare to show true leadership by helping the poor rather than protecting the rich, until they live up to their oath of office by caring for all our citizens and not just the few; until they use their power to effect positive change rather than undermining teachers who work against hopeless odds to do the impossible, until this happens, we won’t be Waiting for Superman, but Waiting for Godot.
The silence of public officials about these decades of government neglect — the true cause of the plight of our inner cities and their public schools — is only all-too-understandable, because they would be indicting the very system they represent. Instead, they condemn the first responders — teachers — who daily must pick their way through the smoldering debris of past inaction. In their attempt to appease a public clamoring for quick-fix solutions to longstanding problems, politicians cast about for scapegoats, a measure always more convenient, and popular, and cheaper, than addressing root causes, which would mean real reform.
It is the perennial stock-in-trade tactic of those who would rather demagogue the burning issues of the day by deflecting public attention from underlying structural causes, because they lack the moral courage of facing the truth, the mark of true statesmen and women.
It is a strange sort of paradox that a nation which demands improved public schools is unwilling to pay for them. Indeed, it even remains silent when governors and legislators annually cut billions from public-school budgets and give this funding to charter schools, which refuse to have their books audited, are not public schools, and cherry-pick every child who applies to them.
For too long, the teaching profession in America has been dismissed as an intellectual proletarian class, much as the Romans viewed their educated Greek prisoners of war, whom they enslaved and brought back to Rome as tutors for their children. Teachers are routinely reviled for the important work they perform as unworthy of a professional salary, despite years of experience and advanced degrees. And, yet, they continue to educate on behalf of a nation that begrudges what it pays them. No wonder students doubt the value of learning, when they see that many in the trades earn more than their teachers. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson students learn in our schools.
Yet teachers continue to educate while politicians break down their authority with sustained public criticism and then wonder why teachers command little respect. Nowhere in the world are teachers held in such low esteem as in America, an eloquent testimony to our national character. Yet teachers continue to educate those whom past centuries never dreamt capable of being educated — everyone, and then these teachers, beset on all sides by misunderstanding, budget cuts, public vilification, and lack of parental support, are routinely condemned when they don’t succeed!
And, finally, teachers must now endure the crowning indignity of a punitive evaluation, a weapon wielded by politicians who have the temerity to claim, after decades of government inaction, that teachers themselves are the problem, and, depending on their students’ test scores, they’ll be one step closer to losing their jobs!
Children should be tested by their teachers on material taught by their teachers, and teachers should be evaluated by their school administrators as they always have been in the past. To do otherwise is sheer lunacy since standardized testing, as is well known, doesn’t measure teacher effectiveness, but the parental income and home environment of students as research clearly shows.
The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. Teachers alone are expected to overcome the effects of poverty, segregation, and racism upon students who live within the demoralized world of the inner cities.
In desperate holding actions, hoping against hope for government to come to the rescue, teachers never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by that same government, which, rather than thanking them for their heroic efforts against impossible odds, now turns on them for “failing their students.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
“Selma is sacred ground. It is, in a very real sense, the delivery room where the possibility of a true democracy was born. It is no place to play or to be for political pretense. Either you’re serious or not. If you’re coming, come on Sunday, the actual day of remembrance. If you’re coming, come with a commitment to fight for what these people were willing to give their lives for.”
That’s the message that faith and rights leaders sent in a Monday letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and members of Congress ahead of the anniversary of Bloody Sunday—when white police officers violently assaulted civil rights advocates, including future Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The sign-on letter is led by the co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis—along with former Democratic Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Touré, Rev. Mark Thompson, Rebecca Marion, and Rev. Carolyn Foster. It is open for signature on the Repairers of the Breach website.
“#SelmaIsSacredGround, not a place for political pretense.”
“This is a critical year in the life of our country,” the seven initial signatories wrote. “On the one hand, the president and progressive members of Congress have fought to pass policies that have lifted up Americans in many ways. From Covid relief measures to infrastructure investments to child tax credits that lifted millions of children out of poverty (for a brief moment) to the appointment of the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, we can celebrate some real progress.”
“But, on the other hand, with a Democratic president and control of the House and Senate for two years, Democratic leadership was unable to raise the federal minimum wage,” they continued, also noting that a few obstructionist Democrats repeatedly helped Senate Republicans block efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act by supporting the filibuster.
That obstruction, they explained, enabled “regressive legislative bodies across the nation to pass more voter suppression bills than any time since Jim Crow and to go through another round of dangerous redistricting, which nullifies the potential power of progressive voting coalitions by stacking and packing votes in certain districts to predetermine outcomes before any vote is cast.”
\u201cAhead of the 58th anniv. of Bloody Sunday, @brepairers is joined in this call by Rev. Liz Theoharis @liztheo, Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Toure, Rev. Mark Thompson @ministter, Rebecca Marion, Board Chair, Bridge Crossing Jubilee, Rev. Carolyn Foster of the @AlabamaPPC, and others.\u201d— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II) 1676925038
Highlighting research that shows tens of millions of Americans face some form of voter suppression, the letter leaders argue that if Biden and other politicians plan to visit Selma—which was recently devastated by a tornado—for the Bloody Sunday anniversary, they should “declare that the fight for voting rights and the restoration of what they marched across that bridge for is not over.”
The letter also demands urgent action on living wages and investments in rural areas, stressing that millions of people—particularly in Southern states—live “in poverty and low-wealth conditions” and remain “uninsured or underinsured at a time when we have more people on healthcare than ever before,” three years into the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Those of us who are planning to be in Selma to honor the struggle for voting rights and economic justice should be willing to protest and engage nonviolently if politicians attempt to do moral harm to the memory and the sacredness of what happened on Bloody Sunday,” declares the letter. “This is no time for foolishness, photo-ops, and flaky commitments.”
“Let us be clear: To honor the memory of Bloody Sunday is to work for the full restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the passage of the original For the People Act that John Lewis helped to write, not the bill that was watered down by Joe Manchin,” the letter continues, calling out the pro-filibuster West Virginia Democrat infamous for thwarting his own party’s agenda.
“To commemorate Bloody Sunday,” the letter adds, “is to commit to raising of the minimum wage to a living wage, to ensuring that every American has adequate healthcare, and to enacting economic development that touches poor and low-wealth communities.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is our nation’s most effective tool for combating hunger. It plays a critical role in reducing poverty, improving health and economic outcomes, supporting people who are paid low wages, and serving as the first line of defense against hunger during economic downturns. Access to SNAP provides families with the money they need to purchase groceries, freeing up their limited resources to spend more on other basic needs such as housing, utilities, and medical and child care.
As the Senate Agriculture Committee prepares to hold a hearing on nutrition programs in the 2023 farm bill, there are a few important points to consider.
SNAP is highly effective at reducing hunger and is a powerful anti-poverty tool, especially during times of economic downturn. SNAP reduces hunger by as much as 30 percent and is even more effective among children. Studies have shown that hunger among children fell by roughly one-third after their families received SNAP benefits for six months. Hunger was poised to soar early in the COVID-19 pandemic, but SNAP’s structure and policy changes made it easier for families to access SNAP during this period. Hunger stayed level in 2020 — unlike during the Great Recession, when hunger surged from 11.1 percent to 14.7 percent. SNAP also narrowed racial disparities during the pandemic: from late December 2020 through December 2021, the share of people who didn’t have enough to eat fell 7.8 percentage points for Black adults and 6 percentage points for Hispanic adults, compared to 3.1 percentage points for non-Hispanic white adults.
SNAP helps a broad range of people with low incomes, including children, older adults, people with disabilities, and veterans.
SNAP is linked to improved outcomes for education, economic security, and self-sufficiency. When children are hungry, their performance at school suffers. SNAP is linked to improved educational attainment and higher rates of school completion. One study found that test scores among students in SNAP households are highest for those receiving benefits two to three weeks before the test. This suggests that SNAP can help students learn and prepare for tests — and that when benefits run out and families are struggling to afford groceries, children’s ability to learn is diminished. Similarly, children who received SNAP benefits when they were younger have improved labor market outcomes in adulthood.
SNAP is associated with improved health outcomes and lower medical costs. SNAP helps families with low incomes afford healthier foods and is linked to improved health outcomes over the long term. SNAP participants are more likely to report excellent or very good health than low-income people who don’t participate in SNAP. SNAP is also linked to lower medical costs; some studies show an association between SNAP participation and a reduction in health care costs by as much as $5,000 per person per year.
SNAP is an important support for workers. Finally, and key in some of the conversations happening now, SNAP is an important support (not a hindrance) for workers who are paid low wages and for those looking for work. No one can work when they are hungry. SNAP helps fill the gaps for workers with low and inconsistent pay, and it helps people afford food for themselves and their families during periods when they are looking for work. Most SNAP participants who can work do so. But many of the jobs most common among SNAP participants, such as service or sales jobs, often pay low wages and don’t offer regular work hours or benefits like paid sick leave. This makes it difficult for workers to earn sufficient income to provide for their families and may contribute to volatility due to high job turnover. SNAP supplements these workers’ low pay, helps smooth out income fluctuations due to irregular hours, and helps workers when they temporarily lose employment, enabling them to buy food and use their limited resources on other necessities. For millions of working people, work does not itself guarantee steady or sufficient income to provide for their families. SNAP responds by providing workers and their families with supplementary income to buy food.
While there are some areas where we should make improvements to SNAP, we must remember that it is critical to protect — not weaken — the program while looking for opportunities to strengthen it in a bipartisan bill.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
We get an update from Damascus, Syria, on last week’s devastating earthquakes, as the United Nations warns the death toll in Turkey and northwest Syria will top at least 50,000. The U.N. also says the earthquake rescue phase is “coming to a close” and that efforts are expected to turn to providing shelter, food and care to survivors. Millions have been left homeless by the deadly quakes that…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Recently, Maryland swore in its first Black governor, Wes Moore, in a “historic” ceremony cemented with a tearful introduction by Oprah Winfrey and a hand on Frederick Douglass’ Bible. The Black elite flocked to fill the rooms of the inauguration to witness the third elected Black governor in U.S. history. Yet, this “first Black” gubernatorial win is history repeating itself.
African/Black communities have witnessed “first Blacks” consistently continuing over-policing, surveillance, criminalization and austerity policies.
As Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organization Ujima People’s Progress Party understands,
The Black middle-class’ allegiance to capitalism, and not Black liberation, has largely led the Black political leadership class to function as a comprador misleadership class over the Black majority of working peoples on behalf of the capitalist parties, and political machines they are members of.
For nearly a century, radical African/Black people have criticized elements of the African/Black community as being designed to serve as buffers to ruling class elements. Whether discerned as “neocolonial,” “the comprador class,” or “the Black Misleadership Class,” this sector has evaded accountability to the masses of African/Black people, while using their Black identity as cover for self-serving opportunism.
Moore first became famous for his 2010 bestselling memoir, The Other Wes Moore, an inspirational story of two boys with the same name and ties to Baltimore City. In interviews, Moore is depicted as a Black boy from an economically struggling background who became formally educated, rising to become a U.S. military veteran, and thus a socioeconomically developed Black man. The framing of his “life story,” as told through the book, not only helps manufacture an Obama-like image, politically. But in juxtaposition to the “other Wes Moore,” it leaves room to question how this narrative will affect his policies.
It remains unclear if Moore had been raised in Baltimore City. Yet, as the backdrop of Moore’s life story, the city has been central to his platform on crime. The Public Safety and Criminal Justice page on wesmoore.com states, “Violent crime is on the rise across Maryland and people are dying in our streets.” The solutions presented, however, will be nothing short of a plan to continue what former Governor Larry Hogan started in his campaign to “refund the police,” which increased resources for state law enforcement agencies following the 2020 uprisings.
Citing an “ineffectiveness of leadership,” Moore ignores that not only is Baltimore City already occupied with an array of federally funded police directives, it has just received an additional $7.9 million in federal funds to “fight crime.” This funding is a part of the Biden administration’s $350 million American Rescue plan to “fund the police,” as he enthusiastically announced in his 2022 State of the Union address. Unsurprisingly, in 2022, 1,192 people were killed by police, exceeding any other year in U.S. history. Also, Moore has ignored the existing consent decree issued in 2017, acknowledging the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, and specific provisions of federal statutory law.
“The BPD has access to the Department of Defense (DOD) 1033 program budget. They also train with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) through the ‘deadly exchange program’ and continue to receive federal agents through Trump’s 2020 Operation Relentless Pursuit policy,” says Petros Bein, member of the Baltimore City Wide Alliance of the Black Alliance For Peace (BAP-Baltimore). “This is in addition to the approved privatized policing for universities, like Johns Hopkins, engulfing Black communities.”
These continued failed approaches to “crime” have only proven that added resources, as well as changes in policy or the law, will not contribute to public safety. Moore cannot “rebuild and strengthen relationships between communities and law enforcement agencies” by “increasing accountability and transparency” in a city in which the police department constantly violates its consent decree. Nor should funding community-policing initiatives that “recruit diverse officers that reflect the diversity of communities they serve” be taken seriously. The recent death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee (a city also operating under Operation Relentless Pursuit) has been the most illuminating example of the fallacy of Black faces occupying these spaces to the benefit of the African/Black community.
Policies that address crime in an over-policed city cannot be presented in the abstract. As the country celebrates a “first Black” governor, Maryland continues to imprison more African/Black people, per capita, than any other state. Moore needs to provide more specifics to explain what will be done and how this builds or departs from existing efforts to return control of the Baltimore City Police Department from the federal government to Baltimore City.
“Wes Moore’s connections with Mayor [Brandon] Scott’s office and the city design/city planning committee will shape or harm what’s happening in Baltimore. With no control over the city’s policing, Moore’s decisions directly affect the most marginalized of us,” acknowledges BAP-Baltimore core member, Kimya Nuru Dennis.
The Democratic Party has been able to depict Moore as a trusting solution for Maryland, in general, and for African/Black people, specifically. His socioeconomic status, as well as that of his donors, indicates to BAP-Baltimore what will undoubtedly shape whose voices matter most in prioritizing health, education, and safety-based policies and laws.
The lack of equitable housing that causes displacement, as well as food deserts, and low wages, have been pressing issues in Maryland. African/Black elected officials have not resolved the economic and social crisis facing the African/Black working class of Baltimore City. Instead, their lack of solutions have resulted in the overt criminalization and over-policing of African/Black communities. Police are constantly and consistently well-funded and well-resourced. BAP-Baltimore understands police are used to enforce the status quo of white power and colonial control over the lives of African/Black and other oppressed nations of people. This comes as the city has increasingly privatized and priced out our people. More police funding, while ignoring the causes of crime, cannot resolve the ongoing dilemma facing the African/Black working class in Baltimore City.
The post New Maryland Governor Wes Moore: Another “First Black” in a Colonial System first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.
Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. This year’s report, “Survival of the Richest,” offered a striking vision of global poverty from the trenches of the pandemic years. Imagine this as a start: in the last two of those years, the world’s richest 1% captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth, or twice that of the bottom 99%. Put another way, this planet’s billionaires have collectively “earned” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for obvious reasons) $2.7 billion every one of the last 730 days. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, at least 115 million people fell into “extreme poverty,” with billions more hanging on by a tenuous thread. By 2030, Oxfam reports, the world could be facing the “largest setback in addressing global poverty since World War II.”
The truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.”
The grim realities laid out in the report left me wondering: What kind of cooperation were they talking about at Davos? Did they mean a collaboration among all global communities? (Not likely!) Or did they mean the continued partnership of economic elites intent, above all else, on protecting their own wealth? And what of fragmentation? Amid increasing warfare and beneath the ongoing fracturing of democracies (including our own, thanks in part to a billionaire whose name I hardly need mention), nations, and long-held international arrangements, do they recognize the deepest fragmentation of all, that caused by so much needless suffering and inexcusable gluttony?
Poverty Amid Plenty
Here in the United States, it’s the same story: untold wealth and shocking want, even as House Republicans are threatening to slash programs like Medicare and Social Security just weeks into a new congressional session. Today, in one of the richest nations in the world, nearly half the population is either poor or a single $400 emergency away from poverty. The moral and cognitive dissonance of such a reality can be difficult to fathom, as can the numbers. At a time when the U.S. economy is valued at nearly $25 trillion and the wealth of the three richest Americans exceeds $300 billion, at least 140 million people strain to meet their basic needs and face the daily threat of economic ruin thanks to one pay cut, layoff, accident, extreme storm, or bad medical diagnosis.
Over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks out of the paychecks of their workers, so much so that the average CEO now makes 670 times more than his or her employees. It tells you how far we’ve come that, in 1965, that number was “just” 20 times more. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year) has remained remarkably low, hurting not only those who earn it, but millions of other workers whose employers use it as the floor for their own pay scales. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had kept up with the economy’s overall productivity over the last half-century, it would now be $22 an hour, or close to $50,000 a year.
All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the U.S. economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat — politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.
America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.
Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plus in personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. As a result (as I wrote in 2021 with Astra Taylor), “millions of Americans aren’t just poor; they have less than nothing. The American dream is no longer owning a house with a white picket fence; it is getting out of debt. In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people now aspire to have zero dollars.”
The view looks very different from the top. The first two years of the pandemic marked the most unequal recession in modern American history, with the wealth of the country’s 651 billionaires actually increasing by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of that year, he was joined by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. At Amazon, where the median pay in 2020 was about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made that year to his own endangered workers and would still have had well over $100 billion left.
As an anti-poverty organizer, I’m regularly asked if we can afford to end poverty, even as politicians and economists cite the specter of scarcity to justify inaction or even outright anti-poor policies. Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.
Don’t be fooled. We’re not living in a time of insufficiency, but in a golden age of plenty amid grotesque poverty, of abundance amid unbearable forms of abandonment.
To Tackle Poverty, Tackle Wealth
Despite the capacity to wipe out poverty altogether, antipoverty advocacy generally operates within two interdependent philosophical frameworks: mitigation and charity. The first assumes that poverty is indeed a permanent feature of our economy best alleviated by job-training programs, fatherhood initiatives, and work requirements, but never to be abolished outright. The second approaches poverty as a sad social condition that exists on the margins of society and treats poor people as, at best, pitiable and, at worst, pathological. Together, those two frameworks funnel billions of dollars in charitable and philanthropic giving to explicitly apolitical measures directed downstream from the source of poverty.
While such giving does indeed help many impoverished people meet immediate needs, it does very little to confront poverty in its fullness or why it exists in the first place — and in most cases, the help is inadequate given the need. No wonder the wealthy tend to be the biggest proponents of mitigating poverty through charity, because to fundamentally address the problem would also mean addressing the unequal distribution of political power in our world.
Oxfam’s new report is a good place to explore this, since it not only critiques inequality, but offers possible solutions to the nightmares such a situation creates, above all increasing tax rates on the wealthy, which right now are mind-numbingly low. Consider this statistic: “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of about 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%.”
To counter this, Oxfam proposes that worldwide taxes on the income of the richest 1% be raised to at least 60% (with even higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires). They also suggest that taxes on the wealthy be levied in such a way that their number would be dramatically reduced and their wealth redistributed to meet the needs of the poor.
Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s executive director, explained it this way:
“Taxing the super-rich is the strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy. We need to do this for innovation. For stronger public services. For happier and healthier societies. And to tackle the climate crisis, by investing in the solutions that counter the insane emissions of the very richest.”
A New and Unsettling Force
People often ask me for a plan to end poverty. Usually that means they want to know what policy positions and prescriptions to advocate for, a line of inquiry on which I have plenty of thoughts. As a start, I refer them to the fulsome agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign (that I co-chair), including our demands for fair tax policy. But long ago, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an approach to lifting the load of poverty that goes far beyond any single program or policy.
Some months before the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, having been endlessly asked for an itemized list of demands, King answered this way:
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program. What is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen… The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”
The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest legislative victories. At the time, King pointed out that, beneath the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, areas in which they had made significant gains, millions of Black people remained locked in poverty in the South, as well as across the country, as did so many others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. King himself was surprised to learn that poor white people actually outnumbered poor Black people nationally. Taking that into consideration, he counseled that the movement had to make an evolutionary leap from “civil rights to human rights” and from “reform to revolution.”
This may not be the King whom the nation chooses to remember every mid-January in glitzy speeches by politicians who vehemently oppose the very positions for which he gave his life. In fact, this year, on that very commemorative day, I couldn’t help but think of the words of poet Carl Hines:
“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
But the truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.” Years of experience, and the guidance of others, had convinced him that the next chapter of the struggle required a mass movement of a breadth and depth not yet awakened. As he came to see it, strategically speaking, the unity of the poor would be the Achilles heel of a society desperately in need of restructuring. If poor people could unite to form a new political alliance across the lines that historically divided them, they would be uniquely positioned to lead a broad and powerful human-rights movement that confronted militarism, racism, and economic exploitation together.
The same is no less true today. To end poverty, our smartest and most innovative ideas have to be brought to the table. The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
— Michael Parenti
Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY the one percent who are tax dodgers, tax sheltering criminals:
Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.1 In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.
In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.
Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.
You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?
How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?
The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:
Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!
Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.
This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.
But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.
There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.
Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.
Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.
Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.
Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.
As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.
This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:
The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad
On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.
During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.
This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)
You’d never know that istory talking to linemen or bus driver or high school teacher or city council or …. And youth in college or in high school who will never get to read this article and discuss: “How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine”
A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.
Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.
Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)
The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The media and politicians are shocked to find out British Gas has been breaking into customers’ homes to install prepayment meters. Of course, if they’d bothered to listen to poor people they would have realised that energy firms have been doing this since 1954.
As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, energy supplier British Gas has announced that it would no longer “force-fit” prepayment meters in the homes of customers who are behind on their bills. Energy companies in the UK can obtain court warrants that allow them to enter people’s homes and fit the pay-as-you-go meters. Customers are then at risk of companies cutting their gas supply off if they fail to top them up.
However, an undercover investigation by the Times newspaper looked into this. It found that contractors working for British Gas sent debt collectors to “break into” homes and “force-fit” meters. Some of the customers the report identified had “extreme vulnerabilities”. Journalist Paul Morgan-Bentley went undercover with British Gas and exposed its practice. He noted that the company was breaking into the homes of disabled people:
Others who've had these meters force-fit for British Gas in recent weeks include a woman described in job notes as having “severe mental health bipolar”, a woman "with mobility problems and is partially sighted” and a mother whose “daughter is disabled and has a hoist”
— Paul Morgan-Bentley (@pmorganbentley) February 1, 2023
British Gas’s parent company Centrica was clearly rattled by the story. It said on 2 February it was suspending “all warrant activity” as a result. Centrica will also launch an investigation. Politicians, meanwhile, were outraged:
Today’s news about British Gas breaking into the homes of vulnerable people to install prepayment meters is absolutely horrific.
Wider action to deal with the scandal of prepayment meters is long overdue.pic.twitter.com/nl2eLztyNI
— Lisa Nandy (@lisanandy) February 2, 2023
However, energy firms breaking into people’s homes to fit prepayment meters is hardly news if you’re poor. This is because the government has let energy firms do it since 1954.
As the website Dealing with Bailiffs wrote, energy firms like British Gas can force entry into people’s homes to either fit prepayment meters or cut them off. They can do this under:
Section 2 of the Rights of Entry (Gas and Electricity Boards) Act 1954.
The energy firm has to have a “Warrant of Entry” notice from a magistrate. Dealing with Bailiffs noted that this:
allows a utility company warrant officer access to gas and electricity services in a property on application to a magistrate to lawfully break entry.
It is normally used when contact with the occupants has been unsuccessful and a utility service remains unpaid. A warrant of entry is used to either disconnect services or fit a pre-payment meter to the supply.
iNews reported on this in December 2022. It found that magistrates had granted nearly 500,000 Warrants of Entry since July 2021. iNews noted then that magistrates often signed off on the warrants without even asking if the customers were vulnerable. One magistrate reportedly did a batch-signing of “496 utility warrants in just three minutes and 51 seconds”.
Of course, if the Times and iNews had asked poor people in the first place then they wouldn’t have needed to investigate. However, why would they? Previously, fuel poverty, which would often lead to energy firms installing prepayment meters, was mostly confined to the poorest people. As the Resolution Foundation previously predicted, the cost of living crisis would change all this – and more middle-class people would be hit by fuel poverty:
So now British Gas are raiding slightly richer people’s houses, and suddenly the corporate media are interested – and politicians like Rishi Sunak call it “deeply shocking and concerning”. What’s really concerning is that no-one was interested in how energy firms were treating poor people – until now.
Featured image via Annasmith1986 – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 3.0
By Steve Topple
Yah, I am training to be a school bus driver. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, and that’s First Student, a foreign outfit in 49 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and it’s an equity firm out of Belgium. Bidding on school district transportation contracts far and wide, and alas, this Belgium company is getting paid by guess who?
USA and Canadian taxpayers footing the bill and reaping the poor services. This is what they call the public-private arrangement, again, what is a low level form of socialized payola for private companies while the taxpayer is screwed. As if the public and our governments and our states and our national funding can’t take care of OUR own children’s food, education, and transportation needs: we have to go to a private equity fund to handle schools shuttling. How long will I last is a crap shoot, since this is it for Lincoln County — no luck getting past interviews for county, city and state jobs as a case manager or services coordinator, even though there is that great 10 million shortfall of men dropping out of the workforce.
Oh, shit, I’m almost 66, with too many college degrees and a resume way too long to get very far.
Ahh, I’m also a social worker, educator, writer, journalist and even someone in urban and regional planning, but I can’t get past the interview stage. Missing men, well, there are many reasons for this new phenomenon. In the uncritical thinking USA, we will not get much deep analyses, though, just plain black and white rationales.
*****
The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond: a loss of enrollment revenue, less viewpoint diversity on campus, and fewer men in jobs that require some college education. Some academics want to make clear that just because women outnumber men in college it doesn’t mean that gender-equity issues no longer remain.
This collection of Chronicle articles features news stories, analysis, advice, and opinion essays, including several articles that sounded a warning years ago. It also looks at how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there.
Section 1: Why Don’t Men Go to College?
Section 2: How Can Colleges Draw More Men?
Section 3: Deconstructing the Gender Gap
Don’t get me started on the nanny state, the reverse sexism, the anti-feminism bullshit female empowerment. Don’t get me started on the battle of the sexes, and don’t get me started on the sheeple aspect of education, social work, and nonprofit work. Don’t get me started, man.
I can go down a thousand rabbit holes or warrens, but the thing is I come back out, revitalized, smarter, and, sure more pissed off. This is the state of the world, under capitalism. A Belgium company in the USA and Canada is monopolizing on school transportation. No union shop, $19 an hour here in Lincoln county where home prices and gasoline and food are outrageous and where other districts might pay more per hour.
Again, it’s a bunch of older folk, mostly women, driving buses at age 67, 71, 78. What the hell is that about?
I have also been a substitute teacher in this district, and I’ve written about that too: “Take Down this Blog, or Else! No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans.” Of course, I was and still am mad as hell at my banishment teaching, and can’t accept it, or take it. Even writing this will get me scrutinized by those overlords of the HR subhuman species who spend countless millions of dollars a year on software applications that do snazzy background checks, credit checks, employment checks, reference checks, drug checks, and of course, in my case, Google Scans/Checks, looking for any anti-this or anti-that diatribes or even plain old inverted triangle journalism.
Let’s scoot over to the issue of the failing male, the males in the womb, those just out of the womb, and then the developing baby, child, kid, teen and we end up with 355 million Americanos and a shit load of chronic illnesses for EVERYONE, including the poor child, babes in the woods. The top ten:
What are the 7 main types of learning disabilities? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that developmental disabilities occur among all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Children from ages 3 through 17 frequently have one or more developmental disabilities, such as:
In particular, psychology professionals should study these seven learning disabilities:
Related Disorders
So here we are at, now, in a society with so many epigentic, developmental, gestational, chromosomal and neuro disabilities. So many youth are faced with a lifetime of struggle, even before crawling, and then in pre-K and then K12, and then as adults. If this were a socially just society, there would be trillions spent on finding out the causes and effects and then the effects as new causes for new effects on the individual gestating, and what it is that makes this such a prevalent issue in our Western Society. Schools are warehouses, for sure, and the school to prison pipeline is not some goof-ball concept. We’d be looking hard at the chemicals, the stressors, the mother and father and their own stressors. All the toxins in air, water, food, drugs, including EMFs, and just the lack of nutrition, the fatty liver disease in 1/3 of folk, and the failing sperm counts in men since 1950, and, well, the discussion of who is that village that takes to raise a child.
Everything in capitalism is ANTI-health, ANTI-human, ANTI-Learning, ANTI-community engagement. More and more children, and yes, mostly boys, are monitored in the classroom, those prisons, and the effect or affect is that there is little significant learning and developing going on inside the school and their brains. They are a nerved up/out or nervous wreck, and they are watched and graded and sent home with behavior reports.
Now is the time to pity the child. Our children, and of course, all those children hit with the wagers of war, the wagers of sanctions, the wagers of economic and health and food sanctions. Depleted uranium or lead in the pipes. All of those realities also tie into the flagging mental health, the growing pressures put upon mother, father, child, grandparents, the lot of them in education, et al.
This is the sickness of America:
In solidarity with Cuba, leaders and activists of all Left and democratic parties of India welcomed Aleida Guevara in Surjeet Bhavan.
To a packed hall, Aleida said that it is one thing to talk about an economic blockade and quite another to live under that blockade.
She narrated how no country was ready to even give easily available medicine for a five-year-old child only because of the fear of America. In spite of not being a milk producing country, Cuba supplies one litre milk daily for all children and the aged, by importing it from New Zealand which is expensive because of the high transportation costs.
They were forced to buy milk from far away New Zealand, as their northern neighbour, US is not ready to trade with Cuba. The sixty years of illegal and inhumane US blockade has taught Cuba to spread humanism through sending doctors to wherever they were in need. Cuba is just 90 kilometres away from the mighty imperialist super power US. Even then it can’t be defeated since it believes in the scientific principle of people’s unity and those who are united can never be defeated. “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (The people united, shall always be victorious). She said Cuba took arms for peace and defending their motherland. She asserted that Cuba believes in standing up for equality against any kind of barbarism in the world. Thanking the people of India for always standing with Cuba, she said that the people of Cuba will always treasure this solidarity and value it immensely. (source)
Milk, man, and the United Snakes of America is so so powerful, going after children far and wide. You know, Cuba never attacked the USA, never went to war, and alas, this is the power of the dirty capitalists, war mongers and some sick psychopaths. Medicines, medical equipment, air conditioners, food, and energy. This is the way of the rat, the USA RATON.
The entire psychiatry and psychology and sociology of oppression is what runs modern Western society. There are no right ways now to raise children, to support families, and to build community. It’s all about the private sector sucking up as much as the public sector can regurgitate to this thieves. While the children suffer, and while the entire shooting match is toast as we in a culture of pollution and gestational crimes and constant bombardment of children with poisons — from those in the plastics, chicken nuggets, lawn sprays, all the off gassing, all those artificial flavors — find it harder and harder to survive all the death traps that we know this society is unleashing at an earlier and earlier age.
We are in an age of behavior adjustment, brainwashing, mind control, sinister Stockholm Syndrome, general anxiety disorders created by social media and generalized hatefulness from the legislators and two-bit politicians. Checked out or challenged just looking at a book, we are in the new normal of trillion$ for the pigs of war, for SWAT teams, for the opposition to beat us down, to implode the family, to eradicate the human and humane family. These kiddos come onto the bus with behavior plans, with their little classroom check slips for the parents to mull over at home.
Oh, what is enlightenment? “Behavior charts and similar public shaming methods don’t teach self-regulation. They mainly harm vulnerable learners.” The following is pretty light weight compared to the scenes I have been enmeshed in as a substitute teacher in special education and blended classrooms. Believe me.
Mr. Hill stops reading aloud to his 4th grade students and turns to Anisa. “Anisa, you’re off task. Change your clip. I asked you once and you are still digging in your desk. Walk over and change it now.”
Anisa stands and walks across the classroom. Several of her peers make condescending comments under their breath. Anisa moves her clip from green to yellow and returns to her desk and puts her head down. Her nonverbal behaviors indicate that she’s angry, hurt, and frustrated.
A few minutes later, Josh raises his hand. Mr. Hill calls on him and Josh responds, “Anisa is off task again.”
Mr. Hill looks at Anisa and says, “Again? Please change your clip to red. One more problem and it will be another call home. You have to learn to pay attention.” (Source: Tear Down Your Behavior Chart! Lee Ann Jung Dominique Smith)
Read the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freire gives the term “freedom” a specific meaning: it is the freedom to critically question and change the world. In other words, a person is free when they are able to understand and change their own conditions.
For Freire, education and oppression are connected, since education can be used either as a tool for oppression or as a method of liberation from oppression. Freire distinguishes between a pedagogy (a way of practicing education) that serves oppressors, and one that helps oppressed people understand and change their society. According to Freire, “freedom” (the freedom to critically question and change the world) requires people to gain a new understanding of how reality works. Changing the dominant understanding of history is a key part of this process. Freire sees education as useful not just for individual growth, but also for achieving social change. To expand on this point, he discusses social change as a necessary tool to achieve freedom and overthrow oppression. Within Freire’s framework, systems of oppression try to prevent radical social change so that they do not lose power. Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics. A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. (some clipped notes)
*****
Feeling the burn yet, the absolute oppression instilled in the greatest country and system the world has ever seen?
Get a little primer on exactly what capitalism and inflation and the systems of Milton Friedman are all about here:
So when you say that inflation is only a monetary phenomenon, what Milton Friedman is saying is, “Don’t look at the power structure. Don’t look at how markets are structured. Don’t look at monopolies. Don’t look at how the wealthy corporations are inflating [prices]. Look at something that we can blame on labor.”
The inflation that Milton Friedman talks about — and you just mentioned my old boss’s boss Paul Volcker — is wages. So when the Federal Reserve talks about inflation, they say, “It’s really wages rising.” Well, we know that wages have not risen anywhere near as fast as the cost of living, so that can’t be the reason — that wages are rising.
But if you can claim that inflation is only caused by labor making too much money and hurting other workers as consumers, then you have the Federal Reserve able to come in and say, “We’ve got to have a depression. We’ve got to have unemployment. We’re going to raise interest rates because we want more unemployment to increase the reserve army of the unemployed so that wage earners will be so desperate for a job that they’ll work for less. And if only they worked for less, then prices will come down, if somehow the companies are going to lower their prices because they can pay their labor less.”
The pretense is that it’s all labor’s fault.
We are all on this behavior and consequence chart. We, that is, the 80 Percenters who have 8 percent of wealth in the USA, compared to the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the One Percent and 19 Percent holding 92 percent of the money-power-possession chart. We mustn’t act up, mustn’t question the boss, mustn’t wonder why the oppressors are our neighbors, the ones our taxpaying work funds, or why so many Americanos believe this is it for Nirvana — the USA, greatest invention in human kind since the wheel.
Oh, those progressives are capitalists to their bones:
Liz Warren shifted from supporting Medicare for All to advocating a two-phased approach intended to build support for a single-payer model (in which the federal government would provide health insurance for every person in the U.S.), by first creating a federally based plan to compete with private insurers and expanding access to Medicare. Elizabeth Warren Says She’s ‘a Capitalist To My Bones’ And Positions Herself as FDR’s Heir
And that is THAT capitalism —
“Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Rupa Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Raj Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.” (“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness)
Imagine that, all those children, and I am not talking about those with allergies, with multiple chronic illnesses, including diabetes and asthma, caught in this vice which is CAPITALISM.
Daily, we are oppressed, and as the digital oppressors get more powerful, everything about us will be transhumanist, and we will be abiding by retinal scans, saliva analyses, galvanic skin response tests, and then the body will be the internet of physiology, the absolute bot world of nano things controlling the entire human experience, and that’s not just heart rate and BP, but thoughts.
Below, I find these on the bus floors much of the time. The children leave them in their desks at school. They are on the playgrounds with orange peels wrapped inside. Oh, the behaviorists. The mind benders. The psyops, the dead-end Americans, paying for the tools of Nazi War, and now, how many teachers are talking about the Doomsday Clock to their high schoolers, just to broach the issue?
Hell, people do not talk about Ukraine and the pimping of weapons of child-killing in public or at the workplace. These bosses, like the Belgium First Student honchos, send memos out on what can and cannot be said during election A or election B at the workplace.
And we wonder why so many neuro-normal (sic) people are checked out. Trauma: The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank, baby, trauma!
This is Startup to Storefront, and on today’s episode, we are unpacking the science of how to get unstuck. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the title of the book written by our guest today: author, psychotherapist, and trauma specialist, Britt Frank. Britt knows a thing or two about getting unstuck, as she has battled everything from meth addiction to sexual abuse. She emerged from that trauma with a new outlook on life, a Master of Social Work degree, and a desire to help others overcome their own hurdles. These hurdles vary from individual to individual, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s not uncommon for someone to put up a mental blockade that prevents them from moving forward. Getting over this mental blockade that inhibits you from progressing forward is what we are dissecting today.
In today’s episode we discuss:
– Why you don’t need every friend to be a best friend
– How Covid didn’t create a mental health crisis, it just exposed the one we already had
– The power behind changing your why’s to whats. So roll up your sleeves and let’s start the process of getting unstuck.
The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank,
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
Since Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and the GOP’s subsequent slide into utter inanity, real life has continued to so far outpace satire that The Onion is starting to seem strangely mundane. Take, for example, the House GOP’s latest lurch into bizzaro-land: Several dozen hard-right lawmakers want to replace the country’s entire progressive tax code with a sales tax of 30 percent…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Clarity Press recently published Joan Roelofs’ latest contribution to the movements for peace in the United States, The Trillion Dollar Silencer (TDS). She has been a peace activist all her life and a scholar who always worked to bridge the gap between activism and academia that despite that effort seems to have widened rather than narrowed, at least since the 1990s. Part of the reason for this can be found in the activity of pseudo-academic institutions in the private sector, foundations and their appendages, think tanks. Naomi Klein may not have been the first to so describe them but her characterization cannot be disputed: places where people are paid to think by those who make tanks. After reading Joan Roelofs’ new book, it seemed more useful to talk to her about it rather than simply review it.
Dr T P Wilkinson: Some years ago you published a book called Foundations and Public Policy. In it you give a substantial overview of the tax-exempt foundation landscape in the US and how these institutions have not only shaped but also created public policy in the US. As I understood the work your concern was not necessarily to condemn these efforts but to call attention to this exercise of political power by unelected institutions largely beyond public oversight and unknown to most citizens. Of course you also show that some policies that may be very controversial in fact originated in the foundation sector and owe their adoption and implementation to it. One suspects a sympathy with C. Wright Mills but as a political scientist you concentrate on the perspective from your own discipline.1 Now in this new book you start from the question “why is there no anti-war movement?” and proceed to show how much influence the “war movement” has on the potential for “anti-war movement”. This seems an extension of your argument in the earlier book: namely that many important policies are made beyond the scope of open political discourse and action — essentially hidden from the constitutional processes available to citizens. Does this book simply cover another sector or is it also an indictment of a general erosion of those constitutional processes and public control over the State?
Joan Roelofs: Foundations try to fix up our political and economic system without threatening capitalism and US world dominance. However, radical change is needed, for the sake of justice, protecting the environment, lessening the threat of war, and ensuring the basics of the good life for all. Foundations divert these goals, replacing them with reformist measures that often are only stopgaps. In the process, they removed incentives for radical activism, especially by creating a world of nonprofit organizations with decent staff income, doing obviously good things. They, along with government agencies, acted as soft cops in the Cold War, aiming to dispel the attraction of socialism throughout the world.
Democracy today, i.e., a truly representative system without corruption and bought representatives, would not necessarily produce justice, equality, peace, and environmental regeneration. It would reflect the self-interests of the majority, who are not poor. In earlier times the majority was poor, so democracy might have worked to produce major changes in wealth distribution. I’m not so sure that it could produce a rational economic system or anti-war fervor. In my old age I have more sympathy with Plato, especially because the semi-democracy of Athens voted for war.
TPW: Do I understand correctly, the majority is not poor today? Certainly the majority is not poor like those who live in Indonesian shantytowns or in Guinea Bissau. But with wages that have stagnated and declined for nearly 40 years now and a recognizable expansion of the gap between income and assets held by the majority and the minuscule segment of super-rich, surely there is growing poverty. Do you mean poverty as a fact or poverty as self-perception? How do you define poverty? Economist Michael Hudson has said that since the last major housing crash the last bastion of working middle class assets—home ownership – is rapidly deteriorating. This is equivalent to massive expropriation, turning homeowners into quasi-feudal tenants. Are you saying there is no democracy to counter that trend? People like Hudson and Jeffrey Sachs practically say that what makes China a democracy is that its system of government really responds to the needs of the vast majority of the people. Is the problem perhaps with the definition of democracy in the US?
JR: The official poverty rate in the US is 11.6%. Of course it is a disgrace, and especially the homeless, even in Keene. Many of these people do not vote. Many of the poor are tied into the social service system, government and NGO with housing, food, etc. Not in the mood for protesting. I live in a very mixed neighborhood and see how various poor people cope. Some own their homes (with their property taxes forgiven or unpaid), however run down; other in Section 8. The odd thing is that some of these decrepit houses have slate roofs, and even the landlords can’t afford or find people to repair them. My house was built in the 1850s, like much of the neighborhood.
TPW: Mao Zedong said during the Chinese Revolution “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He was arguing that not only the revolution but also any accomplishments, such as land reform, that the Chinese people (particularly the peasantry) were able to accomplish could not survive without the armed force to defend it against enemies. In the 1930s that meant not only the reactionary forces gathered around the KMT and European colonial powers but also the Japanese. He specifically said that China — unlike Europe or the US — had no constitutional structures capable of protecting the peasantry or workers and their achievements.
Nonetheless when I finished reading your book I could not help thinking that it coincides with Mao’s dictum. The political power in the US grows out of the barrel of guns made by the enormous military-industrial-complex. At the end of your book you propose steps to take to oppose this power over American life and society. Allowing that one should use every tool available to oppose militarism in the US (or anywhere else) the impression one gets is that the power of the military is so pervasive that very few constitutional means are available. On the other hand the sheer mass of US military force seems more irresistible in the US than abroad. Does this mean that the US is really a military regime? If it is aren’t Americans faced with the same problem that countries ruled by warlords elsewhere in the world face? Are there examples from other countries that might strengthen attempts to reduce the power of the gun in US politics and society?
JR: I didn’t say there was no anti-war movement—but that it is very small. I listed a number that are doing good work. What is remarkable is that the progressives, academics, minorities, immigrants, religious institutions, et al have so little participation in anti-war causes and are mostly silent about ongoing overseas exploits. At election time foreign and military policy are barely mentioned by candidates or the press. Support or silence, not covert politics, maintains militarism.
TPW: So there is an anti-war movement that is very small. That means it is a niche issue. The difference must be that it has no “lobby” since the US Congress is no stranger to niche issues. One cannot help observing—especially from outside the US—that given the extent of US engagement, whether political, military or business, even people working beyond the US borders exhibit what might be called “geographical impairment”. We have even seen political leaders who apparently do not know where on the map to find the places they want to invade or sanction. Is it possible that the size of the anti-war movement is also a factor of the general ignorance in the population about the world beyond US borders? The instruments for maintaining this ignorance are the schools and mass media but also the latent feeling of superiority in the best of all possible worlds—in other words, complacency. What does it matter what happens to people or countries I cannot even find? To put the point positively: how much influence or potential does the anti-war movement have for raising the level of basic education about the world in which the US Empire exerts its power?
JR: One thing the antiwar movement can do is raise the awareness of what is going on, which is the aim of my book. There are planned marches in DC and Times Square. A demonstration was held in a Harvard class. The divestment movements inform workers and NGO patrons about the MIC. It is important to inform people on a local level, difficult but I have been trying. For many decades there has been a weekly vigil in Keene, as in other places.
There is a heritage of violence and its glorification in the US, perpetrated by propaganda, the educational system, and the adoration of family members who have been in the military. In addition, there are other reasons for supporting the military, including fear (of being considered unpatriotic, etc.), distractions, and interests. My book is mainly about the interests and the military connections pervading our social, educational, cultural, and economic institutions. Rust belt communities must be saved from destitution, and military contractors prop up ballet and classical music.
TPW: Does the Constitution have any practical bearing on contemporary US politics? In particular regulating the activities of the war departments? What about the militarization of the police and other institutions, after Vietnam and after 2001? Doesn’t this kind of militarism fall through the cracks?
JR: The Constitution doesn’t prevent demilitarization. The UN Charter makes war illegal, so “declaring war” needs to be amended. However, Article I states that no appropriation of money for armies shall be for longer than two years, and requires Congress to define and punish offences against the law of nations.
Courts have generally refused to question foreign policy or war activities, whether they are said to be in violation of laws or the Constitution.
This despite the provision that treaties are the law of the land.
TPW: Some years ago I argued that there was such a thing as military culture. This culture emerged in the late 19th century when, especially influenced by Positivism, militaries in Europe and Latin America saw themselves as the modernizing forces in society. They were at the vanguard of science and technology and management structures. As such they offered a vision of a rational, efficient society that abandoned the superstition of the past and the irrationality of populism or mass politics. In fact the National Defense University and its constituent colleges have had a very significant role in propagating this image of civil-military affairs and governance. Since 2020 there has been another push for “rational” governance, supposedly managed according to science (or medicine). National security ideology has been expanded to a global system of public health ostensibly embodying the same benevolent principles of good governance.
Shouldn’t we welcome the capacity of the military-industrial complex to propagate such a rational model for political and social management? If not, what is the alternative.
JR: Some aspects of the military favor rationality, science, and meritocracy—not the ideal system but better than nepotism, corruption, etc. for achieving both competence and justice. The irrational part is war, especially where nukes are involved. Victor Considerant (see my translation of his Principles of Socialism)2 was a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, joined the military engineering corps. He and many of his fellow students were socialists, (St. Simonian at first), and their goals were projects such as creating a national railway system. In the TDS, I recognize the positive side of military organization.
Science has been distorted for destructive ends. It should be concerned above all with how to provide the good life for all without destroying the planet.
Fletcher Prouty, in The Secret Team, explains how the military establishment was invaded by CIA Cold War covert action people.3 There is also a revolving door between the Department of Defense and military contractor personnel.
One reason for the massive military budget is that a “free market” economy is not sustainable. The invisible hand was always a myth, and now, because of automation, outsourcing, agribusiness, consumer satiation, and extensive poverty and disability, the economy requires massive government intervention even to go along in its irrational way. The Cold War prompted US de-industrialization policies in order to build up capitalist industrial powers in Southeast Asia.
TPW: I heard and also read Tony Benn say he found it incredible that when he was drafted to fight in World War 2, the government gave him everything he needed for the job of just going out and killing Germans, but was unwilling to guarantee these things for me to do productive work.4 It has been said enough, I suppose, that the reason corporations prefer their own health and pension plans to socialized health care and pensions is for the simple purpose of labour discipline. Now much of that old corporate “welfare” has been turned over to the big five funds or derivative speculation. Those who dare to demand what soldiers and sailors get as hired killers, just for paying taxes and being good citizens, enjoy very little support. Does this mean that killing is just seen as a greater economic good than anything else workers could produce in the US?
JR: Funding the DoD is much easier for Congress than civilian intervention (there is some), which is considered socialistic.
Now rural and small towns are desperate for any government contracts, and Congress is fine with giving the military trillions to play with.5
TPW: You mention that one of the effects of all this soft intervention by the military is to promote single-issue activity or movements. For some the anti-war movement, like pacifist movements, are all single-issue movements too. In a 1967 interview German student leader Rudi Dutschke was asked, not long before he was shot in April 1968, if he would engage in guerrilla warfare in Germany to change the conditions there.6
Gunter Gaus referred to priests participating in liberation struggles in Latin America. Dutschke responded that were he in Latin America he would fight with a rifle— but he is in the Bundesrepublik and therefore has to fight with other means. Is there anything in the massive US military apparatus that offers an opportunity for those inside to oppose the destruction of the country they are constitutionally sworn to defend? Or is this a closed culture that must continue to feed itself?
JR: There are some people in the military, at all levels, who question the fateful path of US policy and operations, and also fine organizations such as Veterans for Peace. However, today’s troops are pressured and wooed with benefits. Psychology is certainly utilized, as Merrill (see part 2) describes in your previous interview.
TPW: How do you see the impact of US military culture in rest of world? There was a time in the 80s still when people in Germany actually demanded that the US military leave— and certainly not install medium-ranged atomic missiles. However those days seem to be long gone. Does the “silencer” also silence abroad? Is there any relationship between the way US military-industrial power is exercised in the US and the way it is exercised among its “allies”? Do you see potential for cross-border action or is the differences embedded in US military culture too great to allow people to see the relationships to the rest of the empire?
JR: I mention some of these factors in Europe in TDS. There is a military industrial complex in Europe and much civilian manufacture is outsourced. NATO has many connections with civilian society, ministries of defense and foreign policy, and EU institutions. Bases are of economic importance, often situated in depressed areas. One important work on the topic is The Globalization of NATO by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, another Clarity Press book.
I wish others would extend my research on the military at the ground level, in the US and elsewhere. There is so much more, and visibility might help to activate people, perhaps to figure out how to change the system of wars and the ever-present threat of nuclear winter.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In the 14-second video now seen by millions, San Francisco gallery owner Collier Gwin stands nonchalant yet intent, his legs crossed casually, his age-folded face glaring as he pummels a Black homeless woman on the sidewalk with cold water spray.
Yes, it’s 2023, and a wealthy White man is blasting a hose on a homeless Black woman for sitting on the sidewalk, literally as if she were trash. Power dynamics don’t get much starker than that.
We hear of vile, violent abuses against homeless people often, but it’s rarely caught on video. Here, thanks to a concerned passerby, Gwin’s soulless, sickening assault became documented, indisputable evidence of a violent crime. He’s right there in the video, glaring at the woman, blasting cold water on her, shouting “Move! Move!”
Unhoused people are told to “move” constantly, by vigilantes like Gwin and by city police, public works teams, and by society writ large. Just “move” away from this spot right here, where we can see you, to some other spot; out of sight, out of mind.
In a moment, Collier Gwin became a hashtag of horrors, his gallery a window-shattered memory, a one-starred on Yelp. With rising anger came alleged death threats, and soon local television predictably changed the narrative: suddenly, the story was about Gwin’s grievances, his lost patience after supposedly trying to help the woman, and about the cascading threats. There was no talk about the homeless woman, her loss and pain, her experience surviving on these cold mean streets.
The woman, the crime victim, was disappeared—nameless, faceless, lost entirely from view. She was described only in Gwin’s terms, as a nuisance. We can’t even “say her name,” because we don’t know it.
The woman, the crime victim, was disappeared—nameless, faceless, lost entirely from view.
Meanwhile Gwin, who was at first stunningly unapologetic, embarked on an apology tour of sorts, with a maddeningly compliant media aiding and abetting. He griped to local media, “Nobody can get into their stores or into their offices. And so consequently, you know, if she got wet when that was happening, it was because she was there getting wet.”
Instead of a story of violence against a homeless woman, the narrative became about Gwin “snapping,” about ” patience wearing thin” with homelessness—and even with the term “the homeless,” as media still call “them.” Instead of a story about the larger violence and criminality of homelessness amid this city and region’s epic wealth, Gwin’s assault became contorted into a “yeah, but” tale of ultra-privileged exasperation at the unsightly, unprofitable plight in the streets.
Lost in the hubbub about Gwin’s attack is the larger constant violence that San Francisco and other big cities wage on unhoused human beings every day. Here in this supposedly “liberal,” allegedly “tolerant” city of Saint Francis, homeless people are policed relentlessly, pushed from block to block, and “swept” from view by the city’s Department of Public Works, their tents and belongings (clothing, medication, other personal valuables) destroyed.
Even in this cold rainy “Bomb cyclone” winter that’s been nasty enough for President Biden to declare a state of emergency, the city continues to “sweep” away homeless people and trash their belongings—in violation of both basic humanity and a court ruling ordering the city to stop its “sweeps” when it has a chronic shortage of shelter space.
This and other daily violence against unhoused human beings is enabled and empowered by an increasingly virulent, reactionary narrative that the poorest of the poor in our society are somehow the problem, that “they” are a nuisance, that “they” are the ones to blame. This is not just a rightwing Republican talking point—it is increasingly adopted by neoliberal Democrats and so-called “moderates” and centrists who insist they are “fed up” with the crises in the streets.
Just a day before Gwin’s hose spraying attack, one Tweeter I regrettably engaged with bellowed, “Good, sweep them all away!” Three others “liked” the comment. Another said of homeless people, “Comfortable is a state of being for them. They prefer to not work. No responsibility. No bills. Do drugs. Get free stuff/food.” Many peddle the bizarre false notion that the city “pays” homeless people hundreds of dollars a month to live on the streets. Even if someone filled out endless forms, stood on endless lines, and managed to get a host of city, county, state, and federal aid that somehow amounted to “hundreds” of dollars, it would be at best barely enough to stay alive, and nothing more.
This increasingly predominant and insidious neoliberal view falsely (and counter-productively) blames the individual rather than the system (yes, our structural system) of extreme private wealth accumulation and a 40-year demolition of public-sector solutions that are the real root causes of this impoverishment and suffering. We can chart this back to President Reagan’s decimation of aid to poor people, and mental health and public housing supports.
We should all be fed up with acts like Gwin’s inhumane assault and by the city’s daily violence and harassment of homeless people. We should all be fed up with the completely preventable epidemic of homelessness amid epic, obscene wealth and inequality. We should all be fed up knowing that, for all its complexities and varied contexts, homelessness can be prevented by mustering our vast financial resources (city, regional, and national) and some political humanity and courage to invest in meeting people’s basic needs.
Gwin’s violence against this homeless woman was despicable, and he should be held accountable for his crime. It took more than a week for district attorney Brooke Jenkins to issue an arrest warrant, charging Gwin with misdemeanor battery “for the alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness.” With TV crews conveniently on hand, city police picked up Gwin at his gallery.
Meanwhile, the larger crime of homelessness amid extreme wealth goes unchecked; as does the city’s ongoing “sweeps” of unhoused people and illegal destruction of their belongings, in violation of court orders. While Gwin’s violence against a homeless woman may seem an egregious outlier, it’s indicative of a broader violence, hatred, and dehumanizing of homeless human beings. For homelessness to end, this larger violence and crime—the false, stale, and harmful blaming and scapegoating of homeless people, the perception that “they” are the problem—must end.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.
On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was formally sworn in as Brazil’s new president one week prior, on 1 January, there was no such melee; it appears that the vandals were waiting until the city was quiet and Lula was out of town. For all its bluster, the attack was an act of extreme cowardice.
Meanwhile, the defeated Bolsonaro was nowhere near Brasília. He fled Brazil prior to the inauguration – presumably to escape prosecution – and sought haven in Orlando, Florida (in the United States). Even though Bolsonaro was not in Brasília, the Bolsonaristas, as his supporters are known, left their mark throughout the city. Even before Bolsonaro lost the election to Lula this past October, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil suggested that Brazil was going to experience ‘Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro’. This prediction is supported by the fact that the far-right Liberal Party, which served as Bolsonaro’s political vehicle during his presidency, holds the largest bloc in the country’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate, while the toxic influence of the right wing persists both in Brazil’s elected bodies and political climate, especially on social media.
Mayo (Egypt), Un soir à Cannes (‘An Evening in Cannes’), 1948.
The two men responsible for public safety in Brasília – Anderson Torres (the secretary of public security of the Federal District) and Ibaneis Rocha (the governor of the Federal District) – are close to Bolsonaro. Torres served as the minister of justice and public security in Bolsonaro’s government, while Rocha formally supported Bolsonaro during the election. As the Bolsonaristas prepared their assault on the capital, both men appeared to have abdicated their responsibilities: Torres was on holiday in Orlando, while Rocha took the afternoon off on the last working day before the coup attempt. For this complicity in the violence, Torres has been dismissed from his post and faces charges, and Rocha has been suspended. The federal government has taken charge of security and arrested over a thousand of these ‘fanatic Nazis’, as Lula called them. There is a good case to be made that these ‘fanatic Nazis’ do not deserve amnesty.
The slogans and signs that pervaded Brasília on 8 January were less about Bolsonaro and more about the rioters’ hatred for Lula and the potential of his pro-people government. This sentiment is shared by big business sectors – mainly agribusiness – which are furious about the reforms proposed by Lula. The attack was partly the result of the built-up frustration felt by people who have been led, by intentional misinformation campaigns and the use of the judicial system to unseat the Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), through ‘lawfare’, to believe that Lula is a criminal – even though the courts have ruled this to be false. It was also a warning from Brazil’s elites. The unruly nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the ‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest rollback of neoliberal austerity.
Kartick Chandra Pyne (India), Workers, 1965.
The attacks on government offices in the United States (2021) and Brazil (2023), as well as the recent coup in Peru (2022), are not random events; beneath them is a pattern that requires examination. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been engaged in this study since our founding five years ago. In our first publication, In the Ruins of the Present (March 2018), we offered a preliminary analysis of this pattern, which I will develop further below.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Third World Project withered as a result of the debt crisis, the US-driven agenda of neoliberal globalisation prevailed. This programme was characterised by the state’s withdrawal from the regulation of capital and by the erosion of social welfare policies. The neoliberal framework had two major consequences: first, a rapid increase in social inequality, with the growth of billionaires at one pole and the growth of poverty at the other, along with an exacerbation of inequality along North-South lines; and second, the consolidation of a ‘centrist’ political force that pretended that history, and therefore politics, had ended, leaving only administration (which in Brazil is well-named as centrão, or the ‘centre’) remaining. Most countries around the world fell victim to both the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology, which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that belied the argument that politics had ended.
Leonora Carrington (Mexico), Figuras fantásticas a caballo (‘Fantastical Figures on Horseback’), 2011.
The Great Recession that set in with the global financial crisis of 2007–08 increasingly invalidated the political credentials of the ‘centrists’ who had managed the austerity regime. The World Inequality Report 2022 is an indictment of neoliberalism’s legacy. Today, wealth inequality is as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on average, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns $771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth. Income inequality is equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world income. It gets worse if you look at the ultra-rich. Between 1995 and 2021, the wealth of the top one percent grew astronomically, capturing 38 percent of global wealth while the bottom 50 percent only ‘captured a frightening two percent’, the authors of the report write. During the same period, the share of global wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to 11 percent. This obscene wealth – largely untaxed – provides this tiny fraction of the world’s population with a disproportionate amount of power over political life and information and increasingly squeezes the ability of the poor to survive.
The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report (January 2023) forecasts that, at the end of 2024, gross domestic product (GDP) in 92 of the world’s poorer countries will be 6 percent below the level expected on the eve of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, these countries are projected to suffer a cumulative loss in GDP equal to roughly 30 percent of their 2019 GDP. As central banks in the richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. Roughly one in five of these countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from one in fifteen in 2019. All of these countries – excluding China – ‘suffered an especially sharp investment contraction of more than 8 percent’ during the pandemic, ‘a deeper decline than in 2009’, in the throes of the Great Recession. The report estimates that aggregate investment in these countries will be 8 percent lower in 2024 than had been expected in 2020. Faced with this reality, the World Bank offers the following prognosis: ‘Sluggish investment weakens the rate of growth of potential output, reducing the capacity of economies to increase median incomes, promote shared prosperity, and repay debts’. In other words, the poorer nations will slide deeper into a debt crisis and into a permanent condition of social distress.
Roberto Matta (Chile), Invasion of the Night, 1942.
The World Bank has sounded the alarm, but the forces of ‘centrism’ – beholden to the billionaire class and the politics of austerity – simply refuse to pivot away from the neoliberal catastrophe. If a leader of the centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states. When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous forces of the far right, who shift the blame for social chaos away from the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and marginalised.
The hallucinatory insurrection in Brasília emerged from the same dynamic that produced the coup in Peru: a process in which ‘centrist’ political forces are funded and brought to power in the Global South to ensure that their own citizens remain at the rear of the queue, while the wealthy tax-free bondholders of the Global North remain at the front.
Ivan Sagita (Indonesia), A Dish for Life, 2014.
On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to which he sent many others, quoted these fine words from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.
The post When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New polling finds that the proportion of Americans who have delayed medical treatment due to costs has hit a record high as the pandemic rages on and it becomes harder for the working class to afford regular and emergency costs. According to Gallup, 38 percent of Americans had either put off seeking medical treatment themselves or a member of their families did so in 2022. This is a 12 percent…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As the cost of living crisis continues, new research has told poor people what they already knew: that financially, they’re screwed. However, what the data does do is shine a useful light into just how bad things are.
Torsten Bell is the chief executive of think tank the Resolution Foundation. The group does a lot of research into how government policy affects the poorest people. Now, Bell’s team has crunched some more numbers. He tweeted that 65% of the poorest fifth of people have no savings at all:
National savings rates cover a wide definition of savings. Let's focus on what most people think savings are: cash in the bank. The are LOTS of people with very little savings. 65% of lowest income 5th in Britain have less than 1 month's income in savings vs 56% in Germany/France pic.twitter.com/iuUU67f5Jc
— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
This has hardly changed since 2016-18, at a time when the poorest people who were in bad health could save even less. However, it’s no surprise that poor people can’t save any money. This is because they spend more on everyday costs than all other groups – from housing to food – and the least on “recreation”:
Soaring inflation has hit the poorest people the hardest. So their ability to save is directly linked to income, as Office for National Statistics (ONS) data has shown:
However, Bell showed another problem: that the poorest people are also often behind on their bills:
Hopefully you all knew no/low savings are a problem anyway. But if anyone needed convincing, when a cost of living crisis turns up it has meant people falling behind on bills/getting into debt pic.twitter.com/eP3ytAzXwe
— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
Again, it’s no surprise that people reliant on social security are in the worst position regarding paying bills. This is because successive Tory governments have repeatedly frozen benefit rates, cutting them in real terms. Similarly, polling commissioned by the BBC found that 32% of social housing tenants had fallen behind with utility bills in the past six months during the cost of living crisis. Between 2016 and 2018, the poorest fifth of people had the highest rates of “problem debt”, despite having the least money. This is likely to be the same now. Yet as Bell pointed out, the government helps the poorest people the least when it comes to savings:
Here's how we prioritise our support for savings:
– typical household in top 10% will get £800 next year
– compare that to £80/household for the poorest fifth pic.twitter.com/Hx8NbMTfT2— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
The end result of this is financial chaos for the poorest people.
The BBC carried out a poll, but didn’t check whether people were rich or people. The poll found that:
Half those asked paid for at least some of their Christmas and holiday season spending on credit.
And:
A third of respondents to the poll who used credit to help get through Christmas and the holiday season said they were not confident about their ability to repay.
This leads to a deterioration in people’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Search engine optimisation agency BlueArray reported that surveying showed that:
when asked if they are worried about affording essentials such as food, clothing, housing, and travel over 84% are worried with 36% of these being extremely worried.
It also found that:
87% of those surveyed say financial stress is impacting their mental health with 26% of those saying it impacts them a lot.
2023 is going to be a disaster for countless people during the continuing cost of living crisis. With no savings, little meaningful government support, and energy bills set to go up again, the poorest people are running out of places to turn. So, it will be left to communities and not-for-profit groups to pick up the pieces.
Featured image via pixabay
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
Predatory lending is an easily overlooked business that has damaged communities of color and poorer people for decades. It traps borrowers in never-ending cycles of debt with high-interest loans on coercive terms. But when Wall Street private equity gets in on the predatory lending industry, it amplifies the magnitude of financial exploitation.
Private equity, put simply, is supercharging the payday and predatory lending industries as it does in any other industry. Private equity has the money — big money — to buy control of lenders and reach more people with greater levels of abuse than they could before. That means more of the infamous debt traps that characterize predatory lending.
Over the last decade, private equity brought additional financial resources, and in some cases, a new level of sophistication, to the subprime lenders they acquired, often enabling the payday and installment lenders they acquire to buy competitors. Only a few months ago, private equity firm Park Cities Asset Management took control of Elevate Credit.
Elevate is a notorious predatory lender. “Elevate raked in over a half billion dollars in 2013 alone. And they showered over $210,000 of that cash on federal lobbyists to attempt to hinder regulations of the payday loan industry,” according to the website Payday Lending Facts. In August 2022, a federal judge in Virginia gave final approval to a settlement involving Elevate Credit, where the company agreed to pay $33 million to resolve litigation related to a predecessor company’s dealing with various tribes.
Private equity firms own more than 5,000 payday lending stores in America and provide capital for several startups’ online payday loans, a 2017 report from Americans for Financial Reform showed. The predatory lender, Mariner Finance, had only 57 branches in seven states in 2013. It now has roughly 480 branches in 22 states, nearly a decade after the Wall Street private equity firm Warburg Pincus – headed by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner – acquired it. In addition to that financial power, private equity has access to bond markets to fuel its expansion.
Private equity firms Diamond Castle Holdings and Golden Gate Capital merged Checksmart Financial and California Check Cashing Stores into Community Choice Financial in 2011, and over the years, acquired or rolled up other companies like CURO and Direct Financial Solutions to build what is now a network of nearly 500 locations nationwide.
Predatory lenders owned by private equity firms create incentives for their employees to mislead consumers on loan requirements. Private equity firms often pressure employees at predatory lenders they own to sell what are known as “add-on products.” For example, a lender may insert credit insurance on auto or personal loans or try to add high service fees.
“Mariner’s policies and business practices are set and directed by headquarters, leaving minimal discretion to branch managers and loan officers to extend loans that work best for consumers according to their needs and financial condition,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote in a 2022 lawsuit against Mariner Finance. “The primary directive is to sell.”
For example, finance companies like predatory lenders often charge consumers all payments for any add-on products as a lump sum at origination. Essentially, even if a product expires years earlier during the loan term, consumers are still required to make payments on these add-ons. They often use illegal debt collection tactics to create a false sense of urgency to lure overdue borrowers into payday debt traps. Private equity-owned payday lender, ACE Cash Express, was one of the first companies in 2014 to be fined by CFPB for that business practice.
Mariner Finance, which specializes in personal loans of $1,000 to $25,000, with interest rates of up to 36 percent that can be inflated by additional fees. Fortress Investment Group owns similar installment lender OneMain Financial, while the Blackstone Group ― founded by billionaire Stephen Schwarzman ― controls Lendmark Financial Services, which in general, charge up to 30 percent in interest rates for its loans.
Payday loan lenders commonly charge fees of $15 for every $100 borrowed, which equals a 400 percent interest rate for a two-week loan. They prey on low-income and minority borrowers with arbitrary fees that are often more than what is permitted by their local states. “A high rate isn’t automatically a form of predatory lending—it may be higher because of your creditworthiness—but an unusually high one is definitely a red flag,” attorney Andrew Pizor with the National Consumer Law Center pointed out.
Predatory lenders target Black borrowers specifically. In Houston, while African-Americans make up only 15.6 percent of auto title lending customers and 23 percent of payday lending customers, 34.8 percent of the photographs on these lenders’ websites depict African-Americans, per a 2021 study by Jim Hawkins and Tiffany C. Penner of the University of Texas. Black Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the total American population, but end up with 23 percent of all storefront payday loans,” Pew Trusts reported.
Payday lending is inherently predatory and private equity is turbocharging its abuses, enlarging the burden it places on low-income individuals and borrowers of color. About 18 states across the country have a 36 percent rate cap or below to fight this problem, but many predatory lenders operate nationally. Congress must step in with a usury cap that applies nationwide. Stronger protections are the only way to stop the damage caused by predatory lenders, who now increasingly have the financial muscle of private equity behind them.
Two examples — Korea and Indonesia — will be documented here in order to display that America’s Cold War against communism was/is a cover-story, or deceptive cloak, for a war actually against the poor (and the political Left) in all nations: in other words, a fascist war, meaning that America’s Government became fascist-imperialist as soon as World War II ended, despite FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt — America’s President throughout WW II) having been passionately anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. All of this will be explained here, and documented in the article’s links. First, however, will be explained the underlying economic mechanism employed by means of this war that’s actually against the poor, not ONLY against communists. This modern version of fascist-imperialism relies more on deception — on sophisticated propaganda — than Hitler’s did, because Hitler never pretended to advocate for democracy, whereas America does. So, here it is:
In third-world countries, where labor is non-unionized and cheap, an international corporation can supply the latest industrial machinery, to be worked by the fewest dirt-wage workers in order to undercut the prices of any merely intranational (or ‘local’) corporation while still making intranational (within-nation) profits that are vastly higher than any merely local corporations (which are competing against the multinational ones) in any country can and do; and this is the secret of billionaires (who control international corporations) by which they consequently generate vastly higher rates of return on investment than any merely local entrepreneurs possibly can. Offshoring production thus greatly increases return-on-investment for the billionaires while it drives wages down for the workers in the industrialized countries. On a global scale, it’s a war by the super-rich against the poor. In both respects (by lowering wages in industrialized countries and prohibiting labor unions in the banana republics), the result is to cause an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s wealth to become concentrated amongst the billionaires — the people who control international corporations. From the standpoint of billionaires, it’s the system that surpasses any other. From the standpoint of the world’s poor, however, it is the worst system imaginable, because it funnels wealth from the masses to the super-rich; it impoverishes billions while pouring a bigger and bigger share of the world’s wealth into the control of the world’s mere 3,000-or-so billionaires. That’s the way the world works and ever-increasingly has worked ever since 1945.
Here’s how it happened:
Korea
“The secret genocide in South Korea you’ve probably never heard of”
(The sources in the article, by Écspielle Kay, excerpted here are mainly hidden behind paywalls because the U.S. Government has always suppressed what this article is reporting. But I have accessed every source here, and find the article to be fully honest and accurately documented. I have removed the photos but retain their descriptions.)
… What had really happened in Daejeon in the summer of 1950 … was later termed the Bodo League massacre.
The centre of Daejeon, South Korea, appearing as an ordinary industrial city. Also the site of one of history’s largest massacres.
Song Joon-ae immediately told the manager of the site. The manager of the site called the Daejeon division of the construction contractor company. It continued upwards until the discovery was brought to the attention to South Korean authorities. The construction site became an excavation site, and the bones which Soon Joon-ae found were not the last to be unearthed.
Government officials at the various sites around Daejeon found hundreds of sites with hundreds of bodies, some children, some infants, some civilians, some wearing peasant clothing, others wearing military uniform. Park Rae-mun, an archaeologist who appeared at the site estimated that 1.2 million people were massacred at the various sites around Daejeon. Kim Dong-Choon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South Korean governmental body, conservatively estimates that approximately 100,000 were executed by the South Korean military on October 1950, while many point to 400,000 as a likely figure. Both executioners and escapees came forward, and a picture gradually built up that these people were massacred on the suspicion of being leftists. …
The story of South Korea’s past starts with a provisional government often forgotten about in history textbooks. The People’s Republic of Korea lasted only from 1945 to 1946, and its capital was in Seoul. Through people’s committees all over the Korean peninsula, a twenty-seven-point programme was formed through democratic participation in government, a relatively novel experience for Korean people at the time.
“the confiscation without compensation of lands held by the Japanese and collaborators; free distribution of that land to the peasants; rent limits on the non-redistributed land; nationalization of such major industries as mining, transportation, banking, and communication; state supervision of small and mid-sized companies; …guaranteed basic human rights and freedoms, including those of speech, press, assembly, and faith; universal suffrage to adults over the age of eighteen; equality for women; labor law reforms including an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and prohibition of child labor; and “establishment of close relations with the United States, USSR, England (ed. should be the United Kingdom), and China, and positive opposition to any foreign influences interfering with the domestic affairs of the state.”…
As soon as American troops landed in September of 1945, something seemed off about the People’s Republic of Korea. Nationalisation of major industries? Free distribution of land to peasants? People’s committees? Strong labour-unions and an eight-hour work day? To the United States, this experiment in a united Korean peninsula under democratic rule whiffed of communism.
What immediately occurred afterwards was the abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree. Officials serving under the government were shot, buildings were bombed, and supposedly “communist-sympathetic” Korean troops stationed in the country were summarily executed in a bloodbath lasting for several months. The United States Army Military Government was established, causing the eruption of mass public outrage at military personnel from the former Japanese Empire serving in office in South Korea.
To even further outrage, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the 24 Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army, assessing the situation badly, announced that the Japanese colonial government in Incheon would be kept, and, surprised at the poor reaction from Korean citizens his decision had elicited, tried to placate them by creating the Korean Advisory Council to represent the voice of ordinary Koreans. Unsurprisingly, his council was composed of landowners, wealthy businessmen, and officials from the Japanese colonial government.
Still not taking the hint, the military government continued to rule over months of civil unrest and outbursts of violence after outlawing the people’s committees and the PRK government. On September 23, 1946, 8,000 railway workers in Busan lead a strike, quickly spreading to hundreds of other towns and cities. A police station in Yeongcheon went under siege as a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands converged all at once, killing 40 policemen. More rebellions killed more than 20 Japanese officials and landlords. The situation escalated, and the American military declared martial law, tens of thousands being killed as military troops fired into mass crowds of demonstrators.
With haste, the First Republic of Korea, what we now know as South Korea, was declared in 1948. Syngman Rhee was flown abroad a US military aircraft to Tokyo, travelling to Seoul, and was installed as [president of the First Republic of Korea]. Rhee immediately arrested the remaining left-wing opponents in the political arena, setting his sights on Kim Koo, a former independence activist, an increasingly popular statesman, and advocate of unification. Syngman Rhee, as a fierce anti-communist and nationalist who would later be forced into exile by his own citizens, had him killed on 26 June 1949. …
“South Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 1 March 2010
MS [Mark Selden]: How have the media covered the work of the Commission?
KDC [Kim Dong-chun, retired Standing Commissioner of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission]: We have had to contend with the fact that the biggest Korean newspapers have ignored or suppressed our important findings and resolutions. The conservative press fails to recognize the relationship between past wrongs and present injustices facing many Korean citizens and those of other countries.
“The Road to the Truth: Lessons from South Korea’s Truth Commissions” (2021)
1 The Final Report of the Jeju Commission confirmed systemic massacres, indiscriminate arrests, torture, and summary executions by the Rhee government during the U.S. military occupation of Korea. 72 The release of the Final Report in 2003 resulted in a public apology from then President Roh Moo-hyun, the inclusion of the Final Report in Korea’s educational curriculum, and the creation of memorials for the deceased.73 Unlike the Anti-Nation Commission, the Jeju Commission had a clear mandate that authorized the Jeju Commission to freely conduct investigations into the Jeju Uprising.74 The extensive involvement of the Office of the Prime Minister also showed how proper governmental support helped the Jeju Commission succeed.75 The apology from President Roh was particularly significant because it marked the first apology by a head of state for human rights abuses in Korea.76 Furthermore, the allowance of the Final Report in high school classrooms allowed for a more neutral understanding of what really happened in the period leading up to the Korean War.77 C. South Korean Truth Commissions and the Korean War The Korean War claimed the lives of over 1,000,000 civilians, which made it the deadliest civilian event in Korean history.78 During the Korean war, atrocities were committed by the South Korean government against its own citizens. 79 For example, the 1949 Bodo League massacres that occurred during the Rhee presidency claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 South Koreans for allegedly being North Korean spies or communist sympathizers. 80 …
Although the TRCK made efforts to locate remains from mass graves related to the Bodo League Massacres and the Geochang massacres, the TRCK’s efforts were cut short due to an abrupt change in leadership in 2008, when President Lee Myung-bak came to power.89 When established in 2005, the TRCK had the full support of then President Roh Moo-hyun who was committed to using truth commissions as a vehicle for uncovering the violent truths of Korea’s past.90 In contrast, President Lee saw truth commissions as an obstacle to his goal of bolstering Korea’s economy.91 The TRCK’s resources and mandate became even more vulnerable when Lee appointed “new leaders” to the TRCK commission to better serve his policy agendas.92
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War”
1 March 2010, by Kim Dong-choon
The Other War: Korean War Massacres
More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953).
“Truman put Nukes in Guam and Gave the Order to Nuke North Korea”
(Based upon key details that slipped through in the academic book by Bruce Cumings; (2011) The Korean War, Robert Barsocchini documents that President Truman had an order drawn up to nuke North Korea but, for some unclear reason, “the order [to nuke North Korea] was never sent.” This was already after Truman had –)
managed to kill millions of Koreans, many, if not most, with “oceans” of napalm produced largely by the Dow Chemical Company, which the US air-force “loved”, referring to it as the “wonder weapon” for its ability to wipe out whole cities of people.
One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.” Reporters saw case after case of civilians drenched in napalm — the whole body “covered with a hard, black crust sprinkled with yellow pus.”
US “intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”.
Cities were destroyed, civilians burned to death and blown to bits with zero “tactical or strategic value”. Killing was an “end in itself”.
“[T]he United States Air Force was inflicting genocide”, Cumings notes, “on the citizens of North Korea.”
“The Case Against North Korea”
(I had posted this on 23 September 2019, to place into historical perspective the U.S. regime’s war against North Korea:)
So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China”? It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the U.S. regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the U.S. regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the U.S. regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the U.S. propaganda-media to allow the publics in the U.S. and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the U.S. is the world’s champion of).
This massive historical document opens:
On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S.A. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.
At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.
Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to U.S.-and-allied publics:
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.
Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]
The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the U.S. flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.” Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.” In other words: the U.S. regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under U.S. President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II. Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.
(The Netflix series from South Korea, The Glory, is fictional but its portrayal of current South Korean culture is relevant here because it portrays South Korea as having a rigid and brutal caste-system that honors the rich and damns the poor, and thus it exemplifies in today’s generation of South Koreans the values-system that the U.S. regime has inculcated into their culture. This is an extreme version of neoliberalism-libertarianism, a zero-sum-game view of life in which individuals are evaluated mainly if not entirely by how wealthy or poor they are: rights come ONLY from wealth, and the poor are worth nothing and deserve to be trashed.)
Indonesia
The October 1965 through March 1966 Indonesian government extermination of anywhere from 500,000 to two million Indonesian supporters of communism and of any other left-wing (or pro-poor) political party — including supporters of Indonesia’s leader, General Sukarno, who had some leftist supporters, including some that were communists — was probably masterminded, ordered, by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, on behalf of the owners of the mega-corporations who were backing the Democratic Party. Certainly, LBJ was behind this ‘ethnic cleansing’, even well before it began. As early as March 1965, Johnson’s people were privately vitriolic against Sukarno, who was making noises about land-reform and possibly nationalizing natural resources. For example, on 18 March 1965, “118. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Ball) to President Johnson” opened:
Our relations with Indonesia are on the verge of falling apart. Sukarno is turning more and more toward the Communist PKI. The Army, which has been the traditional countervailing force, has its own problems of internal cohesion. Within the past few days the situation has grown increasingly more ominous. Not only has the management of the American rubber plants been taken over, but there are dangers of an imminent seizure of the American oil companies.
The coup started on 1 October 1965; General Suharto was installed to replace Sukarno, and promptly began the extermination-campaign. But he didn’t know whom to slaughter; so, as one excellent review of Vincent Bevins’s excellent book about the slaughters, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, succinctly put the matter, “The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of ‘troublesome’ employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.” Other fine reviews of this book are here and here. However, like the other books that have been published about that extermination-campaign, Bevins’s focus isn’t on the masterminds who planned and bribed to get it done (its beneficiaries), but instead on the physical perpetrators and their victims. The coup-and-extermination’s ultimate beneficiaries aren’t named, nor identified.
The U.S. did that extermination in conjunction with other members of the American gang, mainly in Europe. The Judge in the International People’s Tribunal stated that “the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia were all complicit to differing degrees in the commission of these crimes against humanity.” It was a Rhodesist operation, done for the U.S.-and-allied (especially Netherlands) aristocracies.
As I have documented elsewhere, FDR was intensely opposed to all imperialisms, but on 25 July 1945, Truman made the decision to reverse FDR’s foreign policies and aim for the U.S. itself to take control over the entire world.
(The 1982 Peter Weir movie, The Year of Living Dangerously, dramatically represents, from the standpoints of diplomats who were serving in Indonesia at the time leading up to and during the extermination-campaign, the chaotic conditions in Indonesia during that period, but sheds little light upon the reasons, methods, perpetrators, and beneficiaries, behind the massacres.)
The post America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The energy crisis, the cost of living crisis, and companies imposing prepayment meters on customers are keeping millions in the dark and cold. A new report by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) claims that more than two million people are being disconnected at least once per month.
The CAB did polling on people’s experience with prepayment meters. It found that that 33% of people’s energy had gone off at least once in the last year. Also, 19% of people had gone without electricity for periods of more than 24 hours at a time. Both these figures were due to people not being able to afford to top-up their meters. So, when the money runs out energy companies automatically switch off their supply. This equates to one person every ten seconds losing access to gas and/or electric – more than three million people.
Additionally, the CAB said its staff had seen energy companies force people onto meters in breach of regulations:
At the same time, Citizens Advice frontline advisers have consistently seen evidence of people in vulnerable circumstances being moved onto prepayment meters, in breach of energy supplier regulations. We continue to see evidence of these practices even after the regulator wrote to suppliers in mid-November to remind them of their obligations.
They said the government and regulator’s lack of enforcement of regulations had had profound effects on the most vulnerable people:
Our polling exposes the consequences of the failure to effectively enforce these regulations: Over 130,000 households including a disabled person, or someone with a long-term health condition, are being disconnected from their energy supply at least once a week because they can’t afford to top up.
The CAB warned that the issue of prepayment meters is “so acute” that the government must ban their forced installation, and put extra safeguards in place:
This ban must include legacy prepayment meters and remote switches for smart meters. We will take forward further work to define what these safeguards should be in collaboration with industry, Ofgem and Government.
They said new and existing meter users should be reviewed “with a commitment to replace them with credit meters where this is necessary to remove the risk of disconnection”.
Prepayment metering is another front in the class war. Alongside the cost of living and fuel crises, frozen wages, and the precarious state of housing in the UK, the practice leaves many of society’s most vulnerable people struggling to survive.
Campaigns like Don’t Pay UK have sprung up to resist the increased costs being forced onto the population. And, as if we needed reminding, while bills have soared, energy bosses have been making a mint even as they’ve forced people onto meters.
The state should intervene to help people. However, the power to make them do so can only come from below – through organised resistance by those affected.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Eric Jones, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 2.0.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.
The world is confronting multiple, compounding crises, from COVID-19, energy, inflation, debt, and climate shocks to unaffordable living costs and political instability. The need for ambitious action cannot be greater. However, the return of failed policies such as austerity, now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation,” and a lack of effective taxation and debt-reduction initiatives threaten to exacerbate the macroeconomic instability and daily hardships that billions of people are facing. Unless policymakers change course, an “austerity pandemic” will make global economic recovery even more difficult.
As we show in a recent report, the looming wave of austerity will be even more premature and severe than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. An analysis of IMF expenditure projections indicates that 143 governments will cut spending (as a share of GDP) in 2023, affecting more than 6.7 billion people – or 85% of the world population. In fact, most governments started scaling back public spending in 2021, and the number of countries slashing budgets is expected to rise through 2025. With average spending cuts of 3.5% of GDP in 2021, this contraction has already been much bigger than in earlier shocks.
Even more worryingly, upwards of 50 countries are adopting excessive cuts, meaning their spending has fallen below their (already low) pre-pandemic levels. This cohort contains many countries – including Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Guyana, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, Suriname, and Yemen – with large unmet development needs.
The austerity measures that governments are considering or already implementing will be deeply harmful to their populations, and especially to women. Governments are planning to limit social protections for vulnerable populations; cut programs for families, the elderly, and people with disabilities; slash or cap the public-sector wage bill (implying a reduction of frontline workers like teachers and health personnel); eliminate subsidies; privatize transportation, energy, and water services; cut pension benefits; reduce labor protections and employers’ social-security contributions; and decrease health expenditures.
In parallel, many governments are adopting short-term revenue-generation strategies that will also have detrimental social effects. These include increasing consumption taxes – such as regressive sales and value-added taxes (VAT) – strengthening public-private partnerships, and increasing fees for public services.
Just in eastern and southern Africa, UNICEF finds that Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, and South Africa are considering or implementing three categories of austerity measures, while Lesotho is pursuing four categories, and Botswana five. Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia are each applying four or more categories of measures to boost revenue. Including spending cuts and tax increases, Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, and Zambia are each considering at least seven categories of austerity measures that are known to have adverse social impacts.
Not only are these governments pursuing painful austerity at a time when the region is dealing with unprecedented droughts and a cost-of-living crisis. They also are showing little willingness to adopt policies – such as higher tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals – that are critical to reducing their already-high levels of inequality.
Unless austerity is reversed, people in developing countries will lose social protections and public services just when they are most needed. According to Oxfam, almost half of the global population is already living on less than $5.50 per day. And, lest we forget, trillions of dollars have been mobilized since the start of the pandemic to support corporations, while ordinary people have borne many of the costs of adjustment.
The dangers of an aggressive austerity approach were made clear over the past decade. From 2010 to 2019, billions of lives were upended by cuts to pensions and social benefits; lower investments in programs for women, children, and the elderly; fewer and lower-paid teachers, health, and local civil servants; and higher prices from basic consumption taxes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are alternatives to austerity. Even in the poorest countries, there are at least nine other financing options that some governments have been using for years, and that are fully endorsed by the United Nations and international financial institutions. These include progressive taxation; debt elimination or restructuring; clamping down on illicit financial flows; increasing employers’ social-security contributions and coverage by formalizing workers in the informal economy; using fiscal and foreign-exchange reserves; re-allocating public expenditures; adopting a more accommodating macroeconomic framework; securing official development assistance; and new allocations of the IMF’s reserve asset, special drawing rights.
Since fiscal decisions affect everyone, they should be made not behind closed doors, but through inclusive and transparent national dialogues that include trade unions, employer federations, and civil-society organizations. Governments must abandon austerity measures that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Only by exploring alternative approaches can we support people and get back on track to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The world is still suffering one kind of pandemic. There is no need for another.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Whatever Arizona’s new governor Katie Hobbs does with over 3,000 steel, 40’x8’x8.6,’ four-ton shipping containers — still arriving to wall off Mexico for 10 miles of the San Rafael Valley — is yet to be revealed.
Her predecessor, Republican Doug Ducey, in the last months of his regime was ramrodding containers into place on a 60’ strip of desert as part of former president Trump’s border wall. His executive-ordered crash project cost nearly $100 million to buy, truck in, bolt containers together and weld sheet metal over three-foot gaps from roller-coaster terrain.
A few days ago, a federal lawsuit now forces the state to remove them because they rest on federal land. Costs are estimated to be $70 million.
Previously, Hobbs has said she might move the containers and repurpose them as affordable housing. So she’s got the right idea. So have others. In the last two years the trend for buying used containers has increased for temporarily sheltering the homeless. They join tiny-house villages, RV and campsite communities, storage units, motels, and vacant factory and office buildings.
Too, the railroads are selling off their 50-foot boxcars which could double container capacity for “affordable” housing. A boxcar’s average age is 30 years, however, explaining why prices range from $2,000 to $4,000, half the cost of a container ($8,300 for 40-footers).
Hobbs even may be aware of a model for a container community: the two-year-old architectural prize-winning pair of three-floor temporary shelters for 232 of the homeless in Los Angeles’ Chinatown: the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village owned by Los Angeles county.
Looking like New Orleans’ balconied apartments, the orange and yellow shelters face each other on 60,000 square feet of the former LA sheriff’s parking lot. Built in less than six months for $57 million , workers stacked and bolted three floors of 66 containers together for the two main buildings. They overlook 20 one-story modular wooden housing units. Each end of the two buildings has wide staircases, and an exterior prefabricated elevator at each floor’s midpoint.
Interiors of the 135 square-foot rooms and 8.6-foot ceilings—including a bathroom — have four-panel vertical windows with blinds. Each room was drywalled and painted, followed by air-conditioner and heating units, a half-refrigerator and sink. Furnishings were monastic: a bed, table, microwave, and shelving. Landscaping is a grassy courtyard between the two buildings, raised planters of herbs, and a tree at each end of the turf.
A sizable modular administration building houses offices for intakes, case records, counseling and healthcare services, as well as a laundry, commercial kitchen, and dining room. It has 24-hour security. The only drawback is that the four-acres are contaminated requiring an onsite treatment plant to “manage” the soil underneath the complex.
Before apartment builders rush to apply the Solis model for expanding units with extra containers, a few caveats need to be weighed against bargain-basement cost, availability, and transport. Many containers have been found to be toxic , their plywood flooring prone to fires. Inside temperatures could reach 135ºF with an AC breakdown. Lifespan is 10 to 15 years even with regular maintenance.
So Hobbs can convert containers—probably for permanent, low-income housing—into a Solis-like suburb. Or buy and remodel boxcars (and cabooses) for the homeless. Both are a vast improvement over packed, vermin-infested, crime-ridden shelters and the inhumane outdoor measures taken by at least two major cities—LA and Portland, OR. They are beset by sidewalk squatters, tent encampments, and RV settlers, all drawn to the West Coast’s mild, year-round temperatures, and social services. Current homeless populations: LA, at least 40,000; Portland, 5,228 and 800 encampments.
They’re scarcely alone. Last year, 326,126 were homeless, New York City leading with 102,656 packed in shelters and uncounted thousands on streets or subways. All cities with a “homeless problem” are being pressured by complaints from owners of small and large downtown businesses about doorways blocked by transients, trash, and toileting. Echoing Malthus’ “final solution,” they want the homeless gone forever, driven to residential neighborhoods or beyond the city limits. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
In Los Angeles, the ACLU of Southern California issued a report last year about police and sheriff’s deputies first harassing the homeless, then bulldozing encampments and seizing belongings. If victims persisted in living on the streets, they were banished by threats of citations to the Mojave Desert near Lancaster and Palmdale in unincorporated, East Los Angeles County.
LA’s new mayor, Karen Bass declared at her inauguration that her “first act as mayor will be to declare a state of emergency on homelessness.” Heavy emphasis was laid on sheltering 15,000 by the end of her first year. During her campaign, she mused to the Los Angeles Times: “There’s a big chunk of land in Palmdale and maybe we could create a village out there.” Her vice mayor added that LA owns “thousands of acres in Palmdale.”
Lancaster (pop: 176,892) is only nine miles down the highway from Palmdale (pop: 172,790), and the first to revolt against Bass (local newspaper headline: “Homeless ‘Invasion’ is coming”). Its outraged city council just voted unanimously to declare a state of emergency to protect it from “an incursion” of LA’s homeless. Palmdale’s council probably won’t be far behind.
Up in Portland meantime, its city council was voting to spend $27 million chiefly to fund Mayor Ted Wheeler’s resolution that within 18 months the city would set up three, two- to four-acre sanctioned campsites. Each would eventually contain 100 tents and 250 people and perhaps expansion to three additional sites. Local channel KGW’s Blair Best reported that: “Residents will have access to food, case managers and mental health and substance-abuse treatment, and…on-site and perimeter [neighborhood] security.” Some $750,000 is allocated for private-security forces in designated neighborhoods.
Once the campgrounds are open, Wheeler warned that like New York City, the police will do street sweeps and arrest the homeless refusing to leave unless they either agreed to use city shelters or moved to the camps—no matter what the Constitutional ramifications are. Multnomah County which encompasses Portland, spent $2 million , two years ago to distribute 22,700 tents and 69,514 tarps to the homeless. Under Wheeler’s policy, most probably will wind up in landfills.
A major factor in this tragic dilemma is the fury of many neighbors where these complexes and campsites are to be located. The chief complaint against the homeless aside from unsightliness is the alleged increases in crime, drug use, garbage, and hygiene. Most of all, it’s the suspicion that any kind of congregate housing lowers property values and steals their taxpayer dollars.
A middle-class Portland resident typified that stereotypic view: “I live in this neighborhood, and I think it’s a very nice neighborhood. I would not want to have a large group of homeless around here. I think you would have the crime go up, that’s the main thing.”
And a news release from the city of Lancaster addressed Mayor Bass’s plans for neighboring Palmdale:
A large homeless population in one area could lead to increased crime and safety concerns and potential damage to property values. This could be a major concern for residents and businesses in the area, and it’s an issue Lancaster has already been struggling to support with its existing unhoused population. There are also serious health concerns for the homeless population who would be moved from a climate ranging from 60-80 degrees annually to the high desert which experiences extreme weather highs and lows.
But this view of homeless communities is not necessarily true at all, considering that, say, sober houses instantly boot troublemakers and backsliding alcoholics/addicts from the premises. There’s rarely noise nor traffic congestion. Can that be said for fraternity and sorority houses in residential neighorhoods? Too, Solis-type facilities offer only temporary housing, social services, and security to move residents into productive lives.
Those experiencing eviction because of layoffs, business bankruptcies, or acquisitions can readily identify with the plight of the homeless in those settings. Fortunately, many speak up in their defense at public meetings or in neighborhood informational canvassing—or take the time and make the effort to reach out on their behalf.
CounterPunch writer Desiree Hellegers set such myth-makers straight a few days ago: “Never mind that the Pacific Northwest is choc-o-bloc with models of tent cities and tiny- house communities that are democratically run, generally with elected councils: Dignity Village, Right 2 Dream 2, SHARE-WHEEL, etc. None of them is perfect, but they are safer and infinitely more empowering, humane, healing, and effective, and less likely to violate the Geneva Conventions than what Wheeler & Co. have in mind.”
And a Los Angeles tiny-house resident reminded the fearful or judgmental about shelter living: “For people who get their noses up in the air, this can happen to anybody.” That’s certainly true for many of the 3.8 million living paycheck to paycheck and either are about to be evicted because the American Rescue Plan’s rent-moratorium has expired , or the 8.5 million behind on rent, as well as those facing significant rent increases. Add to those figures the 1.5 million estimated to lose their jobs because the Federal Reserve’s continuing interest-rate hikes mean small and large companies can’t afford to expand operations, nor are startups able to raise capital.
Perhaps it’s time to educate “NIMBYs” (“Not in My Backyard”) and the general public about who most of the homeless are in those enclosures by WPA-like posters (“We’ve Been Downsized or Evicted, But Are Leaving Shortly!”) spread around affected neighborhoods.
Facing the prospect of a nation of Hoovervilles drawing violent reactions from local residents, a frightened President Biden’s team just launched a plan to reduce homelessness by 25 percent in 2025: the All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness . Unfortunately, nothing was said about funding or what would happen to the remaining 75 percent.
That’s because the plan was just a heavily researched “blueprint” for state and local governments to use as models “for addressing homelessness in their communities.” Said Biden: “ it is not only getting people into housing, but also ensuring they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive.”
Forget any Executive Order to finance a New Deal for jobs and housing, as president Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) did to help solve the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At bottom, the major question involving the overall homeless situation is almost never asked because it involves the responsibility of corporate America: What good is housing if people lack jobs to make rent or mortgage payments? To say nothing of buying basics.
FDR’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) did both. It hired and trained 8.5 million of the unemployed for past and new federal programs. They ranged from infrastructure and environment to park systems and artists/writers projects. His FHA low-cost home-buying loans have housed 44 million since 1934, spurring massive house construction and providing capital for 4.8 million rental units—not counting residential care facilities, hospitals, and manufactured houses.
Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure program could have done the same. But he farmed it out to private interests. They might add and train a few thousand new employees, yet hardly on a WPA scale. If he were an FDR, he would have had the courage to shift part of the Pentagon’s FY2023 $858 billion budget allocation to civilians—as did Trump to spend more than $12 billion on his porous wall—to provide thousands of construction jobs and affordable housing for the homeless.
For the Pentagon, this tactic also might stifle increasing public opposition about its bloated, unaudited budget by showcasing its contribution to “domestic tranquility,” as the Constitution’s preamble puts it. Some $152 billion of next year’s funding—a 20 percent increase—goes for construction and veterans. That’s how those 750 overseas bases and at home were built by its engineers, equipment and supplies, and continue to be maintained. It doesn’t specify constructing what so the door is wide open to building affordable houses or rent-controlled apartment buildings for America’s homeless.
Using Trump’s rationale that his wall would defend the nation from an invasion of illegals, Biden now has precedent to declare such a neoWPA jobs-and-housing project would “provide for the common defense” of this nation and stop any domestic upheaval. After all, a major recession could trigger a massive uprising dwarfing today’s major strikes. So could climate-change migrations around the states.
As the Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Liz Theoharis reminds us: “In the coming years, movements dedicated to democracy and our economic flourishing need to invest time and resources in building permanently organized communities to help meet the daily needs of impacted Americans, while offering a sense of what democracy looks like in practice, up close and personal.”
To this, add the famous admonition to us by that man born into homelessness and persecution: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The post Remodeled Shipping Containers, Boxcars Could Be Solutions for Expanding Homeless Shelters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
COMMENTARY: By Martyn Bradbury
Last month The Daily Blog offered its New Year infamous news media gongs — and blasts — for 2022. In this extract, editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury names the mainstream media “blind spots”.
Graham Adams over at The Platform made the argument this year that the failure of mainstream media to engage with the debates occurring online is a threat to democracy.
With trust in New Zealand media at an all time low, I wondered what is the list of topics that you simply are NOT allowed to discuss on NZ mainstream media.
Here is my list of 17 topics over 30 years in New Zealand media:
You’ll also note that because so many media are dependent on real estate advertising, there’s never been a better time to buy!
Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is a New Zealand media commentator, former radio and TV host, and former executive producer of Alt TV — a now-defunct alternative music and culture channel. He is publisher of The Daily Blog and writes blogs at Tumeke! and TDB. Republished with permission.
Yellowknife, Boxing Day 2022
Can you imagine walking downtown in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any other burg in Canada or the United States and not seeing any panhandlers? This homelessness, begging, and dumpster diving is not confined to major urban centers. Last week, I was in Yellowknife, the capital of Denedeh (Home of the People; colonially designated as Northwest Territories), home to about 20,000 souls, where the temperatures ranged from -30° Celsius to -40° Celsius. Despite this, the homeless were out in the frigid temperatures asking change for a cup of coffee. There are shelters in Yellowknife. The take-away point, however, is that some people struggle with penury despite Canada being a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose preamble recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…”
Specifically, Article 23(1) of the UNDHR holds,
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Article 25(1) of the UNDHR states,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
If Canada and the US honored their signatures on the UNDHR and abided by its articles, then absolute poverty should not exist.
While poverty is an important story for people to be cognizant of, and while it may not receive the media coverage and government prioritization that it deserves, the marginalized story that so many people seem unaware of is that there is a country that made it through 2022 having lifted its citizenry out of absolute poverty.
China declared victory against poverty in 2021. And it is not just China lauding its victory. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commended China on its fight against poverty. The World Bank noted that China has lifted 770 million out of poverty over the last 40 years. Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, “Poverty alleviation and the eradication of extreme poverty, 10 years ahead of its target date, are tremendous achievements of China.” Citing China’s eradication of absolute poverty, even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was moved to praise China’s amazing economic development.
This achievement was by the nominally communist China. Being aware of the victory over poverty is great, but this awareness ought also to be kept in mind before unthinkingly criticizing socialism or communism. The intellectual poverty of the criticism is such that many people consider it sufficient to just remark, “That’s communism/socialism,” as if providing a label for a political-economic system should evoke fear and invalidate it. Thus, in the US, Barack Obama was risibly derided as a socialist; he, nonetheless, sought to distance himself from such a descriptor.
Donald Trump declared his scorn for the bugaboo of socialism (apparently ignorant of what spending on the military; police; border security; highway, airport, train stations, railways, port facilities, bridge construction and maintenance; education; etc represent) and communism. He unsuccessfully tried to paint his presidential challenger in 2020, Joe Biden, as a socialist (again risibly).
Even university professors, such a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, would add their ill-contrived opinions to the anti-socialist, anti-communist chorus.1
What Obama, Trump, Biden, Peterson, Justin Trudeau and other western-aligned personalities beholden to capitalism cannot tolerate is that a developing nation in the earliest stage of socialism (one with Chinese characteristics) has done something that the longtime capitalist-butt kissing nations have never, despite any lip service, come close to achieving: the elimination of absolute poverty.
What’s Next for Chinese Society?
China has identified a metric: “Human rights are an achievement of humanity and a symbol of progress.” Now China has set its eyes on achieving xiaokang (moderate prosperity), defined as “a status of moderate prosperity whereby people are neither rich nor poor but free from want and toil.” Xiaokang is to benefit all Chinese and benefit the world.
Meanwhile, the poor masses in capitalist countries languish while the middle classes, in the US and Canada, fall behind.
Why isn’t this war on poverty covered regularly and widely in capitalist media? Why doesn’t everyone know that the Chinese have conquered poverty and are embarked upon creating a prosperous society for all Chinese? Shouldn’t this be something all nations sincerely and actively aspire to?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
