"The Long Shadow": Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (4/5)

This discussion is good enough that I don't have to say much. This should be an eye-opening discussion for those people who think racism & discrimination no longer exist in 21st century North America or anywhere else in the developed world. Racism & discrimination in every sphere of life is alive, & being vigorously practiced, all over the West / Global North / developed world.

As per the discussion, social mobility is restricted, or at least, severely handicapped, due to this discrimination, & the general public incorrectly thinks that African-Americans, or every non-white / non-Caucasian, is poor or destitute because he / she is lazy or does not know how to find jobs. It's not that black & white.

Non-whites / non-Caucasians are hard-working & studious, & want to find gainful employment, but they are being restricted from doing such. But they & their families need that money, too, so they get involved in criminal endeavours, for which, society treats them very harshly. Severe punishment is not going to make the problem of people turning towards crimes, but eliminating the root cause will solve that problem, & the root cause is racism & discrimination in the society.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FBcnrDf_l0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Out of the 790 Baltimore children you surveyed in 1982, 33 moved from low-income to high-income brackets. What was different about them? ...

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: Well, let me say, just to clarify, that's not income. The way we classify their families and themselves as young adults, it's socioeconomic standing, which is a combination of income, occupational status, and level of education. So it's all three of those things combined. And that movement up, what we do is we classify families as low, medium, and high in terms of their socioeconomic standing, and we do that for the parents and we do it for the children. And then we cross-classify the two so we can see how many children went from low to high, how many children went from high to low, and so forth.

And so, yes, we find that just 33 of the children who grew up in lower socioeconomic status families made it into the higher realm as adults. The number of children who started out in favorable family circumstances and dropped to the lowest level, there's just nine of them. So there is upward mobility, there's downward mobility, but that's relatively infrequent ... .

So there's children who moved up from the lowest, from the bottom category to the highest of our classification. That was 9.5% ... . The ones who dropped down from high to low was just 6.3% of the group that started out high fell to the lowest category. ... But that 9.5% moving from low to high is contrasted with 41% who started low and stayed low, so when there's a fourfold difference in the likelihood of moving up from lower origins to the high destinations. The 6.5% who started out high and dropped low, that's against 50% who started high and stayed high. So that's more than almost a tenfold difference.

So ... that actually does a good job of kind of capturing the whole experience globally over the span of years, 'cause it anchors children in where they started in life in terms of their family conditions and then compares it to where they wound up in life in terms of their own conditions as young adults. And the predominant tendency is to stay where you started. Some people move up, some people drop down, but a predominant tendency is to stay where you started. And that's what really the "long shadow" imagery is intended to convey. Economists that look at these mobility patterns, they call it stickiness at the extreme. You know, you're kind of stuck where you started out.

How did the people move up who did make it out? ... the stories are so different one from the other it's hard to generalize. But some did it by being successful in school, ... , the way your parents probably told you to do it and the way my parents taught me to do it, ... , stay the course, study hard, come to school prepared, and do what your teachers tell you, and you'll be successful. Some of them did that. ... We have others who have moved up by being entrepreneurial, doing well without the advantages of a college degree. ...

So the paths to moving up--now, there are different ways you can do this, and many of our study participants have been quite resourceful and energetic and entrepreneurial and have managed to rise above. But, again, the predominant tendency, the pattern, is to not move up. If you start out in a disadvantaged family, the likelihood is that you're going to be in a disadvantaged family yourself as a young adult. So there's movement up, but there's also stability, and the stability in terms of your position in the stratification, hierarchy ... . Stability is the norm. Most people stay where they start. And the ones who break out and are successful, we applaud them, and it's great to see that, but you'd like to have it from more than just 9.5%. You'd like it to be ... 100% if you could. But short of that, you know, something. You'd like to see greater opportunities for children to get ahead in life who start out kind of behind.

NOOR: ... So, recently Paul Ryan, he said that inner-city men are lazy; and that's why they're not successful, that's why they don't have jobs: they don't want to get jobs. And what has happened since you started this study is that you've had under the Reagan administration a massive amount of cuts in social spending, cuts in social security and welfare in the Clinton years, and the escalation of the war on drugs, mass incarceration. What is your response to Paul Ryan? What are your thoughts? And this is also a common idea throughout society.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, no, it is a common idea. It's widely held. And I think it's just--it's certainly too superficial, and it might be just out-and-out wrong. Certainly as a blanket statement, broadly applicable, it's certainly wrong. We certainly don't see this in the experiences of our group. They try to get ahead by getting additional education, and there are just obstacles that stand in their way, so they're unsuccessful. They try to find jobs, but they don't have family members or neighbors or ins with the boss that can help them get into the door.
...

... I think, as a social social concern, I think much attention is focused on the limited opportunities for African Americans. But it's absolutely wrong about all inner-city people, 'cause one of the things that our book establishes is that the whites of lower background have are much more successful in terms of finding stable and well-paying employment, good-paying employment, much more successful than African-American counterparts and the women of either--, black and white.

... it's clear that they, African-American men in particular, lag behind, and it's challenging for them. And then their challenges kind of trickle down to affect women who are trying to establish lives and take care of families, many of them on their own. The national literature says that African-American men are more likely to apply for jobs than are white men when they need them and are eager to find employment. That much is clear.

It's also clear that the stain of a criminal justice record is a greater impediment for African-American men [than] for white men. We see that in our research, but it's also seen nationally.

So I think there's a relevant history here that we haven't even touched upon. But it has to do with the way opportunities open up in the kind of blue-collar workforce. And it goes back to the World War II industrial era, industrial boom. So what it wasn't too long ago, I think, that Baltimore was the economic engine or powerhouse of the Maryland economy. It's easy to forget, but--because we've been mired in these difficult times for decades now, but in the World War II era, when during the height of the war mobilization--Beth Steel, for example, was the largest steel mill in the world, with 35,000 workers, and now it's being sold off for scrap. That was a time--some of the literature refers to this as the moment of the blue-collar elite, where you could find steady work and high-paying work on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, on the docks. So there was a lot of good, steady work to be found.

But Baltimore was highly segregated during that time, and most of that good, steady work was available to blue-collar whites and not blue-collar African Americans, who were relegated to the least-promising kind of employment. They did all the dirty work and the nonskilled laboring work. And so we're talking three generations back. We're talking about the--our study, youngsters' grandparents.

Also there were restrictive residential covenants. So the white working-class in Baltimore were substantially isolated in residential enclaves. If you know the area locally, the first thing you think about when you--what comes to mind when you think about whites in Baltimore are the upscale neighborhoods that are exclusive--the Roland Parks, the Guilfords, the Homelands. But in point of fact, there are working-class, white working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the city that also are long-standing and very much insulated by residential segregation--Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, and there's over on the west side (near the B&O Railroad Museum) Pigtown, Sandtown, low-income working-class, white working-class neighborhoods that are insulated in terms of being racially segregated.

So you put these two things together in a historic perspective, you've got really a booming industry of high-skill, high-pay blue-collar work and whites having access, greater access to that kind of employment, and you have segregated residential neighborhoods, where people, blacks and whites, don't mix and mingle. They didn't back then, and they don't do much better today. White parents who have social networks through those in the workplace or in the neighborhood, a lot of employment in the non-college workforce is word-of-mouth, ... recommendation from a friend or a cousin or a neighbor that can help open doors. And working-class whites are much better able to provide those opportunities for their children than are African Americans, than are working-class African-American parents.

So what happens is, in the historic context, you see--in the book, we quote a sociologist by the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He's a sociologist at Duke University. And here's the quote. It says, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated have changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.

So I think this history is where the overtly and eminently racist practices come into play that excluded African-Americans from high-wage work, blue-collar work, and that excluded them from neighborhoods where they could develop social contacts that would be helpful to their children. That's 50 years ago. But if you fast-forward to today, you still have these same isolated neighborhoods, and you still have word-of-mouth hiring for these kinds of--on the construction sites and whatnot. And so white parents are better able to help their children get this kind of work. And they do it. They do it.

I'm going to kind of in a very roundabout way get back to your Paul Ryan quote. The white guys are working hard and doing rather well, inner-city white guys working hard and doing rather well. Because they have these network advantages through their parents, relatives, and friends, they can get into this kind of work. And they grew up with it. ... if your father was an auto mechanic, you're helping him. If he's an electrician, a small-jobber, you're on the job with him. So you get worked in that way. African Americans by and large don't have those opportunities and that access.

But the African Americans that we know through our project are also highly motivated and willing to work hard. But they have more impediments, maybe more barriers in the way that keep them from finding, realizing the same kinds of success that the lower income background whites realize. And so I'm very dismissive of that kind of attitude about inner-city young people, African-American or white or/and white. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with what we've seen in the experiences of our children growing up, and it doesn't resonate in terms of what I know of the broader literature that speaks to these very same kinds of issues.

Isn't it Europe that is overpopulated, rather than Africa?

A good small opinion piece stating the obvious for the person who has their eyes wide open; Europe & North America (the Global North) wants to reduce population of other nations, just so more resources are available for their own populations.

This cry of "world does not have enough resources to sustain billions more people" & hence, we all need to start working on family planning & reduce world population is a complete lie. Ironically enough, European & North American countries incentivize human breeding in the guise that they need to increase their population, whereas, people in Asia, Africa, & Latin America are subjected to family planning lectures & medicines.

If the Global North is looking at its finances for the future & seeing a huge shortfall, & plugging that shortfall means that more tax-paying citizens & their industries needing labour are required, & since, it is so worried about the developing world not being able to sustain their growing populations, then why not open up the immigration process. Why not make the immigration process easier & hassle-free, so more people from the developing regions can move to developed European & North American countries, to help further develop their host countries & their own individual social, & financial, well-being. It's a win-win solution for all. But, no, that's not what the West wants.

As the author correctly states in the conclusion that all this talk of overpopulation & unsustainable population growth for the developing countries, is "because some other nations want those resources for their own people instead."

As I always say that population growth is not the problem for the increasing unsustainability, & hence, population control won't solve the problem, but, the actual problem lies with the unsustainable & disproportionate use of available resources. As the author points out in the piece, the West uses a lot more resources, proportionate to its population, than the developing countries of the world. Hence, the real solution lies in controlling the use of resources. Can the West do that; reduce the unsustainable use of resources?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jan/11/europe-africa-overpopulated-global-population

When you arrive in Europe for the first time, the first shock you get is seeing how overpopulated the place is, especially the western part.

A small country like France, which is 5 times smaller than the Democratic Republic of Congo, has about the same population – 67 million inhabitants. The UK is smaller than Gabon, but has a population of more than 60 million inhabitants, compared to Gabon’s population of just over 1.5 million. The worst example is a micro country like Belgium (just over 30000 km square, 167 times smaller than the Congo) which has a population of 11 million. That’s 365 people per km square, compared to the DRC’s rate of 30.

The first question you ask yourself is how they manage to feed themselves in a resource-poor continent like Europe? Why do they have so many kids when Europe is already the only continent to send more than half a billion economic and political refugees to other richer places of the world during the last five centuries? Is it because of the high fertility rate of their men or because of the cold weather which forces them to spend lots of time inside with only one activity left … copulation!

For many people concerned about overpopulation, Africa takes the centre of attention because of the recent growth of its population. But the concept of overpopulation is a fraud and a convenient ideology, because it ignores impact per capita (per one person) and focuses on simple numerics.

In reality, the USA consumes 25% of the world’s resources while its population is only 5% of the total. The west as a block - the USA and Europe - represents slightly less than 15% of the world’s population, but its consumption far outstrips most of the rest of the world, with one study finding that the US, Europe and Japan together suck up 80% of the world’s natural resources.

Africa, as a whole, has a population smaller than China, and a total GDP which is half that of a small country like France. Considering that it’s an already overpopulated continent, it’s surprising that many European countries give incentives to families to make more babies. And, for an already underpopulated continent, Africa is crowded with western overpopulation experts giving money to NGOs and governments to stop population growth. In the meantime, China is abandoning its one child policy to boost its population.

It is only in Africa that we talk about having population reduction funded by western NGOs and governments. Is it because Africa does not have resources to feed 2 billion people? No. It’s because some other nations want those resources for their own people instead.

I hope you won’t bite on this new covert war on the poor – another distraction from the real culprits. The world is overpopulated, so let’s have less rich people. That should be the real agenda.

Mawuna Remarque Koutonin is the editor of SiliconAfrica.com and a social activist for Africa Renaissance.

"Graduate Housing Tips" by Steve Breen



"Graduate Housing Tips" - Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, California, US

"Subsidized Housing" by Mike Luckovich

"Subsidized Housing" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US

Palestinians Can Learn From the African-American Struggle - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.

Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.

Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.

So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kODMTcMsb_E

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:

While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.

One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.

And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.

And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.

But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.

And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.

And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
...

JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.

ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.

But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.

But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.

JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?

ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.

And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.

Baltimore Residents & Workers voice outrage over plans to privatize public housing

I liked this piece from The Real News Network about the rising homelessness, & decreasing numbers of affordable public housing, in US. Here, they are discussing homelessness in one of the American cities, Baltimore, Maryland.

As Mr. Singer explains in the piece that American government has been privatizing public housing since 1974 & now, under the Obama administration, "60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits." All this is happening when "homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s." Is this democracy when the public taxes are subsidizing the rich, & those same poor public are becoming homeless?

Some 40,000 people are homeless in Baltimore. That's just 1 American city & it's not even considered a large American city by any measure. Homelessness has increased multiple folds in large American cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta etc. & this is all happened within the last decade.

Poverty among Baltimore kids are almost 35%; that's almost 1 poor child in 3 children. Poverty is constantly increasing in US. The young generation is moving down south to have some sense of accumulation of wealth through cheaper real estate & taxes. But, the taxes are going up, & wages are going down, overall, & those taxes are not helping the poor public, but the rich keeps getting richer through tax cuts, subsidized public assets being turned private assets, & hence, the inequality keeps increasing.

Where's the democracy in the largest self-anointed "democratic" country in the world where poor can't even get a decent place to call it a home, & keeps becoming poor everyday, while the rich elites become rich at the expense of the poor public?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTL3T0qT6MA

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: In part one of this story, we looked at Baltimore's plans to sell about 40% of its public housing stock to private developers & why some residents, workers, & advocates oppose these plans. But due to declining federal contributions to public housing, many cities face a shortfall in funding. The Department of Housing & Urban Development, HUD, puts the shortfall at $27 billion USD.

Baltimore says it can raise $300 million USD of the $800 million USD it needs by selling some of its properties to private developers.

To understand how America's public housing crisis got so bad in the first place, we spoke to Jeff Singer. He's an instructor at the University of Maryland & a longtime Baltimore public housing advocate.

NOOR: So there's a public housing crisis around the country. How did it get to that point? And start under Bill Clinton to give people a little background in how things got so bad.

JEFF SINGER, CITY ADVOCATES IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE HOMELESS: Well, we can go back even a little farther to 1974, when Richard Nixon created the first privatization of public housing, what we call the Section 8 certificates. And the more money that went to Section 8 certificates, the less money that went to public housing. Section 8 was a way to give private landlords money to house people who were poor. So from 74 until now, we've seen a decline in the amount of federal funds directed toward public housing & an increase in--a small increase in the amount that's directed toward profits.

The program we're talking about here tonight is the efflorescence of that. It's actually privatizing the housing that we built for ourselves & making sure that people can make profits from it. And they don't mix well together. Affordable housing & profits are antithetical.

NOOR: And so what happened starting under the Clinton administration?

SINGER: What happened out of the Clinton administration was a couple of programs & policy changes that are very important. One policy change was that it is now illegal to build additional public housing with federal funds. Can you imagine that? In 1949, Congress declared that it is the goal of the US to make sure that every resident here has safe, decent, affordable housing. But under Bill Clinton, that language was stricken from the law & the number of public housing units was capped by law. So that was one very important issue. Another was that he continued the defunding of public housing. There was a law that required that whenever a public housing unit was demolished, a new unit had to be created. He eliminated that as well. So this has accelerated the demise of public housing.

NOOR: RAD program is happening under the Obama administration, a Democratic administration.

SINGER: Yes. Well, as Huey Long said, they may be Democratic waiters or they may be Republican waiters, but they're serving food from the same Wall Street kitchen. This RAD program was created actually in 2003 by the Bush administration, but they couldn't get it implemented. So now the Obama administration is implementing it with a vengeance, & 60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits. At the same time, homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s, & the secretary of the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development himself says we're in the worst rental housing crisis in our history.

NOOR: How bad is it here in Baltimore?

SINGER: Well, we don't know how many people experience homelessness every night in Baltimore, but we counted over 4,000 people two years ago per night. Over the course of a year, that's probably 40,000 people. So we know it's pretty bad. There are encampments all around the city, the shelters are full every night, & people have nowhere to go.

NOOR: And there's a lot of people in risk of losing their housing as well.

SINGER: Well, they are. And one of the aspects of this new RAD program is that it's going to use federal tax credits to create profits for these developers in public housing. But that means that those federal tax credits will no longer be available to build new affordable housing. ...

NOOR: Baltimore is a pilot city for the RAD program. Why will it be important for people to be engaged here? What kind of impact will what happens here have on the rest of the country, especially when it comes to tenants & the union workers that are being affected by this being mobilized & getting their voices out?

SINGER: I think we have an opportunity here to do something very important, & that is to combine the forces & the interests of the tenants with the forces & interests of the workers. It is outrageous that the federal government has approved a plan that's going to fire 200 workers, workers who had decent wages, job protections, & benefits. The middle class that--the president is talking about growing the middle class; well, now we're destroying part of the middle class. So by combining the interests of the tenants & the workers & the advocates & the neighborhood folks, we can create a really important force, & that force is devoted toward affordable & fair development policies.

NOOR: And so part of the drive for this you can kind of say comes from the perception that public housing is failing. And so why is it important to talk about the mismanagement & the underfunding of public housing to contextualize that?

SINGER: ... The federal budget for the Department of Housing & Urban Development was the equivalent of $90 billion in 1980, & it is now $42 billion. It's less than half of what it was. So they have purposefully for 40 years underfunded public housing, both the capital costs ... & the operating costs. Now the City of Baltimore gets only about 75% of what they need to run public housing, & they get a hundredth of what they need to maintain it.

NOOR: What else is important for people to know about the future of public housing in America, in Baltimore today?

SINGER: Well, public housing is the sector of housing that keeps housing permanently affordable for the very large number of folks whose income is low. And we have a poverty rate in the US of about 15%. In the City of Baltimore, it's over 20%. Among children in Baltimore it's 35%. None of those folks can afford housing through the market. Public housing is the best way to keep them safe and secure.

In other civilized countries, public housing is a very large part of their housing sector. In most European countries, it's 20% of all the housing. In the city of Vienna it's 60% of all the housing is public housing, meaning it's owned by all the people & it's available to people who need it. In the US, it's 1% of our housing, & that's diminishing.

The losing game of publicly financed sports venues

Another great article on how taxes taken from hard-working public are used for something from which most of the general public will never get any meaningful benefit, & it reduces the money a municipal / provincial / state / federal government has to put it towards a better cause. Governments of all levels in the Western world are crying for more money & are putting in more austerity measures to cut expenditures & increasing taxes.

All the while, these same governments are spending the few money they have on things that are completely useless. These monies could be used for building more affordable housing for homeless & hence, reduce homelessness, or improving infrastructure (water pipelines, public transit, roads, cheaper & sustainable energy), which can also create jobs, which in turn, creates more tax revenue for the government, or simply providing or increasing funding for any number of social causes & NGOs.

But nooooo. The taxes from hard-working public, who itself, is trying to scrimp & save every nickel & dime by buying unorganic, cheap & unhealthy food, for instance, are being used to built expensive stadiums, which ultimately benefit the wealthy owners of sports franchises. They themselves pay much less in taxes but take full benefit of other people's taxes.

But then again, as the article asks that are governments merely stupid to bend to the demands of these wealthy individuals & then answers right away that sports subsidies are a political winner. So who is to blame here? Government or the public. The same public who will give their hard-earned money to a wealthy individual & wealthy players, & gets a paltry return for its own investment. Ironically, while the owners & players are swimming in cash & laughing how they have duped the public, the public is also not only cheering "their team" (who will leave the city as soon as it bleeds the city dry) but also buying expensive merchandise with their own money & still giving their taxes. I blame the public who claims to have open eyes & ears & have common sense, but then take such a stupid step.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-losing-game-of-publicly-financed-sports-venues/article25563294/

The people of Quebec City & Edmonton are falling prey to one of the oldest con games – the notion that spending public money on pro sports venues is a sound investment.

Facts don’t seem to matter in this game. And your city could be fleeced next.

Stacks of independent research over many decades have shown that building a stadium or luring a new franchise does little for a city’s economy. They typically don’t generate significant new tax dollars, jobs or growth. In most cases, the money would be more wisely spent on badly needed public infrastructure, such as roads, transit or schools.

And yet, governments serially ignore the evidence & continue to shower subsidies on team owners & their media partners.

In Quebec City & Edmonton, governments are currently sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into new arenas. In Quebec City’s case, the aim is to attract an NHL franchise. The rationale in Edmonton is to keep its team, the Oilers, from leaving.

Gobs of taxpayer cash will similarly be needed if Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre gets his wish of bringing professional baseball back to the city. The price tag for buying a franchise & building a new baseball stadium – presumably, a domed one – will top $1-billion. And it won’t happen unless taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the tab.

So why are governments so gullible?

The simple answer is that sport subsidies are a political winner.

They’re sold as investments in the economy. But it’s really about civic pride, the thrill of the game & cheering for the home team.

Montrealers, for example, overwhelmingly support the idea of bringing baseball back to their city more than decade after the Expos left for Washington, D.C., according to a recent Abacus Data poll. Nearly 90% of 500 residents surveyed expressed varying levels of support, ranging from lukewarm to strong. Just 12% are against it. Roughly 8 out of 10 respondents said Major League Baseball would be good for the economy & generate more taxes for the city.

The reality is quite the opposite, according to numerous independent economic studies conducted over several decades in North America.

“The weight of economic evidence … shows that taxpayers spend a lot of money and ultimately don’t get much back,” according to a 2001 study, “Should Cities Pay for Sports Facilities?” for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “And when this paltry return is compared with other potential uses of the funds, the investment, almost always, seems unwise.”

The subsidies rarely stop once the venues are up & running. Billions of dollars a year in hidden subsidies flow to existing sport venues, according to a 2012 book by Judith Grant Long, now an associate professor of sports management at the University of Michigan. In her book, Public-Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, Ms. Grant Long found that taxpayers are subsidizing 78%of the average professional sports facility in Canada & the US.

Earlier this year, US President Barack Obama moved in his budget to close down one financial vehicle that has encouraged subsidies by barring the use of tax-exempt bonds to finance professional sports facilities. In Canada, governments often fund the projects directly from their own coffers, tapping into lower government borrowing costs.

The real story, however, may be that the main beneficiaries of government largesse are team owners.

Quebec City’s $400-million Centre Vidéotron was built with a combination of municipal & provincial government money. It's ... a lure for an eventual NHL franchise sought by Videotron owner Quebecor Inc., controlled by Parti Québécois Leader Pierre Karl Péladeau.

The cost of Edmonton’s $480-million Rogers Place arena, due to open in time for the 2016-17 NHL season, is being split between the city & wealthy team owner Daryl Katz, who had earlier threatened to move the Oilers to Seattle.

Mr. Katz, who also owns the Rexall pharmacy chain, is now poised to cash in with a massive mixed-used residential, office & entertainment development he’s planning for the surrounding area, dubbed “The Ice District.” The $2-billion project will include 1,000 residential units, 1.3 million square feet of office space in skyscrapers that will rank among the tallest buildings in Western Canada, a luxury hotel & a public plaza with an outdoor skating rink, casino, restaurants & stores.

The private development wouldn’t make much sense without the subsidized Rogers Place as its anchor. And businesses elsewhere will lose as customers inevitably migrate to the new entertainment area, making the deal a wash on the city’s tax ledger.

This losing scenario will play out in your city too unless someone stands up and says, enough.

After being released, US prisoners find new struggles

It's quite common to look down upon people who are involved in small criminal activities but we often forget to peek "behind the curtain" why those people have become what they have become. They are not earning millions from causing pain to someone else. They are small time crooks.

Now, in North America, African-Americans & Natives are viewed as criminals by the general public, usually with the help of police & government's tough-on-crime stance.

Governments at all levels don't care in investing in the rehab of that person, & try to resolve the situation (reduce the crime rate) by trying to cure the symptom of the problem; imprison the perpetrator. Imprisoning these people usually hardens them into a bigger criminal than making them a better person. Governments don't invest in proper rehab of the person because it makes more money through imprisonment than spending money on rehab.

What's the proper rehab of the criminal or people who are involved in small-time criminal activities? Providing these people with education, housing, & employment opportunities. Creating laws where former convicts are properly re-integrated into the society.

Most people, who end up being labelled a "criminal", don't prefer criminal activities over non-criminal activities, at least, initially. But many people, and especially the ones who do fall into criminal activities, commit crimes because they need the money for their families. Basic needs of a human, like housing, education, & employment are all getting expensive or inaccessible.

Housing is getting expensive all over North America & Europe. Big cities like New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Karachi, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai & etc. are becoming expensive in housing. As we all know that incomes never go up as fast as expenses, so poor people are usually pushed out of the cities & into the suburbs or fringes of the city. If they lose their jobs because of the economy, for instance, then they end up being homeless (the numbers of homeless people have actually increased in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, & London in the past decade).

Education is becoming expensive everywhere. Tuition keeps rising. Poor people can't even afford to go to school, anymore. Only way to go to school is taking on debt but good-paying jobs after graduation are becoming scarce so many would-be students don't want to take on debt. If they do take on debt & fail to repay it because they lost their jobs or fall ill, then they can be imprisoned (at least in US), which will mark them as a criminal for life, & then they will have a hard time in securing a job or even a house after they are released. Plus, failing to repay the student loans also put the credit history of the students in jeopardy, which in turn, creates problems for them in securing housing.

Employment has become network-based. North American & European economies are in decline. Jobs are scarce. Whatever jobs are available, even junior-level jobs that they require such high qualifications in terms of education & work experience that most people are excluded from ever being hired for those jobs. If the job seeker doesn't have close friends & family members in influential positions in companies, then forget getting a job, at least one that will pay good enough to cover housing & living expenses.

So, a poor person has only one route to make enough money to take care of the expenses; earn the money in the wrong way (i.e. become a criminal). And if & when that person is caught, as a criminal, & after spending their required time in prison, they will have a much harder time in reintegrating back into society because society & laws will make it much harder for that person to integrate back into society with restrictive laws & wrong social perception of such poor people.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33542839

On the day of Obama's speech, J Jondhi Harrell came down from his apartment & walked over to a nearby corner to haul 22-year-old Jeremiah Ross inside the offices of the Center for Returning Citizens (TCRC). Harrell, the executive director of the centre, has been trying to persuade Ross to stop dealing drugs, or "trapping" & instead find a full time job & stable housing.

Harrell tries to entice Ross - a thin, handsome young man with big eyes & a web of tattoos crawling up his neck - with $100 moving jobs, & lets him use the computers in the front office. If he can get Ross to leave the street corner behind, Harrell says, it could be a major coup - Ross is a leader, lots of the neighbourhood kids look up to him.

But Ross recently finished a stint in prison, he has no high school diploma, & right now TCRC can't afford to pay him a living wage. So the streets continue to beckon.

"After me and my family got evicted, I'm out here," says Ross. "It's hard to find a job, so this all I know. This is the first thing I go to."
...

Nicetown is about a 15 minute car ride away from Philadelphia's Center City where Obama outlined his plans to reform the criminal justice system at the National Association for Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) annual convention ... .

This speech came on the heels of his announcement that he is commuting the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders who've been incarcerated in federal prison for many years. While everyone agrees it is an important moment, the word some Philadelphian advocates for the formerly incarcerated use to describe the president is "disappointing."

Obama spoke of an America founded on second chances - but many return to find that Pennsylvania law prevents them from getting licences to do certain types of work, prevents them from getting housing & sometimes bars them from entering their former neighbourhoods altogether. These types of laws are known as "collateral consequences," & according to a national website that tracks them, Pennsylvania has nearly 1,000 of these restrictions.

"It's become almost like a sport for the legislators to create all these barriers," says Angus Love, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project.

Germantown Avenue once teemed with black-owned businesses patronised by neighbourhood residents collecting good wages from nearby factories. Today, nearly half the people living in the 19140 zip code do not have a high school diploma. Most households bring in less than $30,000 (£19,000) a year & the glittering shops have shut down.

A huge number of the estimated 35,000 former inmates who return to Philadelphia each year from federal, state & county lockups head back to North Philadelphia neighbourhoods every year.

According to 2008 figures, it cost taxpayers $40 million to incarcerate men & women from Nicetown - the fifth highest rate in the city.

"In our community, mass incarceration I would say affects over 60% of the community," says Harrell. "You'd be hard pressed to walk down any street in any black neighbourhood in Philadelphia, and knock on 10 doors and find no one who is affected."

It's a neighbourhood that feels the full absence of "missing men," a term used by the New York Times to describe the large number of black men ages 25 to 54 who have disappeared from cities around the country due to either early death or incarceration.

Philadelphia is said to be missing 30,000 of these men. Nicetown is exactly the kind of community they're vanishing from.

Once released, these inmates could be said to be joining the ranks of the re-appeared men, & Harrell is one of them.

He spent 20 years in federal prison, & returned to Philadelphia 5 years ago. But don't call him an "ex-con" - he & other activists worked hard to get Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter to issue a proclamation declaring that the city officially refer to former inmates as "returning citizens," & Harrell is deadly serious about changing stigma with language.

He'll never use the word "re-entry" either, a term he associates with the sometimes-exploitative network of halfway houses that are often a required stop after prison.

"Frankly I was treated with more disrespect in those six months than in 19 years of incarceration," he says.

Harrell's three-year-old organisation emphasises a holistic approach for former inmates coming home. Harrell & his staff of four help connect clients to housing & employment, but also encourage the men & women they serve to get involved in community service, to join a faith community if they're religious.

He wants to plant community gardens & start buying up the properties on Germantown Avenue to start business that will employ & train returning inmates ... .
...

In fact, job placement & spiritual guidance can only take you so far on the streets of Nicetown. When Harrell thinks about the notion of the "missing men" of North Philadelphia, his thoughts go immediately to Cynthia Muse, who lives just around the corner from his office.

On 31 May, Muse's son Abdul Salaam walked out the door of their row house & headed to a celebration for his 36th birthday. Within hours, he was dead - stabbed in the heart in front of his toddler son & girlfriend in the courtyard of a public housing project less than 2 miles from his mother's home.

This is not the first time Muse, a mother of 5 sons, has been through this.

"It was my third time," she says ... . "My emotions and my logical mind is not giving me no answers. Why have you taken a third son from me?"

Muse never seems to get any resolution. Nobody knows how her son Jalaal ended up in the trunk of his own car, or who shot her 26-year-old son Abdul Aliym to death. Her youngest is in prison.

Only one of her sons, Jamal, now has a steady job & a family of his own to look after, despite spending almost 10 years in prison. He's not entirely sure himself how he made it out, but says the deaths of his brothers helped motivate him.

Indonesia facing overpopulation crisis

The problem with limited resources for an increasing population, in Indonesia & around the world, are not anything to do reproducing more people or family planning. There are more than enough resources in this world to easily sustain an increasing population, because the nature keeps the population of the world in a balance. If people are being born, then people are also dying at an increasing rate, through natural or human causes (gun violence, car accidents, airplane crashes etc.).

Primary problem is the resources are concentrated in a few hands & those hands keep amassing more resources without letting any go. Some of those resources are being controlled by the governments & politicians around the world are corrupt career politicians. They all either take lobbying payments (legal) or bribes (illegal) to essentially do the same thing; favour one party's benefits over another's.

Green economy is touted around the world but no country, except very few, e.g. some European countries, Asian superpowers (China & India), & some Southeastern countries (e.g. Singapore) are actually doing something in this regard. Most countries are not doing anything either because they don't have financial power or fossil fuel industries are way too strong in their countries.

Green economy would have reduced or mitigated the adverse effects of climate change by now, if these efforts would have started a few decades ago. These efforts would have also provided jobs, increased GDP, & positively supported the economies. But, for this to happen, all countries need to work together towards a common goal, instead of fighting like little kids in the playpen (this usually happens in those trade & climate change conferences every year, & hence, after so many gatherings of the "bright minds" of our world, we still are headed head-long into a worldwide disaster).

Another problem is consumerism of the masses. Instead of reducing unnecessary increase in consumption, thanks to slick marketing efforts of multinational corporations around the world, everyone wants everything at any cost.

Financial resources are, as I said earlier, concentrated in a few hands. These elites keep amassing fortunes at the expense of the general public of their own race & ethnicity. They have no compassion for their own people.

We can apply the same idea to housing, food, & water shortages. Clean water is already very little in the world & even then, it is getting polluted, through fracking, for instance, in US. California is in a 4-year drought & there is no let up in its condition. Food production & affordable housing availability; all can be attributed to limited resources not being deployed in a proper efficient & effective manner. If these limited resources could have been or still can be deployed in a responsible manner, then these crises can be easily averted.

I believe you got the general idea what I am trying to say. Resources, be they be financial, food, water, housing, transportation, energy etc. are keep getting concentrated in a few hands. The general public is left to fight for a few scraps at the bottom of the barrel. Instead of working collaboratively towards a common goal of creating a thriving worldwide economy & life for everyone, regardless of our differences, we all are headed for worldwide disaster & human suffering.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/asia/2015/03/indonesia-facing-overpopulation-crisis-150319200635063.html

You know a country is overpopulated when people cannot afford to queue. In Indonesia this is visible every day at bus & train stations.
 
Transport facilities have long lost their battle with exploding demand.
 
Even the most polite people turn into animal-like creatures when a bus or train arrives. Something that might have looked like a queue disappears instantly & the best & most aggressive pushers are getting on board. Unless every inch inside the vehicle is taken already.
 
I have learned this the hard way. Trying to be polite will cost you many hours of waiting on a weekly basis. The only real queues are the long lines of cars queuing patiently day-in, day-out on nearly every stretch of road in every major city. Yes, it is that bad.
 
Onboard a bus or train, the situation is hardly any better. I cannot help thinking about sardines. Passengers, deep in each other’s private space, have one thing in common: An empty gaze on their faces revealing their attempt to temporarily exit from humanity.
 
These daily scenes remind me of those ahead of the Eid festival when rich people hand out money to the poor who die fighting for a few dollars. Or those of children offered candy. Rarely-seen aggression on their innocent faces when they are trying to get their share. Politely waiting for your turn is only affordable to those who know there is enough for everyone.
 
Demographic experts warn this is just the beginning. If the population boom continues, Indonesia will face problems a lot worse than transport nightmares or people fighting for small cash.
 
Already Indonesia is facing housing, water & food shortages & massive natural destruction. For years now, the country has imported basic food like rice because there are not enough fields to grow food for its 250 million people. These food shortages will only get worse according to experts.
 
Not many Indonesians would blame overpopulation for these problems. Ineffective government, corruption, God or nature - anything but the size of their families is to blame. An important credo says "many children means many benefits". The idea that children are the safest retirement plan is still prevalent. And with democratisation the country has given its people the liberty to produce as many as they like.
 
Meanwhile, the government proudly keeps citing statistics. Indonesia, the fourth largest country in the world, the third largest democracy, the tenth largest economy.
 
The word overpopulation has turned into a much more friendly term: demographic bonus; hundreds of millions of people are an interesting crowd for investors, or when it comes to power on a geopolitical level.
 
But what about quality of life? A term more frequently used now. When are Indonesians finally getting tired of battling for survival or simply struggling to get to work every day?
 
With a fast-growing middle class, the demand for quality of life is increasing around the country. Fresh air, clean drinking water, proper education, efficient public services will all be just a dream for most Indonesians as long as the credo "more children, more benefits" still exists.