Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
VP Harris Urges World Leaders to Close 'Gaps Between the Rich and Poor'
(CNSNews.com) - To reach the ideal of "equality," "we must acknowledge that inequality has always existed in our world," Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday in a speech to world leaders at the Paris Peace Forum.
The pandemic has made the "gaps between the rich and poor" worse, she said, with global poverty on the rise as well as "extreme wealth."
She said the progress on gender equality is "under threat," and she quoted "experts" as saying that it will take decades for women to "achieve parity with men."
"Well, today we face a dramatic rise in inequality and we must rise to meet this moment. I believe that we as leaders must ask why this inequality persists."
Harris told leaders they must ask the following "why" questions:
Why is it that one percent of the world now owns 45 % of the world's wealth?
Why is it that one in 4 people in our world lack access to clean drinking water at home?
Why is it that one in three women in the world experience sexual or physical violence during her lifetime?
Why is it that only half of the world has access to the Internet?
Why have we allowed so many of the world's children to go hungry when we know that we produce enough food to feed the entire world?
We cannot be aware of these gaps and simply resign ourselves to them. We cannot accept them by thinking simply, this is what has always been and what will always be. We must instead agree that these growing gaps are unacceptable, and we must agree to work together to bridge them.
Harris said it's not about charity -- it's about "our duty and what we owe to each other as human beings."
She said it's also a "strategic imperative" to close the gaps as the world grows more and more interconnected.
‘Challenge the status quo’
And what is Harris's solution? Build Back Better, of course -- President Biden's plan to raise taxes on rich Americans and redistribute the money to the poor and middle class.
"We must challenge the status quo and build something better," Harris told world leaders.
"To get at the root of this challenge we must look critically at the longstanding systems and structures that are fractured and fissured, and we must fix them.”
The solution begins with "action at home," she said, and then then by "showing solidarity as a global community.”
Harris said the Biden administration "is committed to addressing our own systemic gaps," beginning with passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
"Another bill that will support our nation's workers and families and help us meet our climate commitment is poised to pass soon. Together, these bills are designed to lift people out of poverty, to put people to work in good jobs, and to help bridge the gaps that persist in our nation."
Harris said no single nation can take on inequality alone.
"So as we go forward from this place, let us not be burdened by what has been. Let us focus on what can be. And let us realize a better future together."
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S BRIBES SUCKING KLEPTOCRACY
Watters' World' investigates Nancy Pelosi's financial dealings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M4QZJxb9Dw
OE BIDEN'S CRONIES MARK ZUCKERBERG AND JEFF 'BEZOSHEAD' BEXOS ALREADY PAY LESS THAN 3% TAX
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Hoarding Sweeps Across America, Sparks Food Shortages & Sharp Price Hikes As Supply Chains Collapse
THE ECONOMY TAKING A TURN FOR THE WORSE, ENDLESS MONEY PRINTING WILL CAUSE MORE PAIN, HOME PRICES
Joe Biden, Democrats Seek $625 Billion Tax Cut for Wealthy Coastal Elites
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act,” a filibuster-proof $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation package, gives $625 billion in tax cuts to the nation’s wealthiest blue state residents.
Slipped into the reconciliation package are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts for the Democrat Party’s wealthiest donors, that would be paid for by America’s working and middle class.
A newly released analysis of Biden’s budget finds that plans to increase the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap from its current $10,000 to $80,000 would effectively amount to a $625 billion tax for the wealthiest of Americans living in blue states.
The analysis reveals that “a household making $1 million per year will receive ten times as much from SALT cap relief as a middle-class family will receive from the child tax credit expansion.”
(Chart via Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
“Roughly 98 percent of the benefit from the increase would accrue to those making more than $100,000 per year, with more than 80 percent going to those making over $200,000,” prior analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted.
Biden has repeatedly claimed that his budget will aid middle class Americans the most. In one statement, Biden wrote that his budget “will lower costs for American families.” In another statement, he wrote that his budget will “cut taxes for the middle class.”
The left-wing Tax Policy Center, though, estimates that Biden’s budget will provide massive tax cuts to the nation’s top five percent of earners while increasing taxes on 20 to 30 percent of middle class earners.
Specifically, the estimate found that Biden’s budget will give a tax cut to 66 percent of Americans earning more than $1 million annually while 78 percent of Americans earning $500,000 to $1 million will get a tax cut.
At the same time, 27 percent of Americans earning $75,000 to $100,000 would see a tax increase along with 19 percent of Americans earning $50,000 to $75,000.
In 2017, former President Trump had the SALT deduction capped at $10,000. Since then, Democrats have sought to deliver their wealthy, blue state donors with a massive tax cut by eliminating the cap altogether or greatly increasing it.
Biden, for instance, had sought to include tax cuts for his billionaire donors in a Chinese coronavirus relief package earlier this year. The plan was ultimately cut from the package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in May 2020, also tried to include the plan in a coronavirus relief package.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S BRIBES SUCKING KLEPTOCRACY
Watters' World' investigates Nancy Pelosi's financial dealings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M4QZJxb9Dw
The Biden family has gotten special treatment from Ukrainian oil interests, and the Pelosi family has a similar advantage. Paul Pelosi, Jr. was a board member of Viscoil and an executive at its related company NRGLab, which was involved in energy business in Ukraine. Perhaps the use of the Intelligence Committee has given the Democrats the opportunity to limit Republican questioning and maintain secrecy over the responses from subpoenaed witnesses. This would prevent any official record implicating Pelosi's son.
Wealth-X report: Billionaire wealth surged during pandemic
A new report from research firm Wealth-X found that the global COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the growth of social inequality and witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth among the most privileged layers in society. For the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020.
This amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. Billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019.
“Viewed in aggregate, the global pandemic delivered a windfall to billionaire wealth, boosted by the flood of monetary stimulus and swelling profits in key sectors that coined a new wave of younger, self-made billionaires,” the report said.
Billionaire wealth has increased steadily since 1990, but one-third of these wealth gains have occurred during the pandemic. US billionaire wealth increased nineteen-fold over the last 31 years, from an inflation adjusted $240 billion in 1990 to $4.7 trillion in 2021.
The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.
The US was the top billionaire country in 2020. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS), American billionaires have seen their collective wealth surge by 62 percent, approximately $1.8 billion, since March 18, 2020. Following North America, Asia saw its number of growing by 16.5%, for a grand total of 883. Asia’s billionaires saw their collective net worth grow to $2.6 trillion, a 7.5% increase.
The good fortune of this tiny layer of the world’s population over the past 18 months is all the more appalling when contrasted to the growing immiseration and impoverishment of billions of workers around the globe. As a few thousand billionaires amassed enormous sums of wealth, workers around the world lost $3.7 trillion in earnings during the pandemic, according to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).
The report estimated an 8.8 percent year-by-year decline in global working hours from 2019 to 2020, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is approximately four times greater than the recorded loss during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
The lost working hours were due to massive cuts in working hours and unprecedented levels of job loss, impacting some 114 million people and their families. Significantly, 71 percent of these job losses came from “inactivity,” meaning at least 81 million people around the world left the labor market because they could not find work.
Women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic than men. Globally, employment losses for women stand at 5 percent, versus 3.9 percent for men. Women were much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market, most commonly due to childcare concerns. Younger workers have also been devastated. Employment fell by 8.7 percent among workers aged 15-24 years old, compared to 3.7 percent for adults. Generation Z, the oldest of whom is 23, has become the most unemployed generation and is on track to experience the same financial struggles as millennials.
In the US alone, the official poverty rate rose by 1.0 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The poverty rate grew to 11.4 percent, marking the first increase in the official poverty rate after five years of consecutive decline. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
At the same time, median household income in 2020 dropped by 2.9 percent from the previous year. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.
Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.
The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of poverty—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. Every action these vultures have taken in response to the pandemic has been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of a few. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must fight for a policy based on the interests of the working class, the vast majority of society.
Boston authorities clearing homeless encampment despite protests by ACLU, public health experts
Last month, Boston’s acting Mayor Kim Janey began clearing an encampment of homeless people near the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, commonly known as “Mass. and Cass.” Around 300 people stayed in tents in the area at its peak, with many accessing nearby addiction treatment services.
Janey’s office has claimed that it “is committed to maintaining a public health approach in confronting this complex challenge … focused on connecting individuals to shelter, providing substance use disorder and mental health services, expanding low-threshold housing, providing safe road and sidewalk access, and enforcing laws against those who prey on the vulnerable, or present a danger to themselves or others.” However, news reports, statements by public health experts and a lawsuit from the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that the constitutional rights of Mass. and Cass residents are being infringed upon while their access to life-saving treatment is being interrupted.
The Massachusetts ACLU’s filing notes that after the mayor’s executive order declaring that tents would no longer be allowed on city sidewalks, “the City and its agents began dispersing people encamped at Mass & Cass under threat of arrest, and destroying many of their possessions, contrary to basic constitutional guarantees.”
While some homeless people have been referred to shelters, the ACLU notes that many shelters are not equipped for people with certain medical conditions or family situations. Moreover, during a pandemic, throwing more people into congregate settings risks deadlier outbreaks.
Pine Street Inn, to which people have been referred, said it would be “offering beds if available. Once those are filled, we will provide mats in our lobbies and chairs in our dining room.”
For those who are not enticed by the prospect of sleeping in a chair in a homeless shelter’s dining room, the city has a protocol in place to allow for arresting people for the crime of disorderly conduct, that is, refusing to leave Mass. and Cass.
The threat of criminal prosecution, either for failing to leave one’s belongings with a city worker in the hope that they are returned upon exiting a shelter or for outstanding warrants, some for petty crimes like drug possession, hangs over people’s heads and can make them reluctant to seek out needed services.
The city has convened a special court, nominally to direct people with warrants into treatment. However, public defenders and the prosecutor, Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, both say that this court has sent more people to jail than to treatment.
The Boston Globe noted: “Of the nine people in the court’s first three days, only two went to treatment, according to court officials. Four others were jailed and sent to jurisdictions that had outstanding warrants on them. They included a 33-year-old Gardner man sent to a Worcester jail experiencing a COVID-19 outbreak—over the objections of the prosecutor as well his public defender.”
Dr. Benjamin Linas, who teaches medicine at Boston University and is an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center, and Dr. Joshua Barocas, who teaches medicine at the University of Colorado, wrote an opinion column in the Globe revealing that their statistical models, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, indicate that the clearing of Mass. and Cass, far from helping those who currently live there, will be a public health disaster.
While some in the short term will receive treatment, either voluntarily or because it is court-ordered, it will represent a disruption for everyone who has been living at Mass. and Cass. Such disruptions decrease access to necessary services, including harm reduction programs and addiction treatment.
Some who are currently receiving medication for opioid use disorder will have their treatment interrupted, leaving them vulnerable to an overdose. Others who receive mandated care often cease receiving care when they are no longer required to, likewise leaving them vulnerable to an overdose, particularly because their tolerance has been lowered.
Linas and Barocas project an immediate 20–40 percent overdose increase due to the clearing, a 12 percent increase in overdose mortality in the year following and fewer people receiving treatment for opioid use disorder. Hospitalizations are projected to increase by double digits for endocarditis and for overdoses, a staggering 46 percent in the latter case.
Other public health experts have also criticized the clearing of Mass. and Cass. The Public Health & Human Rights for Mass and Cass Coalition, which includes the Massachusetts Society of Addiction Medicine, Boston Medical Center’s Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, among others, issued a statement declaring, “Public health crises require public health solutions.”
Thoughtfully pointing to the stakes involved, the statement continued, “We support a plan that treats people with dignity, that meets people’s stated needs in the short and long term, and that relies on evidence-based practices of low threshold housing, voluntary treatment, and harm reduction, not involuntary commitment and criminalization which risk even more death.”
Dr. Sarah E. Wakeman, who is the medical director for substance use disorders at Mass General Brigham hospital, told a news conference near Mass. and Cass, “It is my medical opinion that displacing people, offering them ultimatums that include only congregate shelters, medically supervised withdrawal or being funneled into a correctional setting, will worsen the public health crisis that we are seeing,” leading to more overdoses and HIV infections.
Cassie Hurd, executive director of Material Aid and Advocacy Program, which advocates for homeless people, told the same news conference about the limitations of shelters and their “warehouse and jail-like environment.” She also noted, according to the Globe, that earlier in the pandemic the city and state rented hotel rooms for quarantining purposes, and that the same could be done in this public health crisis.
Hotel rooms would give residents of Mass. and Cass some autonomy and dignity while they can access services if desired, although property owners near hotels have objected, leaving the proposal stillborn. New York City, which had a similar program, has canceled it and moved thousands from hotel rooms into crowded shelters and the streets.
The situation at Mass. and Cass is a microcosm of the social crisis across the US and internationally. Even as a few hundred vulnerable people are forced off the streets in a crackdown and shuttled off to jails or crowded shelters, the Boston area has seen a bonanza in wealth in the pharmaceutical and technological industries during the pandemic. The rising stock price of Cambridge-based Moderna, which is jealously guarding intellectual property rights to its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, has minted many millionaires, while restaurant payment processor Toast’s initial public offering turned two of its cofounders into billionaires.
Homeless man faces seven years in prison for a 43-cent “theft” in Pennsylvania
A homeless Pennsylvania man faces up to seven years in prison after being arrested last month for underpaying on a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew.
Joseph Sobolewski stopped at a gas station convenience store outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where he saw a sign advertising two 20-ounce Mountain Dew bottles for $3.
Sobolewski picked up a bottle, laid $2 on the counter and walked out. What he did not know is that the store charged $2.29 for a single bottle, and with tax he had shorted the store 43 cents total.
The clerk called the police, who arrested Sobolewski, who is now being held in jail on a $50,000 cash bond and faces three to seven years in prison.
Magisterial District Judge Jacqueline Leister told PennLive she could not remember specifically why she set Sobolewski’s bond at the exorbitant $50,000, claiming that she handles too many cases. However, she did tell PennLive it was most likely because of repeated offenses and an outstanding warrant.
Court records show that Sobolewski was arrested more than 10 years ago, when he drove off without paying after filling his gas tank. In 2011 he was arrested for stealing a pair of shoes that cost less than $40.
Sobolewski also owes $1,500 in child support and was arrested a few months ago, but has yet to go to trial, for stealing craft supplies from a hobby store.
Under Pennsylvania’s three-strikes law, no matter how small the third theft is, the charge is an automatic felony and carries a 3- to 7-year sentence.
Sobolewski remains in jail as he awaits trial, since he cannot afford to pay the cash bond.
Thousands of people have posted comments on social media expressing their outrage at his treatment, the draconian US criminal justice system, and the mistreatment of homeless:
“Incredibly dumb. That’s all the U.S. does is jail people for ludicrous small-time crimes. Send them to prison for being a drug addict, send them to prison for petty thefts, because incarceration always works…dumb”
“This is plain stupid. And if prosecutors take him to court, they are rotten, as would be any judge or jury that would convict him.”
“Where is Charles Dickens’ common decency when you need it? Does the store have a penny collector tray? Does the clerk hold a grudge? Are the police there that obtuse? Is a Judge going to say it’s frivolous, here’s 43 cents? Shame! He’s already homeless, why not lend a hand?”
“It's seriously time to defund whatever police department that was if they have so much resources and spare time that they follow up on calls like this and track people down and arrest them over an honest mistake that didn’t harm anyone at all in any way. You’re arresting ppl over 40 cents? You are a giant waste of public funds.”
In 2019, the prison and jail population in Pennsylvania averaged over 82,000. Nearly another 300,000 people are on probation or parole. Pennsylvania ranks 25th in the nation in the percentage of its population in jail.
Throughout the country, 2,850,000 people are incarcerated and more than another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole. This figure is higher, in number and percentage-wise, than any other country in the world.
The United States is also the only country which jails people for life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed as a juvenile. Known as Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP), there are over 2,600 throughout the country, and 414 listed in Pennsylvania prisons.
While poor laws have been ruled unconstitutional, on any given day one-quarter of those in jail are there because they cannot pay bail or have outstanding jail fees.
Typically, within 48 hours after arrest, a defendant sees a judge, who can release the person, keep them in prison, or most often set bail. If the person can pay the bail, they are released until trial, getting the bail money back if they appear for trial, convicted or not.
However, most defendants cannot pay bail, which places them at the mercy of the for-profit bail bonds industry. A bail bond company will charge an upfront fee and post the bond. The typical bond fee is 10 percent but often can be higher.
In Sobolewski’s case that would be $5,000. The company does not return the fee when the defendant shows for trial, and bondsmen are granted great powers to go after defendants who do not show, including the employment of bounty hunters.
The arrest of Sobolewski also underscores the depth of the social crisis in general and the lack of social services for the homeless in particular.
More than one-quarter of the population of Harrisburg lives below the poverty line, and the median household income is less than two-thirds the state average.
While trillions have been funneled to the banks, financial houses and the wealthy since the 2008 financial crash and during the pandemic, social programs for the poor and homeless have been slashed.
New York City to move 8,000 homeless people from hotels to crowded shelters, ending COVID-19 prevention program
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to move about 8,000 homeless people out of hotel rooms, where they have been staying during the pandemic, and back to shelters. The timing of the move is uncertain, but the administration plans to complete it by the end of July. The campaign will disrupt the lives and threaten the health of homeless people to make hotel rooms available for tourists as de Blasio declares, “This is going to be the summer of New York City.”
The Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is about 2.5 times more infectious than the wild-type variant, now accounts for more than 10 percent of tested cases in New York City. It is on its way to becoming the dominant strain in the United States. Only 49 percent of city residents and 48 percent of state residents have been fully vaccinated against the virus. Moreover, vaccination rates for homeless people may be significantly lower than those in the general population, according to advocates.
Yet city, state and national politicians are prematurely proclaiming the end of the pandemic and removing all impediments to the generation of profit. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat like de Blasio, ended almost all restrictions related to the pandemic on June 15. Capacity limits, social distancing and information for contact tracing are now optional for offices, retail stores and other businesses. Shelters themselves are merely required to have residents wear masks.
“It is time to move homeless folks who were in hotels for a temporary period of time back to shelters where they can get the support they need,” said de Blasio at a news conference earlier this month. But many homeless people have continued to receive support at the hotels and do not want to return to shelters. Moreover, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to pay for the hotel rooms until the end of September.
“I don’t want to go back—it’s like I’m going backward,” Andrew Ward told the New York Times. Ward was moved from a shelter to the Williams Hotel in Brooklyn. “It’s not safe to go back there. You’ve got people bringing in knives.”
Before the pandemic arrived in New York, the shelters were notoriously overcrowded. In some shelters, as many as 60 people stayed in one room. These conditions enabled the rapid spread of the coronavirus. More than 3,700 residents of New York’s main shelter system became ill with COVID-19, and 102 have died, according to city data. But considering the inadequate systems for testing and contact tracing, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, these figures are undoubtedly underestimates.
The pre-pandemic crowding of shelters, combined with the continual rise of homelessness, emphasizes that the existing shelter system is inadequate to meet the needs of all homeless New Yorkers, including those who stayed in hotels recently.
In spring 2020, the de Blasio administration moved homeless people out of the shelters and into 60 Manhattan hotels, many of which were in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods. The residents of these neighborhoods soon complained about noise and claimed that homeless people were using drugs and urinating in public. A neighborhood group in the affluent Upper West Side area demanded that approximately 300 homeless men be evicted from the Hotel Lucerne. When the city developed a plan to move them to a hotel in the Financial District, residents of that neighborhood filed suit to stop its implementation.
Understandably, many homeless people prefer the hotels, which provide far better living conditions than the shelters. Hotel rooms have granted homeless residents privacy, kept their belongings secure and reduced confrontations involving residents with substance abuse or mental health problems. “It’s peaceful. It’s less stressful,” Ward explained to the Times. He added that if he were moved back to a shelter, “I’d just stay in the street like before.”
The spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and the inadequate distribution of vaccines create the conditions for a health disaster if homeless people are returned to shelters or sleeping rough. “There are people sleeping in shelters who are still testing positive and getting sick,” said Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, in a statement. “Until permanent affordable housing can be secured, the safest option remains placement in hotel rooms.”
Moreover, shelter operators have been able to maintain most of the treatment and counseling services for those without homes while the latter have stayed at the hotels. “It is simply inaccurate to say that people aren’t getting services in hotels,” said Routhier, in a direct response to de Blasio’s statement.
When he ran for mayor eight years ago, de Blasio decried New York’s inequality, using “A Tale of Two Cities” as a major theme of his campaign and promising to reduce homelessness dramatically. Today, homelessness in the city is at its highest level since the Great Depression. During fiscal year 2020, 122,926 individual homeless men, women and children slept in the city’s shelter system. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping in shelters each night is 39 percent higher now than it was 10 years ago, and people from every New York City zip code are homeless.
But these stark figures do not provide a full picture, because they do not account for those who do not sleep in shelters. Natalie Monarrez is a homeless woman who works full time at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, a borough of New York City. Her hourly wage of $19.30 is too low to afford a studio apartment in Staten Island or New Jersey, so she sleeps in her car. Her clothes are stored in suitcases, and she keeps food in a cooler.
Monarrez maintains a membership at Planet Fitness gyms so that she has a place to shower and brush her teeth. She relies on fast food restaurants and retail stores for their public bathrooms. When businesses were locked down and their bathrooms inaccessible, Monarrez was forced to buy anti-bacterial wipes and use her car.
“Jeff Bezos donates to homeless shelters for tax write-offs and PR. He needs to know that some of his own workers (without family or a second income) can’t afford rent,” she told Vice News .
The candidates in New York City’s recent Democratic mayoral primary scarcely acknowledged the crisis of homelessness. As of this writing, Eric Adams, a former policeman and former Republican, is ahead in the initial first-choice results in the primary election. Adams has made vague promises to provide housing for homeless New Yorkers, but these promises are as meaningful as those that fellow Democrat de Blasio made eight years ago.
Andrew Yang, the businessman and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, depicted homeless people themselves as the problem, alleging that they degraded other New Yorkers’ quality of life. No doubt he was appealing to the affluent and heartless residents who demanded that homeless people be ejected from “their” neighborhoods. That such a vile position is accepted within the Democratic Party is a further indication of its reactionary character.
The crisis of homelessness in New York City is a product of capitalism, which is itself in historic crisis. Homelessness cannot be addressed in a humane or meaningful way by either of the capitalist parties, which uphold the interests of finance capital and subordinate all other considerations to private profit.
Homeless crisis continues in Seattle, across Pacific Northwest
There were an estimated 11,751 individuals experiencing homelessness in Seattle-King County, according to the official one-night count in January 2020. Forty-seven percent of these persons were unsheltered, the third highest homeless population in the country after New York City and Los Angeles.
Citing the risk of COVID-19, Seattle will not be doing its annual unsheltered homeless population census this year. Outdoor camps have proliferated throughout the last year as shelters have been forced to downsize and create social distancing. But without an official count, the region will not know how many more people are living on the street until mid-2022.
Such conditions are echoed elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, Oregon, there were at least 4,000 people experiencing homelessness at the end of 2019, a count which has not been updated in part thanks to the pandemic. Oregon as a whole has an estimated 14,600 homeless people, while Washington has more than 22,300.
Amid this escalating social crisis, a group of businesses has focused on forcing Seattle to further crack down on the homeless population under the nameplate of the organization Compassion Seattle.
The primary goal of Compassion Seattle in changing the city of Seattle’s charter, whatever the claimed aims of its defenders, is to enshrine sweeps in the city charter with an official declaration that “there is no right to camp in any particular public space.” Efforts are ongoing to get an amendment to that effect, Charter Amendment 29 (CA29), on the ballot for Seattle’s November elections.
If adopted, the amendment would be catastrophic for the city’s homeless community. By declaring there is “no right” to eke out a meager existence where they can, it would mandate the city and its police forces to clear out homeless encampments wherever they are found on a regular basis. In a city which only has shelters for about half its homeless population, thousands would essentially be forced to live on the run or move out of the city altogether.
Little else is laid out concretely by Compassion Seattle. It calls for 2,000 units of permanent or emergency housing within one year but says nothing about how that will be funded. The only funding the amendment actually requires would come from Seattle’s $1.6 billion general fund (the discretionary portion of the city’s $6 billion budget). Under the amendment, Seattle would need to allocate 12 percent of that to a new “Human Services Fund,” which is actually only a small increase from the 11.2 percent of Seattle’s general fund already allocated toward homeless services.
Moreover, such an increase would likely require cuts in other areas of city services aside from the Parks and Recreation Department’s budget, which the amendment specifically separates from homeless services to keep the parks clear of encampments.
Compassion Seattle was originally proposed by former City Council member Tim Burgess, who has a history of promoting criminalization of homelessness. In an email to the local alternative media publication The Stranger, Burgess addressed the resource issue, saying that the mayor and council could redirect existing revenues and suggested they could use “the new JumpStart tax revenue that will begin flowing next year if the tax survives the legal challenge.” Burgess is openly opposed to Seattle's JumpStart tax on the incomes of the wealthy, which just survived a lawsuit against it by the Chamber of Commerce. If it survives appeals, collections will begin next year.
Another top-tier supporter of CA29 is George Petrie, CEO of real estate mogul John Goodman’s Goodman Real Estate. Goodman has done battle with his low-income tenants, doubling their rents and serving evictions without informing them of their right to Tenant Relocation Assistance, resulting in tenants protesting outside his yacht marina in 2014. Goodman also invested in defeating a pro-affordable housing city council candidate in 2015.
Seattle Mayor Democrat Jenny Durkan has always been a promoter of sweeping encampments, essentially chasing homeless people across the city, even after the CDC stated that ceasing this practice could help lower the risk of COVID-19 transmission. King County has to date suffered more than 111,000 cases of the pandemic and at least 1,600 deaths.
Kshama Sawant, a leader of Socialist Alternative and member of the Seattle City Council, professes to oppose the sweeps, and recently stated, “Compassion Seattle is presenting the billionaires way to fight homelessness.” But she has proven her willingness to work closely with the Democratic Party in Seattle throughout her tenure on the Seattle City Council and welcomed the endorsement of local Democrats in 2019. She is also now a member of the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America, a faction of the Democratic Party, the same party to which Burgess and others victimizing the homeless belong.
Much of the ongoing housing crisis in Seattle, even before the pandemic, has been caused by a sharp rise in mortgage and rent prices that have far outpaced rises in income. Moreover, according to a pro bono study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company presented to the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, since 2010, King County has lost a total of 112,000 housing units affordable to households earning below 80 percent of the area’s median income.
The study also noted how little it would take to end homelessness in the city. “Using a conservative set of assumptions, ending the homelessness crisis in King County would therefore cost between $4.5 billion and $11 billion over ten years, or between $450 million and $1.1 billion each year for the next ten years. To put it another way, ending homelessness in King County would require spending three to five times the approximately $260 million currently spent locally on homelessness and [extremely low-income households] housing in the region.”
Or rather, this would be less than 6 percent of the net wealth of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Seattle-based Amazon.
The Compassion Seattle amendment should also be seen as a warning to workers across the country. In less than two weeks, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mandated moratoriums on evictions is set to end on June 30, which will put approximately 11 million renters nationwide at risk of eviction, many of whom are facing the prospect of homelessness. If Seattle’s Charter Amendment 29 passes, those homeless people forced out of Seattle will be facing increased police repression, and homeless people everywhere else in the country will face the same threat as cities across the country follow Seattle’s example.
Such dangers clearly show that no section of the ruling class can realistically present a serious effort to address the housing crisis in Seattle or anywhere else. While the resources exist within society to provide everyone with a home and a decent standard of living, this can only be achieved through an independent struggle of the working class against the capitalist politicians and the corporate interests they serve, and for the socialist reorganization of society.
Judge temporarily blocks New York City’s transfer of homeless people from hotels to group shelters
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to move 8,000 homeless people from hotels, where they have been living temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, back to group shelters faced a temporary setback last week. A federal judge blocked the plan, ruling that the city had not adequately considered the homeless peoples’ health as it began implementing the move.
The ruling results from a legal challenge that was filed by the Legal Aid Society. The organization alleged that the city had refused to allow homeless people with disabilities or serious health problems to apply for reasonable accommodations, even though a 2017 class action settlement requires the city to do so. The Legal Aid Society accused the city of violating the rights and endangering the lives of the homeless. The judge agreed that violating the right to reasonable accommodation could cause “irreparable harm” to the “psychological, physical and mental health” of the homeless.
The homeless are the most vulnerable section of the population and suffer the effects of the social crisis most acutely. During the early stages of the pandemic in spring 2020, New York City moved about 8,000 homeless people from crowded group shelters to hotel rooms. This effort to reduce the spread of the coronavirus greatly improved the living conditions of the homeless. Hotel rooms gave these people privacy, security and a measure of dignity that the shelters had denied them.
But last month, de Blasio joined New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—both Democrats—in prematurely lifting public health measures and proclaiming an end to the pandemic. De Blasio, who is trying to attract workers and visitors back to New York City, says that moving the homeless back to shelters is crucial for the city’s reopening program.
Even as he professes concern for the welfare of the homeless, De Blasio has been shuttling them back to shelters where the coronavirus, particularly the more contagious Delta variant, can spread easily. In these shelters, a single room often houses as many as 20 people, who sleep within a few feet of each other. De Blasio also has claimed that moving the homeless back to group shelters will enable them to get the treatment and counseling services that they need. In fact, shelter operators have been able to maintain most of these services while the homeless have stayed in hotels.
Court documents show that as of July 9, the city had moved 3,685 homeless adults from 23 hotels back to shelters or to rooms in other hotels. The homeless have been made to stuff their belongings into garbage bags and have been packed into school buses to be driven to the furthest reaches of the city. One woman who uses a wheelchair and has kidney disease and prior strokes was moved to a shelter on a hill that she could not climb.
Mike Roberts was moved from the Lucerne Hotel in the affluent Upper West Side to a shelter with no air conditioning. At night, he often wakes up soaked in sweat. “Here, when I wake up, I’m in a cubicle,” he told the New York Times. “It’ll be three people around me sleeping, one snoring, one probably getting high or a guy pacing the floor. Who wants that?”
Michelle Ward applied for a reasonable accommodation that would allow her to stay in a hotel near the Empire State Building but was denied. She has severe sciatica and asthma, along with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. “I can’t take this no more,” she told the New York Times.
Approximately 5,000 homeless people remain in hotels. On July 13, Judge Gregory Howard Woods of Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that the city must meet with the homeless to determine whether any are disabled and qualify for reasonable accommodations. He held that the city must give at least seven days’ notice before transferring people who qualify for these accommodations. According to the city’s own data, approximately 68 percent of the homeless are physically or mentally disabled.
Although advocates for the homeless cheered the decision as a victory, it will not stop the transfers. The city will make “minor adjustments to our process” and begin moving people again this week, a spokesperson for New York’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) told the New York Times.
These transfers are part of New York City’s relentless campaign to whisk homeless people out of sight. Police have been dismantling homeless encampments and city officials have created a program to allow New Yorkers to report panhandlers and homeless people to the authorities.
Homeless people who have protested the city’s mistreatment of them have faced police reprisals. Several hours before Judge Woods ruled on Legal Aid’s challenge, 12 homeless New Yorkers and their supporters went to the office of the Department of Social Services (DSS), which oversees DHS. They demanded to speak to Commissioner Steve Banks about providing permanent housing and increasing the value of the city’s rent subsidies for the homeless. Police arrested six of the protesters.
Although homelessness is at its highest level in New York City since the Great Depression, the candidates for the Democratic nomination for mayor scarcely mentioned it during the campaign. One exception was Andrew Yang, the businessman and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Speaking for the most heartless section of the city’s financial oligarchy at one of the primary debates, Yang blamed the homeless for degrading New Yorkers’ quality of life.
Former policeman and erstwhile Republican Eric Adams won the primary election and will be the Democrats’ mayoral candidate. Adams has made vague promises to provide housing for the homeless, but they are as empty as the similar promises that fellow Democrat de Blasio made eight years ago.
As of July 13, more than 4,100 homeless people had been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 120 had died. DHS estimated that, as of July 2, it had fully vaccinated only 21.5 percent of adults who stayed in a shelter.
The data indicate that the pandemic is worsening in New York City. As of July 18, the daily average of total cases for the previous seven days was 523. This number is a 64 percent increase over the daily average for the previous 28 days, which was 318. Moreover, the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus now accounts for 41 percent of tested cases.
Because it represents only a temporary setback for de Blasio’s plan, Judge Woods’s ruling shows that it is impossible to protect the homeless by appealing to capitalist courts. These courts, like de Blasio and the New York City Council, subordinate all considerations, including the right to housing and the right to health, to the profit interests of the city’s financial elite.
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