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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

How a Nation Self-destructs


Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


How a Nation Self-destructs

Nations are made up of people. Nations are only as strong as the bonds between the people. Strong social bonds, strong nation; weak social bonds, weak nation. Social bonds have many elements; the most important element is how much people care about each other. If people do not care about each other, if they have a “screw you, I got mine” attitude and are not willing to help others in need, then a nation is ready to topple at the first sign of significant stress. If people have a strong social bond, they will work together during difficult times and solve all problems.
If a nation’s leaders create enormous amounts of national debt that cannot be paid because good paying jobs have been sent overseas, a weakly bonded nation is doomed to failure when an inevitable bankruptcy and economic collapse occurs.
If just before the national bankruptcy and economic collapse the leaders frighten the people with a real or phony enemy, some people will purchase weapons to protect themselves. Should the financial and economic crash occur, a weakly bonded people might resort to using weapons against each other in an every man for himself situation.
Mission accomplished; nation destroyed.
How to Save a Nation
Open the minds of the people to the fact that everyone is in this together, everyone is different and valuable, everyone is entitled to the necessities of life, including meaningful work with reasonable pay, and all differences should be celebrated rather than fought over.
Then, follow Lao zi’s advice and do nothing and everything gets done. If the people are solidly united and bonded they do not need leaders or instructions, they will naturally do what needs to be done.
Harvey Lothian is a 78-year-old man living on the Sunshine Coast of B.C., Canada. His passions since a teenager have been history, politics, economics, sociology, social psychology, learning, traveling and reading. In recent years he has come to understand what Plato meant when he said all dogs have the soul of a philosopher. He can be reached platosdog7782@gmail.comRead other articles by Harvey.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Homes for the Homeless


aeon



Homes for the homeless

San Francisco’s homeless are harangued and despised while conservative Utah has a radically humane approach

by Susie Cagle
Header cagle aeon homeless 1 canvas 1

David Hogue isn’t sure that he should tell me his name. He sits in a back office in the shelter where he has lived for the past 18 months, hands folded neatly in his lap. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to talk. He tells me about how he’s had trouble finding work. He tells me about how he’s bounced between homes for years. He tells me about how his brother dropped him off here the day after New Year’s.
But to identify himself as homeless – this is new.
The condition of homelessness is fluid, and so is our definition of it. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) placed the homeless population in January 2014 at 578,424, but advocacy groups such as the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness say that more than 3 million Americans experience an episode of homelessness each year: a night, a week or a month in a motel, in a recreation vehicle or on a friend’s couch might not make you ‘homeless’ in the eyes of the federal government, but they certainly define your lived experience.
The US has always had many shades of destitute, but this particular era of homelessness marks a new chapter in the country’s history. The causes of this crisis are no great mystery. Real median household income has plateaued since the 1960s. Adjusted for inflation, minimum wage has fallen since the 1970s. After the manufacturing industry contracted and unemployment grew in the 1980s, the homeless populations in US cities rose precipitously. For the first time since Hooverville – the shanty town built by homeless people during the Great Depression of the 1930s – American poverty was laid bare in its parks and on its streets. Since then, about 600,000 people have lived without a home on any given night in the US.
In every housing market, minimum wage is not enough to afford the average two-bedroom rental. Federal and state programmes to support and serve the mentally ill have been all but entirely dismantled. And the highest prison incarceration rate in the world has only further destabilised poor communities. For the most part, homelessness has been approached as a natural and inevitable plight of contemporary urbanity: a thing to be managed, not fixed.
But now a new optimistic ideology has taken hold in a few US cities – a philosophy that seeks not just to directly address homelessness, but to solve it. During the past quarter-century, the so-called Housing First doctrine has trickled up from social workers to academics and finally to government. And it is working. On the whole, homelessness is finally trending down.
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The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes.
Homelessness has always been more a crisis of empathy and imagination than one of sheer economics. Governments spend millions each year on shelters, health care and other forms of triage for the homeless, but simply giving people homes turns out to be far cheaper, according to research from the University of Washington in 2009. Preventing a fire always requires less water than extinguishing it once it’s burning.
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By all accounts, Housing First is an unusually good policy. It is economical and achievable. The only real innovation lies in how to inspire the necessary compassion and foresight to spur governments into building those needed homes.
But Housing First is not very popular. It runs directly counter to the US meritocratic mythology, where one is presumed to fail or succeed by one’s own hand. The homeless are presumed to have earned their place on the street.
Precious few places have had the nerve to fully implement a Housing First policy, though hundreds of cities have drawn up the plans. But the approach has been successful in Utah, where chronic homelessness is down 91 per cent over the past decade, and where rapid rehousing programmes have housed thousands of newly homeless veterans and families quickly and cheaply. To the surprise of every self-described progressive, Utah has emerged as a model for municipal programs around the country.
The spread of Housing First could usher in a new kind of compassionate governance in a new era of urban growth – but like any policy, its application is limited. The programs are available only to a small subset of the homeless: those with disabling conditions such as mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, whose lives and habits place the biggest financial burden on the state. They are not available to people such as David Hogue, at least not until he becomes more desperate and his plight is deemed too expensive. Even at its most robust, our social safety net is hung very low to the hard ground.
When the federal government embarked on its first significant plan to ‘end homelessness’ more than a decade ago, it seemed less a clear, developed strategy than a kind of dream.
If progressives are surprised by Utah, they will be horrified that Housing First began under President George W Bush. Between 2002 and 2003, hundreds of service providers and local officials met in Washington, DC to learn about the policy. Housing First generally comprises two prongs: permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless, defined as those prone to long bouts of homelessness as well as substance abuse or mental health issues; and rapid re‑housing assistance for the less acutely homeless, who are typically aided in finding a home rental and given basic living funds for a few months to help stabilise them.
Representatives from cities and states across the US spent the policy camp devising ambitious plans to reshape their communities, but Utah was one of the precious few to actually implement theirs.
‘People ask, why Utah?’ Lloyd Pendleton, the head of Utah’s Homeless Task Force tells me. Pendleton spent years as an executive at Ford Motors before taking a job managing resources at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) that put him in close contact with service providers and aid groups across the state. After that 2003 meeting, he asked the Church to ‘loan him’ to the government to devise the plan, and later took the position at Utah’s Homeless Task Force. At the time, Utah had a fast-growing homeless population, a strong and homogenous local community, a faith-based ethic of mutual aid, resources, and, in Pendleton, a uniquely empowered champion.
In 2010, President Barack Obama’s administration released its ambitious plan for a reboot of the programme first started under Bush. The Obama plan was released quietly, but it came with a mandate and a timeline: to end chronic and veteran homelessness by 2015, and family and child homelessness by 2020. By then, Utah’s Housing First pilot programme had already proved successful: 17 of Salt Lake City’s most troubled and most expensive homeless people were given their own apartments.
Nowhere else is quite like Salt Lake City, ‘the Crossroads of the West’, first settled by a desperate people with nowhere else to go. The Mormons who established the state in religious exile were close-knit, self-sufficient, and passionate about their personal liberty. This was never a community with much regard for the laws and policies of a hostile federal government, and that spirit has never really changed. On some points, this slice of the Wild West appears conservative: there’s an emphasis on preserving personal freedoms, and no particular love for taxes. But on others, this culture born of a very independent yet interdependent commonwealth is more truly progressive than any ‘blue-collar’ state.
When I visited Utah, people kept telling me that collaboration made this shift possible. For the most part, the only people who care much about the homeless are the people whose job it is to do so. Pendleton made it his mission to change that. With his background in corporations and the Church, he was successful in bringing government, non-profits, faith-based organisations, and business leaders to his table. He was able to persuade them that homelessness required a solution that went far beyond the capacity of traditional social welfare services. This seems obvious but proved radical: no longer could service providers compete with one another for the same funding, and neither could business leaders complain about the visible homeless but claim that they had no say in the solution.
‘When you go to a homeless summit, the only people there are homeless service providers,’ Pendleton tells me. ‘You need that higher community buy-in, a higher level of coordinated effort.’
This daisy chain of partnerships includes the non‑profit organisation Housing Opportunities, which develops and manages dedicated permanent supportive housing facilities across the greater Salt Lake County area.
Housing Opportunities’ apartment buildings are located away from the downtown business district and closer to residential areas. They feel more like college dorms than institutions. Communal areas, gyms, computer labs, libraries, community gardens and athletic facilities – it’s safe to brag about the amenities when all of this is cheaper than the alternative.
This kind of permanent supportive housing is developed by both public and private non‑profit entities using established funding streams already dedicated to affordable housing programmes. In Salt Lake County, the Road Home non-profit and the Housing Authority of Salt Lake City also operate similar dedicated facilities for families and individuals. Permanent supportive housing programmes also place the homeless in regular Section 8 housing, under which landlords accept housing vouchers in lieu of payment.
The rent is, at minimum, $25 per month, or one-third of a resident’s income if there is any, which some earn by working janitorial, clerical or landscaping jobs at the facility. The rest of the cost is subsidised by pre-existing HUD funding and special grants.
While it looks like its own separate policy structure, Housing First is truly just a reconsideration of entrenched housing programmes and budgets. Utah is not especially rich compared with other states, and its chronic homeless weren’t so uniquely inexpensive as to leave the state with the surplus it needed to build this new infrastructure. Much of the work of housing support staff is spent searching for a particular grant, voucher or other funding stream that best fits each client.
On my way to Utah this May, I read a letter to the editor in a local Salt Lake newspaper, decrying Housing First as wasteful, hopeless and a general insanity. Advocates in Utah tell me this isn’t a terribly common refrain. But it speaks to entrenched US attitudes that could forestall the wide‑scale adoption of the Housing First approach.
Americans have a deep and abiding faith in the strength of one’s own bootstraps – regardless of whether or not one can afford boots. The prevailing system of subsidised housing in early US history was the workhouse or poor farm, where the otherwise homeless endured hard manual labour in exchange for meagre accommodations. It wasn’t until President Franklin Roosevelt’s sweeping New Deal that the nation’s first public assistance programmes were established in the 1930s, including subsidised housing. But in the decades since, those programmes have, in many ways, come to look more like the old workhouse than progressive social policy.
Aid is almost always predicated on a system of incentives: a Rube Goldberg machine of carrots, sticks and innumerable pulleys to wrench the homeless constantly in new and opposing directions. Assistance is given conditionally and you must earn it, just as you are presumed to have earned your place in hardship. Temporary transitional housing programmes, which are still the dominant form of housing available to the homeless in the US, hinge on righteously rewarding good behaviour – participation in drug treatment programmes, successful performance at a job – and punishing bad behaviour with eviction.
Since the recession of the previous decade, more than 20 US states proposed laws to require all applicants for public assistance to pass a drug test. Those laws were ruled unconstitutional, but at least 13 states have passed legislation requiring some recipients of food stamps, welfare or other public assistance to submit to drug testing, and at least 18 more states have proposed similar laws.
In this cultural environment, it’s best to pitch Housing First not as a holistic ideology that reimagines the true nature of the social safety net and the rights of individuals, but as a strict cost‑saving measure: the carrots are far less expensive than the sticks, at least for those at the extreme ends of homeless life.
If Utah is the ideal model, then Hawaii has become the cautionary tale. Article 9, section 10 of the Hawaii state constitution is a precept in native Hawaiian law, the Law of the Splintered Paddle. It was first established by King Kamehameha in 1797 with the intent of protecting the poor:
Oh people,
Honor thy god;
respect alike [the rights of] people both great and humble;
May everyone, from the old men and women to the children
Be free to go forth and lie in the road (ie by the roadside or pathway)
Without fear of harm.
Break this law, and die.
In the ensuing centuries, the Law of the Splintered Paddle has been reconsidered as a statement on public safety as homelessness has been criminalised. It is easy to live without a home in temperate and traditionally culturally tolerant Hawaii. This has long frustrated the state’s more conservative politicians, who first offered the homeless strange carrots – plane tickets back to their home communities – before resorting, quite literally, to sticks. In late 2013, the state representative Tom Brower took a ‘tough-guy’ approach to the state capital’s homeless problem, by smashing any shopping cart he found with a sledgehammer, after thoughtfully removing the homeless person’s belongings from it first. Recently, Hawaii killed a proposal for a homeless bill of rights, and upheld a law banning people from sitting or lying on public sidewalks.
Bans on sitting or lying in public spaces have also been instituted in California, in such progressive bastions of hippie idealism as San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Berkeley, and nearly one-third of other US cities. Bans on begging, sharing food with homeless people and sleeping in cars make the homeless life nearly impossible in hundreds of other US cities. These policies are predicated on the reality that homelessness is a local problem, and the fantasy that, if driven to the most rural parts of the country, the homeless will simply cease to exist. These laws are good for property values, but not for city budgets – a study by the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 found that they prove expensive to enforce.
Cities these days have less and less room for the homeless, the poor, and even much of the middle class. New demand for urban life has far outstripped the housing capacity of most major cities, and every county in the US is facing an affordable-housing crisis. Where cities were once the easiest place to be poor, with access to services, aid, transit and small housing accommodations, they’ve now become nearly impossible.
Alongside this new economic pressure, a wave of self-described progressive policies has reclaimed urban spaces in the name of sustainability and innovation. Urbanists say that cities are our innovation hubs, our policy labs. Many of the cities with the most passionately stated progressive politics are the ones with the most expensive housing markets and the most desperate homeless communities. These are the places we’ve come to associate with innovation.
The most substantive critiques of Housing First point to this larger economic reality: homelessness is a problematic condition, but it is not the problem in itself. Our economic policies guarantee that there will always be someone left behind, and without addressing this core problem, any triage can’t really stem the bleeding. In the meantime, every policy is, by its nature, a half measure. Unfortunately, there is a growing market for quick fixes masquerading as solutions for systemic problems. ‘Teach the homeless to code’ was a joke before it was a reality in San Francisco, followed soon by the homeless shower bus, and innumerable homelessness-solving apps.
When the tech worker Greg Gopman wrote a Facebook post decrying San Francisco’s homeless and comparing them to wild animals, he was righteously vilified. Gopman atoned for his sins by performing light community service with local homeless groups, and then reimagined himself as a homeless advocate and new solutionist. Gopman’s latest plan to solve homelessness involves building intentional communities made up of tiny geodesic domes furnished only with a bed, for which residents pay $250 per month for a maximum of six months. Residents must be sober and have no history of mental illness.
Gopman calls these ‘transition centres’, a nod to the transitional housing model that cities are rejecting in favour of permanent housing. He’s currently seeking ‘investors’. When I tell service providers in Utah about Gopman, they look at me like they smell something rotten.
Those who cheer Utah’s impressive success have repeatedly called the Housing First programme ‘shockingly simple’. This would be lazy if it weren’t also wrong. In reality, Housing First is incredibly complex, and requires a very specific set of conditions in order to actually work. If cities set out to solve this complicated and expensive social problem before they’ve embraced the underlying philosophy that housing is a human right, they are likely to fail.
Despite its remarkable run in Utah, Housing First has been slow to spread through the rest of the US. Since 2002, cities and states have implemented Housing First ideas with varying degrees of success. Houston and New Orleans achieved their initial goals, but Seattle failed – because, according to the director for the city’s largest non‑profit service provider, it didn’t implement Housing First at the scale the city required.
Pendleton’s successes at Utah’s Homeless Task Force attracted media attention, including an appearance this January on The Daily Show, which made it possible for Pendleton to begin consulting cities on how to do what he did.
‘I’m looking to find an Orlando, a Denver, that’s serious about making this happen,’ Pendleton tells me. ‘My goal personally is to find a half a dozen states or counties or cities, and become a regular participant with them and say here’s how we did it, here are the principles, now let’s find the champions locally.’
But heroes and ideas alone do not make change. What made Utah’s programmes successful was concentrated power and wealth in the LDS Church – the Church that Pendleton brought to the table. Kerry Bate, the executive director at Housing Opportunities, recounts how they organised congregations to assemble the furniture for all of the apartments – which they’d also donated. It took only a few hours. ‘The Church can go both ways,’ he tells me. ‘It can smother you or you can blossom.’
There are, however, still homeless people in Utah. This seems an important point to mention, if a painfully obvious one. The Road Home shelter has never had to turn anyone away, says its housing director Melanie Zamora, but its 850 beds are full each night, and hundreds more homeless sleep in the city parks, under bridges and along the river.
Like many major US cities, Salt Lake is gentrifying, too. It is one of the only places where median wages have outpaced median housing prices, but the city is still short of thousands of necessary affordable-housing units, and homelessness overall has increased precipitously since the recession. Downtown near the Road Home, dozens of the homeless spend their nights inside a shelter, and their days in the nearby streets and parks. Blocks away, renovated condo lofts are selling at a premium, and cranes work morning to night to build more. One developer began a neighbourhood group and campaign to move the shelter to the other side of the freeway, where the real estate is less valuable and accessible. It would be a lucrative move for Salt Lake’s housing market, and a significant blow to housing the homeless.
It is not that Housing First is broken, it’s just that it’s not nearly enough.
For people such as David Hogue, this all amounts to cold comfort, the policy equivalent of the hard mats you have to sleep on if you arrive too late at the shelter to get a real bed.
For Hogue to receive more help, his intolerable condition must become even more intolerable.
‘He’s been here for a year and a half – but he’s not chronically homeless?’ I ask Zamora.
‘If we don’t do something soon, he will be,’ she says.

Monday, October 5, 2015

BELIEF The Pope’s Billionaire Entourage: How the 1 Percent Embarrassed Themselves Before the Pontiff

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BELIEF
Kenneth Langone and his ilk will pay handsomely to hear him speak. They just won't follow his actual teachings.



Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24.
The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day.
Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection.
All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour.
Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”
Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.”
So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.’”
“Oh, OK?” Oh, brother. Wonder how Pope Francis would have responded to that bit of priestly pragmatism? After all, Francis is the one who wrote, “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
But sure enough, there in the exclusive crowd at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue Thursday night, hanging out as the Vicar of Christ celebrated Vespers, was Kenneth Langone, soaking it all in. There, too, reportedly, were a couple of other crony capitalists and St. Patrick’s fundraisers – Frank Bisignano, president and CEO of First Data Corp., and Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America.
Bisignano, known as “Wall Street’s Mr. Fix-It” used to work for Citigroup and for Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and reportedly received annual compensation at First Data to the tune of $9.3 million. Moynihan was paid $13 million for 2014, down from $14 million in 2013. Last year, Bank of America, the second largest in the country – but the most hated — made a record-breaking $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department to pay up for allegations of unloading toxic mortgage investments during the housing boom. Nice.
But of all the fat cats suddenly in the thrall of the People’s Pope, one was the most impressive. Watching Francis on television Friday afternoon as he met with kids up in East Harlem at Our Lady Queen of Angels primary school, I noticed a well-dressed man hovering near the pontiff. A politician, a government or Vatican official, I wondered? Nope, it was none other than Stephen Schwarzman, head of the giant private equity firm Blackstone.
He was paid a whopping $690 million last year and last week, he and his wife donated $40 million to pay for scholarships to New York City’s Catholic schools. A generous gift for sure, but as Bill Moyers and I wrote in 2012, this is the same Stephen Schwarzman “whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months — one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.”
“To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’ Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion.”
As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Armory’s entrance [was] hung with banners painted to replicate Mr. Schwarzman’s sprawling Park Avenue apartment. A brass band and children clad in military uniforms ushered in guests… The menu included lobster, baked Alaska and a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne Montrachet, among other fine wines.”
It must have seemed like Heaven to some. And what makes this billionaire’s proximity to the pope all the more surreal is that just the morning before, Francis had spoken to Congress in reverent tones of two outspoken, radical, New York Catholics; activist and organizer Dorothy Day – co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — and Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, each of whom embraced poverty, social justice and resistance.
“We believe in an economy based on human needs rather than on the profit motive,” Day wrote, and Merton worried about “the versatile blandishments of money.” Day wished the church’s bounty to be spread among the needy and not spent on cathedrals and ephemera. And Merton wrote, “It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you, try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself.”
Whether the irony struck Stephen Schwarzman is unknown. He himself was probably in too much of a hurry for contemplation. After East Harlem, he rushed off to the White House and that state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. His plus-one was Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who infamously told employees they should be like hyenas stalking wildebeest: “It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system… because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement).”
There you have it. In the Bible – right before the camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Masters of the Universe like Dalio and Schwarzman prefer the Law of the Jungle, buying proximity to holiness and assuaging guilt with cash, all the while upholding savage nature red in tooth and claw.
By the way, Schwarzman’s wife gave the White House dinner a pass. She had a better deal: an excellent, paid in advance seat at the pope’s mass in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos, is senior writer of Moyers & Company, airing weekly on public television. www.BillMoyers.com

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Dick Cheney's Crimes Against Humanity


Brainz



Dick Cheney's Crimes Against Humanity


cheney crimes
Politics is a dirty business and politicians don't come any dirtier than Dick Cheney. He's a man who delights in operating on the 'dark side' and is the Darth Vader of American politics. However, is it going too far to accuse him of "crimes against humanity"? That term has quite a narrow and specific meaning in international law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Courts defines it as:
particularly odious offences that constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are part either of a government policy or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. Murder, extermination, torture, rape and political, racial or religious persecution and other inhumane acts reach the threshold of crimes against humanity only if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice.
Pretty heinous stuff, I'm sure we can agree, but that is the yardstick against which we measure the actions of Dick Cheney and see whether they do, in fact, amount to "crimes against humanity".

The Illegal Invasion of Iraq

illegal invasion of iraq
Going to war is the most serious action that a government can take. Citizens must never be put in harm's way or have their lives put at risk except where the most pressing and urgent necessity exists. We now know that the invasion of Iraq was based on lies. Virtually everything that Cheney said about it was simply untrue. There were no WMDs and he knew it. Iraq posed no threat to the west and he knew it. There was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and Al Quaeda and he knew it . Cheney repeatedly lied to make the case for war. The position of the United Nations was crystal clear. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in September 2004, declared:
The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.
Legally, the invasion was in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, reflected in both US and international law, which specifically prohibits wars of aggression. So it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Cheney was instrumental in starting an illegal war, surely one of the gravest possible crimes against humanity.

Mass Murder

cheney crimes
It follows that, if the invasion of Iraq was based upon lies and illegal under international law, any killing that resulted from it would also be illegal. If Cheney wilfully and deliberately misled Congress into authorizing him to engage in an unlawful war in which American troops and Iraqis were killed, he is arguably guilty of murder under American law. The US Criminal Code defines murder as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought and specifically holds that murders perpetrated by any kind of wilful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing are murders in the first degree. If the killings are the result of Cheney lying to Congress, then they could be regarded as premeditated. Therefore, there is an argument that Cheney can be held responsible for mass murder. So far over 4,000 American soldiers and perhaps as many as a million Iraqis have died as a result of the illegal invasion of Iraq. To put that in perspective, it is vastly more than the death toll from all terrorist acts committed against the west put together.

Prisoner Detention Abuses - Violation of the Geneva Convention

cheney crimes
Guantanamo Bay has become an international symbol of everything that was rotten about Bush and Cheney's "war on terror". It was created cynically as a way of avoiding America's obligations under international law and putting the detainees beyond the reach of US justice. The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect non-combatants, including prisoners, in times of armed conflict. They protect American servicemen as well as everyone else. Cheney claimed that these protections apply only to conflicts between states and since Al Qaeda is not a 'state', the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the "war on terror". It made no sense to anyone. On the one hand, Cheney argued that this was a war on terrorism, subject only to the laws of war, not US criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, he said the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda, which put the war on terror in a legal limbo. This novel 'anything-goes' approach served as the Bush administration's legal cover for a wide range of questionable tactics, ranging from the Guantanamo military tribunals to efforts to hold even US citizens indefinitely without counsel, charge or trial. The moral and legal no-man's land of Guantanamo was replicated around the world in other secret CIA 'black' prisons where people were held illegally and often tortured.

Torture

cheney crimes
Torture is a truly heinous crime which is prohibited by both American law and under the Geneva convention, to which the USA is a signatory. Let us be quite clear about this, torture is classified as a war crime. Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441 says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a “grave breach of common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions and it then it defines what a 'grave breach' would be. One such breach is torture or the conspiracy to commit torture. Cheney's regime was not about 'rough' or even 'enhanced' interrogation techniques. It involved practices which have for a long time been generally accepted as torture. These include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions, in some cases rape and sexual abuse, cultural and racist abuse and beatings. These actions that were undertaken by the CIA and military under the direction of Cheney and as part of a widespread government program very clearly fall into the category of crimes against humanity. Torture is an issue which has dragged America into the gutter in the eyes of the rest of the world and it is the issue that may still see Cheney and Bush indicted as war criminals.

Extraordinary Rendition

Extraordinary Rendition
To be fair 'extraordinary rendition' (illegally kidnapping people and flying them to prisons in other countries) is a crime that America has also carried out under other administrations, but never to the same extent or as brazenly as under Cheney and Bush. In practice a foreign national might be snatched anywhere in the world and flown to a secret prison in some 'ally' country (like Egypt) where torture is routinely practised. The prisoner may be held without rights or access to any legal system, sometimes for years, and often subjected to the most brutal torture. This was the method by which the CIA, under Cheney's direction, managed to 'out-source' its most heavy-duty torturing and interrogation. The whole thing, of course, is illegal and, as an officially-approved government program that has resulted in torture, clearly constitutes a crime against humanity.

Military Atrocities in Iraq

Military Atrocities
All war is hell and you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Ok, we know that, but Iraq is not a 'war'. There are no opposing armies. It is an illegal invasion and occupation, but even if Iraq were a war there are certain standards and conventions of humanity that civilized countries observe. Sadly there have been far too many lapses in Iraq. The use of illegal white phosphorus in Falujah to burn civilians to the bone, the trigger-happy 'shoot-first-and ask-questions-later' attitude of US contractors like Blackwater, massacres such as Haditha where 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by US marines - it all adds up to a very dirty and brutal occupation and one that was illegal in the first place and based on the lies of Cheney and others. There is little doubt that war crimes have been committed in Iraq but the responsibility for them goes all the way up the line. The troops on the ground didn't start the war. Cheney and Bush did.

Cheney's Death Squads

death squads
Reporting legend Seymour Hersh caused quite a furore back in March 2009 when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret murder squad, which he kept hidden from Congressional oversight. He said at the time, "Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on." He added: "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us." Secret death-squads are the kind of thing that you might expect in some brutal South-American dictatorship, not America. Although Hersh's allegation was originally attacked by supporters of Cheney, later reports in other newspapers appear to vindicate his charges. It now appears there was indeed a secret assassination program that Cheney instructed the CIA to keep secret from Congress, which in itself was a criminal act.

Treason - the Valerie Plame Affair

cheney crimes
Should we consider betraying your country a crime against humanity? What if that betrayal took the form of risking the life of an operational member of the security forces? Maybe not. That's perhaps stretching it a bit, but before we're done with Cheney let's remind ourselves that he is a traitor to America too. On July 6, 2003, four months after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times disputing the claim that Saddam had tried to purchase enhanced uranium yellowcake from Niger. The claim had been fabricated and used by Bush, Cheney and others in the course of arguing that Saddam's WMD posed a serious threat. To tarnish Wilson, and intimidate anyone else who might be tempted to challenge him publicly, Cheney arranged for his politically savvy deputy, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to leak the confidential information that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA agent (seeking out WMD, no less) and to insinuate that Wilson's evidence of Cheney's dishonesty was tainted and discredited by nepotism. 'Outing' a covert intelligence operative for personal revenge is an action against America, not the individual. Doing this at a time when Cheney himself said the country was at war makes him a traitor.

In Conclusion

So has Cheney committed "crimes against humanity"? The evidence is pretty damning. Of course that's not to say these are the only crimes he committed. There have been a multitude of lesser offenses, such as involvement in the illegal wire-tapping program and unanswered questions over why Halliburton, the company he was ex-CEO of and that made his fortune for him, received $8 billion in contracts from the Bush-Cheney administration for work in Iraq. Coincidence? All these issues need detailed and careful scrutiny under the framework of law. The only real question now is whether Obama will find the courage necessary to bring him to justice. For the moment, the jury is still out.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

As Arrest Records Rise, Americans Find Consequences Can Last a Lifetime

The Wall Street Journal




As Arrest Records Rise, Americans Find Consequences Can Last a Lifetime




Even if Charges Were Dropped, a Lingering Arrest Record Can Ruin Chances of a Job

Jose Gabriel Hernandez was arrested after being falsely identified as a sexual predator.ENLARGE
Jose Gabriel Hernandez was arrested after being falsely identified as a sexual predator. BEN SKLAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL





America has a rap sheet.
Over the past 20 years, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. As a result, the FBI currently has 77.7 million individuals on file in its master criminal database—or nearly one out of every three American adults.
Between 10,000 and 12,000 new names are added each day.
At the same time, an information explosion has made it easy for anyone to pull up arrest records in an instant. Employers, banks, college admissions officers and landlords, among others, routinely check records online. The information doesn't typically describe what happened next.
Many people who have never faced charges, or have had charges dropped, find that a lingering arrest record can ruin their chance to secure employment, loans and housing. Even in cases of a mistaken arrest, the damaging documents aren't automatically removed. In other instances, arrest information is forwarded to the FBI but not necessarily updated there when a case is thrown out locally. Only half of the records with the FBI have fully up-to-date information.
"There is a myth that if you are arrested and cleared that it has no impact," says Paul Butler, professor of law at Georgetown Law. "It's not like the arrest never happened."
Precious Daniels of Detroit is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process.ENLARGE
Precious Daniels of Detroit is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process. FABRIZIO COSTANTINI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When Precious Daniels learned that the Census Bureau was looking for temporary workers, she thought she would make an ideal candidate. The lifelong Detroit resident and veteran health-care worker knew the people in the community. She had studied psychology at a local college.
Days after she applied for the job in 2010, she received a letter indicating a routine background check had turned up a red flag.
In November of 2009, Ms. Daniels had participated in a protest against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan as the health-care law was being debated. Arrested with others for disorderly conduct, she was released on $50 bail and the misdemeanor charge was subsequently dropped. Ms. Daniels didn't anticipate any further problems.
ENLARGE
But her job application brought the matter back to life. For the application to proceed, the Census bureau informed her she would need to submit fingerprints and gave her 30 days to obtain court documents proving her case had been resolved without a conviction.
Clearing her name was easier said than done. "From what I was told by the courthouse, they didn't have a record," says Ms. Daniels, now 39 years old. She didn't get the job. Court officials didn't respond to requests for comment.
Today, Ms. Daniels is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process. Adam Klein, a New York-based plaintiff attorney, says a total of about 850,000 applicants received similar letters to the one sent to Ms. Daniels.
Representatives for the Census Bureau and the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment. In court filings, the government denied the discrimination allegation and said plaintiffs' method for analyzing hiring data was "unreliable" and "statistically invalid."
The wave of arrests has been fueled in part by unprecedented federal dollars funneled to local police departments and new policing tactics that condoned arrests for even the smallest offenses. Spending on law-enforcement by states and local governments hit $212 billion in 2011, including judicial, police and corrections costs, according to the most recent estimates provided to the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, those figures, when adjusted for inflation, were equivalent to $179 billion in 2001 and $128 billion in 1992.
In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the number of full-time equivalent sworn state and local police officers at 646,213—up from 531,706 in 1991.
A crackdown on what seemed like an out-of-control crime rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s made sense at the time, says Jack Levin, co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Boston's Northeastern University.
"Zero-tolerance policing spread across the country after the 1990s because of the terrible crime problem in late '80s and early 1990s," says Mr. Levin.
The push to put an additional 100,000 more officers on the streets in the 1990s focused on urban areas where the crime rates were the highest, says Mr. Levin. And there has been success, he says, as crime rates have fallen and the murder rate has dropped.
But as a consequence, "you've got these large numbers of people now who are stigmatized," he says. "The impact of so many arrests is catastrophic."
That verdict isn't unanimous. "We made arrests for minor infractions that deterred the more serious infractions down the road," says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 335,000 officers. "We don't apologize for that. Innocent people are alive today and kids have grown up to lead productive lives because of the actions people took in those days."
At the University of South Carolina, researchers have been examining other national data in an attempt to understand the long-term impact of arrests on young people. Using information from a 16-year-long U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, researchers tracked 7,335 randomly selected people into their 20s, scrutinizing subjects for any brushes with the law.
Researchers report that more than 40% of the male subjects have been arrested at least once by the age of 23. The rate was highest for blacks, at 49%, 44% for Hispanics and 38% for whites. Researchers found that nearly one in five women had been arrested at least once by the age of 23.
They further determined that 47% of those arrested weren't convicted. In more than a quarter of cases, subjects weren't even formally charged.
Mr. Hernandez carries a laminated legal document from the Bexar County Sheriff's office confirming his innocence in case he is arrested in the future.ENLARGE
Mr. Hernandez carries a laminated legal document from the Bexar County Sheriff's office confirming his innocence in case he is arrested in the future. BEN SKLAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
It can be daunting to try to correct the record. In October 2012, Jose Gabriel Hernandez was finishing up dinner at home when officers came to arrest him for sexually assaulting two young girls.
Turns out, it was a case of mistaken identity. In court documents, the prosecutor's office acknowledged that the "wrong Jose Hernandez" had been arrested and the charges were dropped.
Once the case was dismissed, Mr. Hernandez assumed authorities would set the record straight. Instead, he learned that the burden was on him to clear his record and that he would need a lawyer to seek a formal expungement.
"Needless to say, that hasn't happened yet," says Mr. Hernandez, who works as a contractor. Mr. Hernandez was held in the Bexar County jail on $150,000 bond. He didn't have the cash, so his wife borrowed money to pay a bail bondsman the nonrefundable sum of $22,500, or the 15% fee, he needed to put up. They are still repaying the loans.
Exacerbating the situation are for-profit websites and other background-check businesses that assemble publicly available arrest records, often including mug shots and charges. Many sites charge fees to remove a record, even an outdated or erroneous one. In the past year Google Inc. has changed its search algorithm to de-emphasize many so called "mug-shot" websites, giving them less prominence when someone's name is searched.
On Friday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill making it illegal for websites to charge state residents to have their mug shot arrest photos removed.
In 2013, Indiana legislators approved one of the most extensive criminal record expungement laws in the country. The law was sponsored by a former prosecutor and had a range of conservative Republican backers. One had worked as a mining-company supervisor who frequently had to reject individuals after routine background checks found evidence of an old arrest.
"If we are going to judge people, we need to judge them on who they are now, and not who they were," says Jud McMillin, the bill's chief sponsor.
The "growing obsession with background checking and commercial exploitation of arrest and conviction records makes it all but impossible for someone with a criminal record to leave the past behind," concludes a recent report from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Further analysis by the University of South Carolina team, performed at the request of The Wall Street Journal, suggests that men with arrest records—even absent a formal charge or conviction—go on to earn lower salaries. They are also less likely to own a home compared with people who have never been arrested.
The same holds true for graduation rates and whether a person will live below the poverty line.
For example, more than 95% of subjects without arrests in the survey graduated high school or earned an equivalent diploma. The number falls to 84.4% for those who were arrested and yet not convicted.
Tia Stevens Andersen, the University of South Carolina researcher who performed the analysis, says the results are consistent with what criminologists have found. The data, especially when coupled with other studies, show that an arrest "does have a substantial impact on people's lives," she says. That is in part because "it's now cheap and easy to do a background check."
According to a 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 69% of employers conduct criminal background checks on all job applicants. Fewer than that—about 58%—allow candidates to explain any negative results of a check.
Mike Mitternight, the owner and president of Factory Service Agency Inc., a heating and air-conditioning company in Metairie, La., worries that if he turns down a job applicant because of a criminal record, he could be open to a discrimination claim. But hiring the person could leave him open to liability if something goes wrong. "I have to do the background checks and take my chances," says Mr. Mitternight. "It's a lose-lose situation."
John Keir says he was fired from his job after failing to mention brushes with the law on his application. Found not guilty of a recent charge, he says he answered truthfully.ENLARGE
John Keir says he was fired from his job after failing to mention brushes with the law on his application. Found not guilty of a recent charge, he says he answered truthfully. STEVE GATES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
John and Jessica Keir, of Birmingham, Ala., have tried various means to combat their arrest stigma. In 2012 the married couple was accused of criminal mischief for scratching someone's car with a key. They were found not guilty at trial.
In January of last year, Ms. Keir, a law-school student, googled herself. "My mug shot was everywhere," she recalls. "I was just distraught."
Though she was in the top 15% of her first-year class at Cumberland School of Law School in Birmingham, she says about a dozen law firms turned her down for summer work. Since she rarely made it to the interview stage, she feared her online mug shots played a role. Eventually, she landed a summer position at the Alabama attorney general's office.
The couple says they paid about $2,000 to various websites to remove their mug shots. It didn't work, Mr. Keir says. New mug-shot sites seemed to appear almost daily. Keeping up with them all was "like playing Whac-A-Mole," says Mr. Keir.
Ms. Keir, who is finishing her law degree at the University of Alabama, has been using Facebook, LinkedIn and Google to create enough positive Internet traffic to try to push down negative information lower in any search-engine results.
Meanwhile, her husband believes he has been caught up in a separate quagmire. Earlier this year Mr. Keir was hired by Regions Bank as an information security official. Weeks later, he says he was let go from his $85,000 job for allegedly lying on his application.
The 35-year-old Mr. Keir says his firing resulted after failing to disclose his recent arrest record as well as a number of traffic violations during his teens that had branded him as a "youthful offender" in Alabama. He says he didn't lie on his application, and only recalls being asked about any criminal convictions.
A spokeswoman for Regions Bank, a unit of Regions Financial Corp., says the company couldn't discuss individual personnel matters, but says the bank sends applicant fingerprints to the FBI as part of criminal background check and asks candidates to answer questions about previous criminal charges and convictions.
Arrest issues don't necessarily abate with age.
Barbara Ann Finn lost out on a school cafeteria job last year after a background check turned up a 1963 hit on her record, which was a surprise to her.ENLARGE
Barbara Ann Finn lost out on a school cafeteria job last year after a background check turned up a 1963 hit on her record, which was a surprise to her. GREG KENDALL-BALL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Late last year, Barbara Ann Finn, a 74-year-old great grandmother, applied for a part-time job as a cafeteria worker in the Worcester County, Md., school system.
"I was a single woman on a fixed income. I was trying to help myself," she recalls.
Along with the application came fingerprints and other checks—a process Ms. Finn dismissed as mere formality. After all, she had lived in the area since 1985, had worked in various parts of county government and served as a foster parent. Her background had been probed before.
So she was surprised by the phone call she received from the school district. Her fingerprints, she says she was told, had been run through both the state and FBI criminal databases. She was clear in Maryland, but the FBI check matched her prints to a 1963 arrest of someone with a name she says she doesn't recognize.
Barbara Witherow, a spokeswoman with the school district, confirms that Ms. Finn had applied for employment and that there were "valid reasons why" she wasn't considered.
Ms. Finn says she believes her problem might trace back to a 1963 episode when she and a girlfriend had gone to a clothing store in Philadelphia. The other woman began shoplifting, she says. Police took both of them into custody, Ms. Finn recalls, but she was released.
"I never heard any more about it and never thought any more about it," says Ms. Finn.
Michael Lee is executive director of the nonprofit Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity's Criminal Record Expungement Project and has been working on Ms. Finn's behalf for months.
The challenge, he says, is expunging a record no one can find.
An arrest record can only be removed if the local court system notifies the FBI that it should be taken out of the file. In Ms. Finn's case, the local authorities say they can't find the original record.
A Philadelphia District Court document obtained by Mr. Lee and reviewed by the Journal says Ms. Finn was never charged. A Pennsylvania State Police spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Lee has asked for another background check from the state to try to put the matter to rest. Says Ms. Finn: "I don't want to die with a criminal record."
Write to Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com and John R. Emshwiller atjohn.emshwiller@wsj.com