U.S. consumer prices soared 6.2 percent in past year, most since 1990

Prices for U.S. consumers jumped 6.2 percent in October compared with a year earlier as surging costs for food, gas and housing left Americans grappling with the highest inflation rate since 1990.

The year-over-year increase in the consumer price index exceeded the 5.4 percent rise in September, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. From September to October, prices jumped 0.9 percent, the highest month-over-month increase since June.

Inflation is eroding the strong gains in wages and salaries that have flowed to America’s workers in recent months, creating political headaches for the Biden administration and congressional Democrats and intensifying pressure on the Federal Reserve as it considers how fast to withdraw its efforts to boost the economy.

Job gains and pay raises have been much healthier during the pandemic recovery than they were after the Great Recession roughly a decade ago. But in contrast to the years that followed that downturn, inflation is now accelerating and diminishing Americans’ confidence in the economy, surveys have found.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, so-called core prices rose 0.6% in from September to October. Core prices are now up 4.6 percent compared with a year ago.

Energy costs soared 4.8 percent just from September to October, with gasoline, natural gas and heating oil surging for the same reason that many other commodities have grown more expensive: Demand has risen sharply as Americans are driving and flying more, but supplies haven’t kept up.

Economists still expect inflation to slow once supply bottlenecks are cleared and Americans shift more of their consumption back to pre-pandemic norms. As COVID-19 fades, consumers should spend more on travel, entertainment and other services and less on goods such as cars, furniture, and appliances, which would reduce pressure on supply chains.

But no one knows how long that might take. Higher inflation has persisted much longer than most economists had expected. And inflation is spreading well beyond items like appliances and new and used vehicles that are directly affected by the pandemic.

“The inflation overshoot will likely get worse before it gets better,” said Goldman Sachs economists in a research note Sunday.

For months, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had described inflation as “transitory,” a short-term phenomenon linked to labor and supply shortages resulting from the speed with which the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession. But last week, Powell acknowledged that higher prices could last well into next summer.

The Fed chair announced that the central bank will start reducing the monthly bond purchases it began last year as an emergency measure to boost the economy. Investors now expect the Fed to raise its benchmark interest rate twice next year from its record-low level near zero — much earlier than they had predicted a few months ago.

Many large companies are passing on the cost of higher pay to their customers, and in some cases, consumers are paying up rather than cutting back.

To attract workers, for example, McDonald’s boosted hourly pay 10 percent to 15 percent over the past year. To help cover those higher labor costs as well as more expensive food and paper, the company said last month that it raised prices 6 percent in the July-September quarter from a year earlier. Yet even so, company sales leapt 14 percent as virus restrictions eased.

Other companies have been more cautious. One of them, Wayfair, an online furniture retailer, said last week that its costs are rising as factories in Asia have shut down amid COVID outbreaks, ports are jammed, and labor costs have surged. But the company isn’t necessarily passing along all those higher costs.

“We are in a mass-oriented business where the average customer does not have an unlimited discretionary budget,” said Michael Fleisher, Wayfair’s chief financial officer. “Inflation is rampant across the economy, and there are competing demands for their time and wallet share.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/10/consumer-prices-soar-520574
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What the 14th Century Plague Tells Us About How Covid Will Change Politics

Nearly 700 years ago, Europe experienced the single most devastating pandemic in recorded human history. Within a timespan of roughly four years (1347–1351), an outbreak of plague tread an awful path across most of the continent, claiming the lives of about half of the population. Economic activities like mining and metallurgy came to a complete stop. In some cases, villages constructed around marginal agricultural lands were entirely abandoned, to be reclaimed by the forests. Chroniclers at the time referred to the event as the “Great Mortality” — today we know it as the Black Death.

Yet the legacy of the Black Death goes well beyond human suffering. The unparalleled pandemic did not just devastate the population in the areas it hit the hardest; it killed off entire social and economic institutions — especially ones that had, up until that point, restricted human freedom and stifled prosperity.

In recently published research, we trace out how the regions that experienced the worst mortality and the most extensive destruction began to look different from those that had fared better. In regions with the highest death toll, the power and social standing of workers went up precipitously, while exploitative labor practices crumbled. As a consequence, government, particularly at the local level, became significantly more democratic and inclusive — effects that could still be seen centuries later.

Today, we may be witnessing the early stages of a similar development. The recent surge in workers quitting low wage jobs, especially in the leisure and hospitality industries, has left employers scrambling to fill empty positions. Some suggest that the Covid pandemic and its fallout have, at least in the short run, augmented the bargaining power of labor. While the available evidence on this point is mixed (there has been only a modest increase in inflation-adjusted wage rates and little change to overall levels of inequality), the history of the Black Death suggests that pandemic-driven shifts in the labor supply can have important and long-lasting economic and political ramifications.

How precisely did the Black Death have this kind of impact? Medieval medicine understood neither how the plague spread nor how it could be treated. Today we know that plague is primarily transmitted to humans by infected rat fleas, but doctors in the 14th century commonly attributed the disease to poison in the air. Easily treated by antibiotics today, treatments at the time consisted of ineffective and potentially damaging procedures such as bloodletting. If allowed to take its course, plague has extremely high mortality — roughly 60 percent-70 percent of afflicted individuals will succumb to the disease. So when the plague entered Europe via trading routes with Central Asia, the result was a calamity of unfathomable magnitude.

The effects of mass death on the economic fortunes of workers were profound. On the eve of the Black Death, Europe was characterized by feudalism, a hierarchical social and economic system with military aristocrats (and the clergy) at the top and a large mass of peasant laborers at the bottom. Because the economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, the elite’s capital was held almost exclusively as land. Peasants were tied to this land through a highly exploitative system of forced labor called serfdom, which demanded the uncompensated provision of labor and greatly restricted workers’ mobility.

The demographic collapse wrought by the Black Death was a fundamental shock to this system — at least it was in the areas where the toll of the plague was high. The basic laws of supply and demand explain why. In areas where the plague hit hard, it decimated the labor force. At the same time, the disease left the upper classes’ main capital asset, land, completely untouched. Thus, one factor of economic production, labor, suddenly became scarce and expensive, while the other, land, became abundant and cheap. The result was a massive increase in peasants’ bargaining power. Thus, workers were able to demand better working conditions, improve their access to land and, given the challenges elites faced in policing their movement, migrate to the cities. In the years immediately following the Black Death, serfdom collapsed and was replaced by a wage economy based on free labor.

Yet this reaction to the Black Death did not take place across the whole of Europe. Although much of Western Europe (including some western areas of what we now think of as Germany) suffered from the plague with particularly high intensity, leading to those massive changes to the bargaining power of labor, Eastern Europe, which was less exposed to trade and had sparser human settlement, saw significantly less death. Consequently, in the eastern parts of Europe, including the east of German-speaking Central Europe, the system of serfdom persisted for centuries longer than it did in the West.

These differences in labor freedom had important consequences for local politics and institutions. We find that areas of Central Europe that experienced high mortality from the Black Death — leading to an early end for serfdom — developed more inclusive political institutions at the local level, such as the use of elections to select city councils. These changes initially resulted from shifts in the organization of agriculture. In areas where the Black Death hit hard, elites were forced to decentralize much of the everyday control over agricultural management to the peasants themselves. This created a local need for coordination, since agricultural production at the village-level could only be successful if peasants agreed on the crops to be harvested and the division of labor in the agricultural round. As a consequence of these early experiences with self-governance, peasant villages began to demand the right to elect their own officials. Over time, this led to wider and wider participation in collective self-governance at the local level. Such experiences fostered a lasting culture of civic engagement and cooperation that proved essential for safeguarding the freedoms of laborers from future attempts by elites to roll back the gains won in the wake of the Black Death. In the southwest region of what is today Germany, for instance, the existence of institutions of local self-government allowed peasants to organize collectively to defend themselves against elites who would have returned them to the bondage of serfdom. They did so by collecting arms, forming armies and storming castles. This feat of collective organization — the Peasants’ War of 1525 — prevented the reimposition of labor coercion.

No comparable dynamic emerged in the areas that experienced low mortality from the Black Death, where serfdom ended late. Rather, in these areas, elites subjected peasants to an increasing array of exploitative labor obligations. Our research shows that the long-term effects of this major divergence in political cultures and institutional development was visible even centuries later: Citizens from regions that had a long tradition of democratic engagement rejected parties that were strongly antidemocratic in their orientation, such as Imperial Germany’s Conservative Party in the early 1870s or the National Socialists (i.e., the Nazi party) in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections. In our analysis, the link between support for antidemocratic parties and the intensity of exposure to the Black Death holds irrespective of whether or not one takes into consideration factors such as pre-Black Death population densities and measures of exposure to trade. Moreover, we also make use of the fact that the Black Death had clear seasonal patterns and a decreasing intensity over time. These patterns allow us to infer the component of local mortality rates that is independent of specific political, economic, social or cultural conditions. When doing a new analysis that is based on this component of mortality rates only, we find very similar results and again confirm our theoretical expectations. For these reasons, we believe that the Black Death had a causal impact on long-run voting behavior.

The Southern German state of Württemberg offers a good example of these dynamics. Württemberg was hit especially hard by the Black Death. As a consequence, in many parts of the state, serfdom was replaced by peasant-led forms of local self-government. The workers’ greater independence and ability to organize collectively meant that Würrtemberg became one of the earliest and most important sites of the Peasants’ War of 1525, where the peasants defended their freedoms against the nobility. The state’s long political tradition of local participatory government helps explain why, at key moments in German history, it stood as a bastion for liberal values in otherwise highly illiberal times. At the founding of the German Empire, the highly antidemocratic Conservative Party was only able to achieve an average of 2.3 percent of the vote across Württemberg’s electoral districts in the 1871 election. This stands in stark contrast to the double-digit results and majorities that it achieved in the far eastern parts of Imperial Germany. In those areas, there had not been a comparable, longstanding experience with participatory government, which made it easier for antidemocratic forces to succeed. Similarly, in the 1930 election, the citizens of Württemberg strongly rejected the National Socialists, which only achieved 9.3 percent of Württemberg’s overall vote (the second-lowest among all major electoral districts of Weimar Germany), while the party’s nationwide average was twice as high with 18.3 percent.

So, the experience of the Black Death makes clear that pandemics can contribute to greater bargaining power for workers and perhaps even long run gains in human freedom that echo across the centuries. But will today’s Covid-19 pandemic lead to lasting social changes akin to those encountered in medieval Europe? While we are very skeptical that Covid will lead to changes that are as drastic or long lasting — as neither the destructive power of today’s pandemic nor the technological constraints on the economy are comparable — some of the dynamics of social change we are currently witnessing do resemble those observed in the wake of the Black Death.

Just like in medieval Europe, the current pandemic has been followed by a scarcity of available workers — a shortage that has, in many instances, given laborers the necessary leverage to leave their jobs, participate in strikes and otherwise negotiate for better working conditions. Whether this is just a short-lived uptick in workers’ bargaining power or the antecedent to something more permanent will depend on whether these recent gains become enshrined in institutions that permit workers to act collectively in defense of their rights. This could take the form of national legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would facilitate collective action across unions and enhance worker protections against retaliation for strikes. Or, it could be the result of reforms at the state-level, such as the extension of collective bargaining rights to all public employees in states that have a blanket prohibition or that limit that right to only certain classes of public employees. Alternatively, the state-level repeal of so-called right-to-work laws, which weaken bargaining leverage of unions, would also facilitate worker collective action. Initiatives like these might help American workers peaceably claw back their share of the productivity gains that have been overwhelmingly hoarded by owners, CEOs and upper-level management.

Still, the way in which Covid contributed to the current labor shortage is different from how the Black Death did so, which has implications for how long the effects of the pandemic will last. Unlike in medieval Europe, today’s labor shortage is caused by a combination of secondary pandemic effects — not the death of workers. Specifically, many laborers who would have worked a bit longer before retiring or who struggled to find jobs in the pre-Covid economy have dropped out of the active labor force. Additionally, many young parents are unable to find child care at affordable prices, which further amplifies the existing scarcity of labor. Individuals who belong to high-risk populations may be refraining from working right now due to fears of breakthrough infections or further variants of Covid emerging.

All of these changes are less permanent than demographic collapse, which was how the Black Death altered the labor supply. Some people who have dropped out of the active labor force might choose or be forced to reenter it. Similarly, once child care becomes more accessible, parents might return to work and increase the labor supply. Finally, with booster shots and increased vaccination rates, at-risk populations might be willing to return to work. If those dynamics unfold over the coming months, unless a substantially more deadly Covid variant emerges, the current level of labor power could potentially decline. Without the institutionalization of worker power through new laws or organizations (as occured in hard-hit areas after the Black Death pandemic), the return of the labor supply to its pre-Covid level could close the window of opportunity for workers to permanently gain a fairer share of the economic pie. Under such circumstances, the slow but steady erosion of labor bargaining power in the U.S. would not be reversed, but likely continue.

This contribution is based on the authors’ recent World Politics article, which can be accessed here.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/07/black-death-labor-politics-covid-history-519717
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U.S. hiring rebounded in October, with 531,000 jobs added

America’s employers stepped up their hiring in October, adding a solid 531,000 jobs, the most since July and a sign that the recovery from the pandemic recession may be overcoming a virus-induced slowdown.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent last month, from 4.8 percent in September. That is a comparatively low level but still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5 percent.

The economy’s emergence from the pandemic, by most measures, remains on course. Services companies in such areas as retail, banks and warehousing have reported a sharp jump in sales. More Americans bought new homes last month. And consumer confidence rose in October.

Still, the recovery would gain strength from a sustained acceleration in hiring. The economy grew at a healthy 6.5 percent annual rate in the first half of the year as vaccinations spread and Americans showed themselves more willing to travel, shop, eat out and attend entertainment events. Yet the delta variant held economic growth in the July-September quarter to just a 2 percent annual rate and sharply slowed hiring.

Recent economic gauges have cast a hopeful picture. After several rounds of stimulus checks and other government support payments, Americans as a whole have amassed about $2.5 trillion more in savings than they had before the pandemic. As that money is spent, it will likely fuel further economic activity.

The Conference Board, a business research group, said that in its October consumer confidence survey, the proportion of Americans who said they planned to buy cars, homes or major appliances all rose. And nearly half the survey respondents said they planned to vacation in the next six months — the highest such proportion since February 2020, before COVID-19 ripped through the economy.

Yet some companies say they still can’t find enough workers to fill jobs. Many parents, particularly mothers, haven’t returned to the workforce after having left jobs during the pandemic to care for children or other relatives. Defying the predictions of some, the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement hasn’t caused more people to look for work. Roughly 5 million fewer people have jobs now than did before the pandemic.

Most economists say they’re hopeful that with vaccinations helping to suppress the delta wave, more people will seek and find jobs because they’re no longer sick or caring for someone who is or because they no longer fear becoming infected. Those health issues had sidelined more people in September than in previous months.

America’s workers, who now enjoy greater leverage in the job market than they have in decades, are receiving solid pay increases. The draw of higher income could entice more people to come off the sidelines and look for work again. Wages and salaries in the July-September quarter, compared with a year earlier, jumped by the most in 20 years. Most of that gain, though, went to already employed people who left their jobs: The number of people who quit, mostly to take new positions, has reached a record high.

Rising inflation, though, has eroded much of the value of those pay increases and has become the most serious headwind for the U.S. economy. Higher costs for food, heating oil, rents and furniture have burdened millions of families. Prices rose 4.4 percent in September compared with 12 months earlier, the sharpest such increase in three decades.

That inflation surge was a key reason why the Federal Reserve announced this week that it would begin winding down the stimulus it has given the economy since the pandemic recession struck last year. The Fed will do so by reducing its monthly bond purchases, which have been intended to hold down long-term interest rates to spur borrowing and spending.

Chair Jerome Powell suggested that it won’t be possible to gain a clear picture of the job market’s health until the impact of COVID-19 declines further, which could take months.

Yet in the meantime, there are plenty of signs that the economy is healing: The number of people applying for first-time unemployment benefits fell for a fifth straight week, to a level nearly as low as the pace of jobless claims before the pandemic struck 20 months ago.

And while hiring has slowed for now, consumers as a whole have solid financial cushions. After several rounds of stimulus checks and other government support payments, Americans overall have amassed about $2.5 trillion more in savings than they had before the pandemic. As that money is spent, it will likely fuel further economic activity.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/05/hiring-october-rebound-519678
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Congress puts pressure on Biden to defend Taiwan

China’s military provocations toward Taiwan and President Joe Biden’s mixed messages are igniting a debate on Capitol Hill over whether to adopt a more aggressive official posture — including the possibility of preemptively authorizing Biden to use military force if Beijing invades the island nation.

The conversations, coupled with the White House’s efforts to walk back some of Biden’s apparent slips of the tongue, are fueling bipartisan efforts to ditch “strategic ambiguity,” the policy that has governed the U.S. posture toward the conflict for more than four decades. The strategic ambiguity doctrine, enshrined in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, stipulates that the U.S. remains purposely noncommittal about whether it would defend Taiwan from an attack or invasion by China.

But a push to proactively send Biden a war authorization could subvert ongoing efforts by Congress and the Biden administration to restrict presidential war powers. And undermining the status quo on Taiwan, both parties worry, could be seen by Beijing as a provocation, rather than a deterrent.

“This needs a very directed response from all of us that is properly worded,” said Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Because there’s a very delicate balance here, and we have maintained that delicate balance for many, many years. And it would be troublesome if we upset that.”

“I’m not interested in a cold war or a hot war,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a longtime proponent of reining in presidential war powers. “And I think that we ought to be focused on finding ways to prevent any kind of confrontation.”

Biden himself has been the source of some uncertainty about the U.S. position. In a recent CNN town hall, the president said “we have a commitment to” come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacks or invades the island nation — seemingly contradicting the strategic ambiguity policy.

White House officials quickly clarified that Biden was not announcing a policy change and that he was reiterating the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s defense. But many Republicans — and, indeed, some Democrats — had hoped that he was, in fact, telegraphing a shift.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a retired Navy officer and the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that Congress should consider sending Biden a “very narrow and specific contingent authorization for the use of military force” to defend Taiwan. That action would effectively gut “strategic ambiguity” and allow the president to respond immediately to a Chinese attack or invasion without waiting for Congress to send him an authorization.

Luria added it could take weeks or months for Congress to consider and debate a war authorization if China were to attack. The U.S. would need to be ready to respond at a moment’s notice, she said, and that means being “less ambiguous” about “what our intentions are.”

“If we are going to intervene in a way that would limit the scope of conflict, prevent China from invading Taiwan, or deter them, then we could avoid a full-scale war,” she said.

Most members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, are reluctant to give the president front-end authority to intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Such an effort would also come at a time when bipartisan majorities in both chambers are moving to rein in, rather than ramp up, presidential war powers by taking outdated authorizations off the books.

“I am not a fan or advocate of giving war powers proactively to a president,” Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a brief interview. “If the president feels that that’s necessary, then he needs to come to Congress and then he can get an authorization for the use of military force.”

A senior administration official told POLITICO that the White House will “continue to engage with Congress on these important matters,” and that the Biden administration remains committed to the existing U.S. policy toward Taiwan.

At the same time, though, some lawmakers are expressing an openness to further bolstering Taiwan’s defensive capabilities — in ways that could muddle the strategic ambiguity policy.

“I do think that there are ways that we can enable Taiwan, whether that’s through foreign military sales, whether it is leverage with China, whatever we can find,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a combat veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Earlier this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), an Armed Services Committee member, introduced legislation that would send $3 billion each year to Taiwan for the purpose of boosting its military capabilities as a deterrent against Chinese aggression. He warned, however, that the U.S. should not suggest to Taipei that Washington would be standing by to head off an attack.

“It’s really important that we arm Taiwan and help them to defend themselves. China wants to gobble them up,” Hawley said in a brief interview. “But I think it’s also a mistake for [Taiwan] to say, ‘well, if something happens, the United States will just bail us out.’ They’re a long way away.”

Biden, a former senator and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has long been wary of drawing the U.S. into a war with China over Taiwan. In a May 2001 Washington Post op-ed, Biden criticized then-President George W. Bush for declaring that the U.S. has an obligation to defend Taiwan, similar to what the now-president said in the CNN town hall.

“No one expects world leaders to always stick the landing on their rhetoric,” said Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a Foreign Relations Committee member. “And the strategic ambiguity is maintained when, after a media event, one clarifies one’s comments.”

At a news conference in Glasgow earlier this week, Biden said he was not worried about an armed conflict with China or even “something happening accidentally.”

“This is competition. It does not have to be conflict,” Biden said.

Indeed, the Biden administration has shown little interest in stepping back from strategic ambiguity, even as the president himself has hinted at a policy change in his off-the-cuff remarks. And some lawmakers are cautioning against statements and other actions that could upend the long-standing U.S. policy toward Taiwan, noting that the situation remains extraordinarily fragile.

“I think we have had a reasonably solid policy around Taiwan for going on 40 years now, and I don’t see a need to make that sort of an abrupt change to it,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview this week that the U.S. “absolutely” has the capability to defend Taiwan. While he doesn’t believe an invasion is likely in the near-term, “the Chinese are clearly and unambiguously building the capability to provide those options to the national leadership if they so choose at some point in the future,” he added.

That includes China’s recent test of a hypersonic missile, which some analysts have referred to as Beijing’s “Sputnik moment,” as well as its recent strike-group flyover which triggered Taiwan’s missile defense systems.

Others, like Adm. John Aquilino, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, say that the possibility of a Chinese invasion is “much closer to us than most think,” adding that Beijing views a Taiwan takeover as its number-one priority.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), an Armed Services Committee member and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves, noted that the U.S. has always reacted forcefully to actions by the Chinese that might portend a military conflict.

But, he said, “I think we need to think really hard about whether and to what degree we change the current posture.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/05/congress-biden-taiwan-519689
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To combat homelessness, California is turning hotels into housing

In March 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning its assault on America, Jason Elliott found himself huddled in a windowless conference room late one night with about 15 other California state officials, advisers and epidemiologists who were using their phone calculators to tally up potential death rates.

The group — which included national guardsmen, emergency responders and academics who’d studied homelessness — had been banished by Gov. Gavin Newsom from an emergency Covid meeting in the state’s situation room and directed to come back when they had a plan to address the catastrophe Covid posed for the state’s massive homeless population.

“The early projection was that we would lose 25,000 homeless lives,” Elliot, a senior counselor in Newsom’s office and his top adviser on homelessness, said in an interview. “It’s enough to make you go numb, to make your stomach turn — ‘Oh my God, we got to get going.’”

Of the 580,000 Americans estimated to be homeless in January 2020, over 226,000 had no shelter at all. That meant they had little access to basic hygiene just as public health officials were directing everyone to wash their hands and wipe down surfaces. In overburdened homeless shelters, meanwhile, people were piled on top of each other with cots placed a couple feet apart, just as officials were urging Americans to socially distance and maintain six feet of separation from others.

In California, home to 28 percent of the nation’s homeless population and 51 percent of the unsheltered population, the outlook was particularly dire. Based on sketchy early case and fatality estimates cobbled together from the data coming out of China in the pandemic’s early days, epidemiologists told California officials to expect the homeless to be a major vector for spread of the virus and to die by the thousands.

As the group met into the pre-dawn hours, they batted around potential solutions. Maybe the state could use big wedding tents to shelter homeless people, someone suggested. No, they decided, amassing a bunch of people in tents would present the same contagion problems as crowded homeless shelters. How about using trailers to provide private spaces? No, they didn’t have the time or the money to procure enough trailers.

It was then that someone — Elliott can’t remember who — suggested hotel rooms.

Prior to the pandemic, homelessness experts including Elliott had considered using vacant hotel rooms to house homeless people in mostly theoretical terms — it was a wish-list idea, one that would require some real money to implement, especially at any kind of scale. Newsom had given hotel conversions the briefest of mentions in his “State of the State” address dedicated to homelessness the previous month, as one of a few potential “innovative approaches” to the homelessness problem, like building tiny homes.

But the more the group discussed the prospect over vending machine chips that night in March, the more sense it made to shelter the state’s homeless in hotels during the pandemic. They knew travel was about to plunge — state officials were already weighing a stay-at-home order — so plenty of hotels would have vacant rooms they’d be eager to lease on the cheap. And while FEMA had previously only reimbursed states for congregate, or group, shelter in the wake of past natural disasters, a former FEMA employee on staff in the room that night thought they had a shot of convincing the agency that non-congregate shelter was necessary in the face of a highly contagious virus.

“The pandemic provided us with a confluence of factors that allowed us to do things that a lot of us daydreamed about for years,” Elliott said. Those factors included the urgency caused by the public health emergency, relief money from the federal government and the timing of the crisis, which Elliott said coincided with rising political will to do something about out-of-control homelessness in the state.

“That was kind of the magic recipe,” he said.

So as travel came to a standstill and hotel occupancy rates plunged, California began moving thousands of homeless people into private hotel rooms in an effort dubbed “Project Roomkey,” which would eventually provide temporary shelter to over 48,000 people in hotel rooms leased by the state.

Within months, the state went all in on the strategy, launching an effort to convert hotel rooms into permanent housing. Between July and December 2020, the rebranded “Project Homekey“ would use $846 million — $700 million of it from federal coronavirus relief funds — to create more than 6,000 housing units, 5,000 of them permanent, in 94 properties throughout the state, mostly hotels. The average cost per unit came in at about $148,000. Normally the state spends years and about $500,000 per unit to develop new affordable housing.

David Grunwald, senior vice president for the Los Angeles region at National Community Renaissance, said he “went nuts” when he saw a request for proposals from the city of Los Angeles to turn hotels into housing for homeless people last summer. Grunwald’s team applied for, and won, contracts to develop housing at two old hotels under the first round of the program, including a 49-unit motel in the El Sereno neighborhood of LA now called Casa Luna.

He’s only grown more optimistic about the hotel conversion model since seeing it in action.

“I’ve been doing housing and homeless work since 1989, and it’s the first strategy I’ve seen that has promise to scale up in a way that makes a difference,” Grunwald said.

“The homelessness crisis is the affordable housing crisis”

When people think of homelessness, they often picture the visibly and chronically homeless — many of whom suffer from mental illness, behavioral disorders and substance abuse issues that keep them from holding down jobs. But chronic cases actually comprise a minority of the population. In California, only 30 percent of the people experiencing homelessness in January 2020 had been homeless for at least 12 months of the previous three years, according to a HUD count, which means about 70 percent were newly homeless — often low-income people who’d fallen on hard times and found themselves without a home for the first time in their lives.

“What you don’t see are that many, many of those folks who are out there are getting out of their tents and going to jobs,” said Margot Kushel, head of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative in San Francisco. Kushel, a physician who has studied homelessness’ impact on health, was one of the experts in the room when Newsom’s staff came up with the hotel conversion plan.

In part because of the temperate weather, most homeless people in California — about 70 percent, including about 84 percent of chronically homeless people — are unsheltered, sleeping in tents or cars or on sidewalks and park benches. By contrast in New York, just 7 percent of the homeless population is chronically homeless, and just 5 percent is unsheltered.

Both states have seen their homeless populations rise in recent years. One in four homeless people in the United States last year was in either Los Angeles or New York City.

It’s no coincidence that New York and California are also two of the states with the most severe shortages of affordable housing and the biggest obstacles to the construction of new units — from costly permitting processes to lengthy environmental reviews to strict zoning rules, often fiercely supported by property owners in the community. New York, Hawaii and California — all states with pricey real estate — have the highest rates of homelessness per capita.

“Rezoning is a political process, and most people — even if in the abstract they’re incredibly supportive of affordable housing — they don’t want to change the character of their neighborhood,” said Eric Rosenbaum, president and CEO of Project Renewal, a New York homeless services nonprofit.

That kind of “not in my backyard” mindset is prevalent in California, which has seen an explosion in population growth and property values as the tech revolution took hold, but little corresponding growth in wages for low-income laborers and service workers.

“The homelessness crisis is the affordable housing crisis. They are so deeply linked that it is almost impossible to separate them,” Elliott said.

Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees: While a combination of factors has contributed to the rise in homelessness over the last 40 years, the affordability crisis is the primary cause, she said.

“In the ’70s there was an adequate supply of affordable housing for the number of low-income people,” Roman said. “By the late ’70s and early ’80s that equation had changed, and that’s what started homelessness and continues to be the major driver.”

According to the most recent HUD data, there are 7.8 million renter households who do not receive government assistance and live in inadequate conditions or pay more than half of their income on rent, above the economist-recommended 30 percent. The U.S. has a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes affordable for people whose incomes fall at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of their area median income, according to a National Low Income Housing Coalition analysis of Census Bureau data.

The numbers can be explained by a broader shortage of housing supply. New-home construction over the last two decades has fallen short of historical levels by 5.5 million to 6.8 million units, according to a report released over the summer by the National Association of Realtors. Construction has particularly lagged since the housing meltdown that sparked the Great Recession, and many of the workers who left the industry then haven’t returned. Total housing stock grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent from 1968 through 2000. That rate fell to 1 percent over the last 20 years, dipping to 0.7 percent over the last decade alone.

Housing is also a sector where trickle-down economics applies, to the detriment of lower-income renters. Home prices soared about 15 percent over the last year as white-collar Americans whose finances weren’t hurt by the pandemic crisis competed for a limited supply of housing, spurred on by historically low mortgage rates. The booming market has in turn priced other people out of buying their first home, so more people are renting: There are 1 million more renter households today than there were at the end of the second quarter of 2020, according to NAR data.

When more people compete for rental units, costs go up. They’re already rising at an alarming pace: In 2020, 22.7 percent of multifamily rental units rented for over $2,000, compared with just 12.3 percent in 2017, according to an NAR analysis of Census data.

In the past, low-wage workers had more affordable options. Single-room occupancy housing — essentially rented rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities — used to be somewhat common in American cities.

Those units “started disappearing in the early ’70s and then the ’80s,” Roman said. “And it was largely gotten rid of by affordable housing advocates, who thought it was substandard and we should do better for people. Which I agree with, but we didn’t do better — we just lost all that housing.”

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, about 1 million SRO units were destroyed in different cities around the country, leaving about 200,000 today, Roman noted.

The general lack of supply, meanwhile, has aggravated the NIMBY problem. It’s not just wealthy people worried that a high-density affordable development would tank their increasing property values: low-income communities often oppose the construction of new developments in their neighborhoods, fearing the new buildings would accelerate gentrification and price them out.

“Measurably better outcomes”

California has been throwing ever-larger sums of money at homelessness for years, only to see the homeless population continue to surge, increasing by 40 percent in just the last five years. What made Homekey different was the way it streamlined regulations in a state notorious for erecting some of the most onerous and costly barriers to the development of affordable housing.

The Homekey project — and others like it — gets around those hurdles by focusing on existing buildings handpicked by the communities themselves.

The statute establishing Homekey included a provision deeming any project developed under the program to be exempt from discretionary permits and in line with applicable local standards and zoning rules. The law also exempted certain Homekey properties from a state environmental review requirement, reasoning that because the program relied on existing buildings there was little risk that the buildings would fail to pass the review.

“Because we had land-use conformance and environmental streamlining in place, our partners knew they could get to an occupied site,” said Geoffrey Ross, deputy director of the division of federal financial assistance at the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Normally, “the risk of a project being killed and the time it takes to get approvals increases the cost.”

The result was a much quicker process that for the most part sidestepped neighborhood pushback.

“It’s been a game changer, being able to say, ‘Hey, we have this underutilized building, we can use it to meet an immediate need, we don’t have to go through all the hurdles’,” said Vivian Wan, chief operating officer at Abode Services, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest homeless services providers.

Crucially, the state also required that applicants for program funding be local public entities, which were in a better position to select potential sites based on community needs.

“The local jurisdiction has to go in with the developer, so it creates all this buy-in from the beginning,” Wan said.

The privacy provided by converted hotels is also a draw for some homeless people who would otherwise resist coming indoors, according to advocates, and getting people housed with supportive services like job training, medical services, healthy meals and on-call social workers reduces the strain on other community services like hospitals and jails.

“The dignity, the stability, the safety that comes with that leads to measurably better outcomes than congregate shelters,” Elliott said.

A resident named Ernie Guereca, for instance, has been able to live at Casa Luna while waiting for a voucher to move into permanent supportive housing. Guereca, a 53-year-old El Sereno native, had experienced homelessness for two years, living in an encampment on the center strip of the street on which Casa Luna is located.

The development is currently operated as interim housing for 49 formerly homeless people like Guereca; it will be redeveloped into permanent housing for up to 100 residents in early 2024, with plans for new construction on an adjacent property.

“Do we want to end homelessness or not?”

The idea of converting hotels and motels to housing isn’t new. But the pandemic – which sent hotel occupancy rates plunging to 37 percent and interest rates to rock-bottom lows – proved an opportunity.

“The price points were really high when we looked at this four or five years ago for previously homeless veterans,” said Douglas Guthrie, president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. “When Covid-19 struck, a lot of these mom-and-pop ownership places had serious financial problems, so the price points came down and became much more reasonable.”

Plenty of hotels were already struggling before the pandemic struck, thanks to the rise of AirBnb. And the American Hotel and Lodging Association doesn’t expect the industry to recover from the pandemic until 2024.

So the hotel conversion trend is taking off. And it’s not just high-cost cities eyeing vacant hotels as a potential solution to housing shortages: A community land trust converted a Baymont Inn and Suites in Essex Junction, Vermont, into housing using federal coronavirus relief funds, and hotels in cities as far flung as Branson, Missouri, and Kissimmee, Florida, have been redeveloped into workforce housing using private funding.

“The economic drivers are there for this trend to continue — the unaffordability of housing, which is pushing up demand for rental housing, and the lack of housing in general,” said Gay Cororaton, senior economist and director of housing and commercial research at NAR, which published a report on the conversion of vacant hotels into multifamily housing earlier this year.

Those factors are also continuing to drive up homelessness, including in California. The annual government count to gauge how many people are homeless on a given night was canceled this year because of the pandemic, so it’s hard to know precisely how the crisis affected homelessness rates.

But encampments have grown in major cities around California and the country, although it’s hard to know how much of that comes down to new visibility in the wake of CDC guidance urging officials not to clear encampments during the pandemic.

Homekey’s boosters readily admit the program was never going to solve the state’s homelessness issue: The program is an “arrow in the quiver of arrows that are necessary to tackle homelessness,” Grunwald said, calling it “one of the most intractable problems of our times.”

Washington was impressed enough with the approach to establish a new $5 billion homelessness program at HUD in the March relief package that includes money for the “purchase and development of non-congregate shelter.”

Ross, who oversaw the Homekey project before he was named to his current post overseeing California’s use of funding under the new HUD program, conceded that the economics of conversions may change in the future — interest rates are already rising, many hotels will return to regular occupancy, the political focus on homelessness may fade — but said “we really can deploy these tools in a wide variety of ways and still have very meaningful outcomes.”

“Just because we’re not in the same level of pandemic and lockdown we were in last year does not mean we can’t still be successful,” Ross added.

Grunwald, who used Homekey to develop Casa Luna, is now managing three Homekey projects, as the program enters a second phase with $5.8 billion in new state and federal funds. Grunwald himself was so excited about the concept that he wanted to apply to acquire every project in the L.A. area, before his boss talked him down.

“Once I saw what it was, I was absolutely convinced it was one of the best programs I’d ever seen,” he said.

In fact, with enough financial support, Grunwald sees a national hotel conversion plan as the key to turning the homelessness problem around. Now that the pandemic has created a path forward that works, Grunwald says the question is now, “Do we want to end homelessness or not?”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/main-recoverylab-cities-la-sros-518602
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FDA authorizes first Covid vaccine for kids ages 5-11

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.

The hotly anticipated decision will allow roughly 28 million American children to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, with shots rolling out just as flu season starts and with major holidays looming.

The FDA’s action comes days after its independent vaccine advisory committee voted 17-0, with one abstention, to recommend use of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot in younger children. Panel members were swayed in part by data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed children ages 5-11 are “at least as likely” as adults to contract the virus, and that hospitalization rates are three times higher among children of color than among while children.

The CDC’s vaccine advisers are scheduled to meet Tuesday to evaluate the shot, and are expected to vote in favor of its use in 5- to 11-year-olds. The final step before the vaccine rolls out will be formal endorsement by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/29/fda-authorizes-first-covid-vaccine-for-kids-ages-5-11-517679
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Justice Department announces tougher enforcement for white-collar crime

The Justice Department announced a series of policy changes Thursday aimed at toughening the federal response to white-collar crime, particularly offenses involving corporate misconduct.

Speaking to lawyers who often defend individuals and companies against such charges, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the new approach would do more to deter crime in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

“Corporate culture matters. A corporate culture that fails to hold individuals accountable, or fails to invest in compliance — or worse, that thumbs its nose at compliance — leads to bad results,” Monaco said in virtual remarks to an American Bar Association conference on white-collar crime in Miami. “Although we understand the costs that enforcement actions can place on shareholders and others, our responsibility is to incentivize responsible corporate citizenship, a culture of compliance and a sense of accountability. So, the Department will not hesitate to take action when necessary to combat corporate wrongdoing.”

Monaco said the Justice Department is dropping a policy that gave companies credit for cooperation when they identified all employees “substantially involved” in misconduct.

“Such distinctions are confusing in practice and afford companies too much discretion in deciding who should and should not be disclosed to the government,” she said.

Now, corporations will have to come clean about all employees who took part in misconduct “regardless of their position, status, or seniority,” she said. Prosecutors will decide who merits prosecution or may turn out to be a valuable source of testimony against others, the DOJ official added.

Monaco also said the Justice Department won’t hesitate to bring cases against company executives, even though such cases are typically vigorously contested by well-funded defense counsel and sometimes result in acquittals or dismissal.

“I recognize that cases against corporate executives are among some of the most difficult that the department brings, and that means the government may lose some of those cases. But I have and will continue to make clear to our prosecutors that, as long as we act consistent with the principles of federal prosecution, the fear of losing should not deter them,” Monaco said. “So long as those principles are followed, we will urge prosecutors to be bold in holding accountable those who commit criminal conduct.”

Monaco said the Justice Department will now look at a company’s full range of prior actions in making enforcement decisions, dropping a prior policy that only took account of “similar misconduct.” That could mean an end to banks and other companies getting multiple reprieves from prosecutors in the form of deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, although the DOJ official stopped short Thursday of ruling out giving more than one such deal to the same firm.

Monaco also said the department will step up the use of outside monitors to make sure companies involved in misconduct have corrected course and embed a squad of FBI agents in the department’s section that prosecutes criminal fraud.

The changes made public on Thursday fit a pattern in recent decades of Democratic administrations generally taking a more aggressive posture toward white-collar crime and Republican ones taking a more lax approach, particularly when it comes to charging companies themselves with criminal offenses.

However, in practice, enforcement has proven more similar than different. A major drive against corporate crime was launched under former President George W. Bush following several high-profile corporate implosions, like that of Enron. And under former President Barack Obama, the Justice Department was sharply criticized for bringing no significant criminal cases against bank officials in connection with the mortgage-backed securities that fueled the financial meltdown in 2007 and 2008.

Leah Nylen contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/28/biden-administration-targets-white-collar-crime-517425
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First Covid raised the murder rate. Now it’s changing the politics of crime.

ATLANTA — Volkan Topalli had just purchased two bags of potting soil at a Buckhead Home Depot when he heard a commotion. A fight that broke out at a neighboring pool party was spilling over into the store’s parking lot. He was dialing 911 when he heard a shot and felt a searing pain in his forearm.

It was the third Sunday in May, during one of the first warm weather weekends of what many hoped would be a post-pandemic summer. After more than a year of lockdowns, Covid restrictions on public gatherings were being lifted, concerns about the Delta variant were not yet widespread and celebrations abounded. People felt more comfortable in large groups again, making way for old relationships — and old tensions — to rekindle.

Four men, all under age 20, were arrested in connection with shootings at the pool party and Home Depot. That week, the Atlanta Police Department reported 28 shooting incidents, including the one that involved 55-year-old Topalli, who’d been caught in the crossfire. The bullet to his arm shattered his ulna and left him with a wound that stretches from his wrist to his elbow.

Topalli wasn’t your ordinary victim of gun violence, however. He’s a professor of criminology at Georgia State University, so he effectively became a victim of the kinds of crime waves he’s studied for decades. The crime wave cities like Atlanta are seeing, he says, was entirely predictable.

“I’m not surprised at all that we had an increase in crime,” Topalli said in an interview. “Criminologists and public health people were saying that that was going to be the case as soon as they heard about the pandemic. And it’s pretty much come true at this point.”

His shooting was part of a steep uptick in violent crime during the pandemic that resulted in a highest-in-decades peak in homicides nationwide, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Atlanta was hit hard; the city’s police department reported a nearly 60 percent increase in homicides in 2020. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tied the surge directly to the pandemic, calling it a “Covid crime wave.”

But this crime wave wasn’t like those of earlier decades, which were often concentrated in big cities. The increased violent crime during the Covid-19 pandemic hit everywhere — big cities, small towns and rural areas as well. Where Atlanta and Washington, D.C., reported a steep increase in violent crime, so too did less populated places like Augusta, Georgia and Norfolk, Virginia.

Second, even as violent crimes increased nationally, property crimes and burglaries decreased.

“What the pandemic did was it shifted a lot of these patterns,” Topalli said of the difference in crimes. It owes in part, he explained, to “many more people staying at home, fewer people actually going into places of business … we’ve seen a drop in those kinds of crimes that we would expect would be affected by that.”

Many Atlantans, particularly those in favor of a tougher-on-crime approach, have tried to make Topalli a poster child for the city’s woes, saying crime had gotten so bad that even people studying it were becoming victims of it. But he doesn’t agree that his experience is emblematic of a larger crisis, at least not one that signals run-ins like his will become more common. Rather, he thinks of his injury as a statistical anomaly.

“I’m a 55-year-old white guy. I live in a nice neighborhood … I know that what happened to me was absolutely ‘the wrong time at the wrong place,’” he said.

Experts have been making the case for years that keeping communities safe depends on the availability of resources that keep communities stable: affordable housing, quality education, mental health resources and child care, to name a few. The pandemic reduced or eliminated access to all of these.

That’s how many crime experts explain why violent crime increased everywhere during Covid, even if the situation was most acute in low-income communities where these resources were already limited.

“The pandemic … revealed something that most of us already knew, which was that we have segments of society that don’t have the advantages of other segments of society,” Topalli said. “They’re just beneath the surface and the pandemic sort of, you know, as with a hurricane … has revealed the disparities.”

This insight is motivating for criminologists like Topalli, who see the pandemic as providing new pathways for policies that could continue long-term crime reduction.

Whether city officials and other politicians can incorporate them is another question.

Crime experts cannot pinpoint one or two reasons why violence increased in 2020. But they can identify some root causes of crime that were likely exacerbated during the pandemic. As unemployment rates soared, job loss increased economic hardship. Heightened stress and uncertainty led more people to purchase firearms. Community networks and familial connections were strained.

U.S. murder rate highest in over 20 years

Homicides per 100,000 people

“You put all of that together, and I don’t think you can say, X or Y was the culprit,” said Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based crime analyst. “But I think you can put them all together and say, ‘These were the things that were the major contributors.’ And we may never know which was the most important factor.”

It’s part of why the crime prevention debate has remained largely stagnant. For decades, it has focused on two options: mitigating crime’s root causes or fighting it head-on through policing. The former poses a longer-term challenge often without immediate noticeable results, making it easier for most city leaders to invest in policing instead.

In cities around the country, addressing the crime wave has been complicated by the national debate over race and policing. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer two months into the start of the pandemic added rocket fuel to arguments for and against policing as a solution to crime. Floyd’s killing, and the waves of protests that followed, raised the question of whether public resources are best directed at social services that can prevent crimes, or at policing that addresses it after it happens.

In fact, following Floyd’s murder, the argument was often framed as a zero-sum trade-off: The more funding that goes toward law enforcement to stop crime, some believed, meant that fewer resources would be made available to low-income communities of color.

Minneapolis itself is at the forefront of cities grappling with that dilemma. Amid a steep increase in homicides there, its residents will vote next week on a ballot measure that would fundamentally overhaul the city’s police department and replace it with a Department of Public Safety. The measure, which amends the city’s charter, would cut down on the number of police officers who respond to emergencies, replacing them with crisis managers, social workers and mental health experts.

San Francisco has also poured resources back into communities of color; an initiative from Mayor London Breed invests $120 million over two years into workforce development, housing and youth initiatives using money from the police and sheriffs budget.

But most major cities, including Atlanta, are leaning harder into pro-police options. Between 2020 and 2021, Atlanta’s police department received a $9.5 million increase in funding, according to the city budget. And even in the cities that saw the biggest protests against police violence in 2020 — including Minneapolis, Chicago and the District of Columbia — mayors have proposed increasing police funding for the 2022 fiscal year.

Public opinion has also shifted more in favor of increased funding for law enforcement. In October, the Pew Research Center found that nearly half of all U.S. adults — 47 percent — favor increased funding for their local police departments. That’s up from 31 percent from June 2020.

Some proponents of law enforcement reject the idea that crime prevention and policing are separate solutions.

“Law enforcement is just one aspect of public safety,” said Cedric Alexander, a past national president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives and consultant on crime and policing. The other aspects of public safety, he explained, are “affordable housing, good schools, availability of health care, being able to deal with homelessness in our communities, and a big one, of course, mental health.”

For its part, the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to straddle the line between the root causes of crime and increased policing. The foundation has established four “At-Promise” community centers that offer job training, GED preparation and recreational activities as part of the foundation’s efforts in predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods in North and West Atlanta.

The initiative provides services to between 30 and 40 students each day — about half of what it used to before the start of the pandemic, according to representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Yet, those hard-fought relationships were strained in summer 2020, just weeks after Floyd’s murder, when 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by an Atlanta police officer after falling asleep in his car outside of a drive-through Wendy’s. His killing set off waves of protests in the city — and damaged already precarious relationships between individual officers and teens taking part in the At-Promise programs.

“We had so much progress, you know, we were really building those relationships, and really building trust amongst our communities and our law enforcement,” said Lakeisha Walker, vice president of youth programs with the Atlanta Police Foundation. Amid citywide protests against police violence, she said, “it kind of felt like everything just fell apart.”

“Because now it’s, ‘Okay, we don’t trust you.’”

In Atlanta, a traditionally Black-led city that has experienced one of the nation’s highest spikes in violent crime, ongoing debates around crime and policing in the city have generated tensions between the city’s political leaders, community advocates, residents and members of law enforcement. All those factions are majority Black, making the political fault lines less about race and more about policy.

Jamal Taylor, a lead organizer with the Atlanta-based activist group Community Movement Builders, is working toward a future he hopes is police-free. The Community Movement Builders’ headquarters, a two-story house in the heart of Atlanta’s historically Black and rapidly gentrifying Pittsburgh neighborhood, sits just 10 minutes from the city’s downtown center and less than one mile from the Wendy’s restaurant where Brooks was killed.

His organization’s argument is that as long as Black communities remain under-resourced, adding more police to their neighborhoods would only further sow distrust and, ultimately, increase deadly conflict.

“What does decrease crime is being able to provide cultural resources,” Taylor said. “So people have stable places to live, so that people have food, people have stable communities and safe communities. That’s what decreases crime.”

But leaders like Joyce Sheperd, a city councilmember who represents the Atlanta district that includes Pittsburgh, are more pro-police, arguing that a law enforcement presence combined with community initiatives will help alleviate crime. She sponsored legislation that authorized the city to lease land to the Atlanta Police Foundation for the construction of a $90 million, 150-acre police training facility on the outskirts of the city. The city council adopted the plan in September.

The Community Movement Builders and other activist groups protested construction of the training facility from its earliest days. It drew the ire of city leaders like Sheperd, who has been at odds with the organizing group and said their efforts were counterproductive.

“There were people who were anti-police basically saying that we should not build out a police academy … they came and protested in front of my house on my porch,” said Sheperd.

The movement against the training facility became known as “Stop Cop City” and has grown into one of the most heated debates in Atlanta around use of municipal funds and the role of police in alleviating crime. However, because construction of the training facility is likely to take years to complete, it won’t have an impact on the current crime spike. What it will do instead, says Kamau Franklin, founder of the Community Movement Builders, is boost morale among the city’s police force after the Floyd unrest while negating the needs of the communities they are meant to serve.

“This is not just a ‘both sides’ argument around what’s the best way to solve crime,” Franklin said. “This is also about perpetuating a narrative that the police were somehow victims last year.”

The pandemic-related crime wave is a leading issue in municipal elections across the country. Atlanta voters will choose a new mayor on Nov. 2, and the two top-polling candidates, former Mayor Kasim Reed and City Council president Felicia Moore, have shaped their campaign pitches largely around their approaches to crime.

Reed’s familiarity with Atlanta — and his relentless focus on crime — has helped vault him to the top of the candidate pool. In an interview, the former mayor called crime the “number one, two and three issues” in Atlanta “because there is absolutely no place in Atlanta that’s immune from it.”

The pandemic “pushed people who are already on the margins in terms of income and employment, to have to, or to turn to, violence,” Reed said. “I don’t think ‘have to’ is the appropriate word. But I think that it certainly influenced what’s going on.”

Increased policing is part of his answer. His campaign platform includes hiring 750 more police officers in addition to revitalizing community initiatives. In early October, the city’s largest police union endorsed Reed for a third term.

“Anyone who says that more police don’t reduce the level of crime, that’s just simply not the case,” Reed said.

Also at issue are the optics associated with the uptick in violence in Atlanta, a capital city that is home to several large business hubs in a state that has become a red-hot focus of national politics. Reed’s opponent, city council president Moore, sees the issue of crime as not just an outgrowth of the pandemic in Atlanta but a long-term challenge.

Rising crime, said Moore, “threatens our city, and our reputation as a safe city and a place to come work, play and live.”

Her plan to decrease crime includes a heavier investment in courts and youth, as well as a promise to have a one-on-one conversation with at least 98 percent of the city’s police force.

“There’s no one, magic-bullet solution,” Moore said. “It is dealing with the root causes, but it’s also dealing with immediate action that needs to be taken to make sure we have the police presence that we need on our streets, making sure that our court system … is working appropriately and not allowing repeated violent offenders back out on the street.”

However the mayor’s race turns out, Topalli says he hopes the pandemic crime wave has helped reopen a needed debate over the causes and cures for violent crime. And with luck, that debate will ultimately expand the definition of public safety — an expansion “that opens up the room for mental health, opens up room for public health, it opens up room for things like housing, education, community partnerships,” he said.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/28/covid-murder-crime-rate-517226
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Virginia’s vote-counters are ready for a tight race that could take days to resolve

Recent polls have the high-stakes Virginia governor’s race as a neck-and-neck contest between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin — and that means it could take days to determine the winner.

The vast majority of Virginia’s votes are expected to be counted on Election Day, and the state has made improvements to election laws earlier this year that will likely expedite the election night process — including some changes made, at least partially, to prevent conspiracy theories about the count from taking hold. But exceedingly close elections can take longer to resolve, including recounts. And in this case, Virginia law allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive by Nov. 5, three days later.

Former President Donald Trump and some of his supporters have already begun warning of voter fraud and laying the groundwork to question the veracity of Virginia’s elections after undermining faith in the 2020 results with a series of baseless claims. “The Virginia governor’s election — you better watch it,” Trump said in an interview with John Fredericks, a popular conservative radio host in the state, in September. “You have a close race in Virginia, but it’s not close if they cheat.”

Other states soon took center stage after Election Day 2020, but Virginia’s vote-counting was another prime example of how bad actors can sow disinformation by taking advantage of the general public’s unfamiliarity with election procedures. The Associated Press called the state for President Joe Biden about a half-hour after polls closed. At the time only 10 percent of the vote was reported in, and Trump was still leading in the early raw vote count. That lead in the incomplete count persisted for hours, which conspiracy theorists used to claim the state was stolen from Trump.

In reality, Biden won the state by a huge margin. Trump’s fleeting lead was due to a combination of Republican-leaning areas reporting results earlier than Democratic-dominated counties, as the AP noted in its explainer of its call, and Democrats disproportionately voting via mail ballots, which were generally reported later in the evening.

Some new changes should make the process even smoother and more clear in Virginia. A law passed earlier this year requires that in-person early voting and mail ballots be reported separately, after previously being reported in one big tranche, which election officials say will improve the process.

“That separation allows for a couple of different things: It means that people will know where the votes came from,” said Brenda Cabrera, the director of elections for the city of Fairfax and the president of the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia. “Dividing it up also allows us to get those results in faster.”

The new law also requires jurisdictions to begin preprocessing mail ballots no later than a week before the election. A lack of preprocessing of mail ballots is what made the mail ballot count — which was heavily Democratic in 2020 after Trump’s attacks on mail voting — take so long in states like Pennsylvania last year.

Scott Konopasek, the new general registrar of Fairfax County, said “it’s going to look like a wildly different night” in his county this year than in years past. Fairfax County, which is separate from the city of Fairfax, is a Democratic bastion notorious among election observers for its late reporting.

“Right at seven o’clock, or right shortly after seven o’clock, I’ll be reporting the absentee portion,” Konopasek said, noting that those numbers have historically been one of the last things in the evening. He said he anticipates early in-person voting results to come in within an hour of polls closing, and numbers from Election Day precincts should start rolling in around 8 p.m.

“The big giant bite of ballots that has, in the past, mysteriously shown up at the end is going to start out at the kickoff this time,” Konopasek said. He noted it was a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction decision, and others will not have the same reporting timeframe that he does.

Loudoun County general registrar Judy Brown, for example, wrote in an email she anticipated that her jurisdiction would report “early voting numbers first followed by election day votes followed by mail ballots,” allowing for the possibility that mail ballots are reported in the same window as Election Day votes. She wrote that her expectation for when the county’s results are mostly reported would be no later than 9 p.m., two hours after polls close, “if all goes well.”

But if the election is extremely close, it could be a wait until Friday to find out the winner. The state allows ballots that are postmarked by the U.S. Postal Service no later than Election Day and received by noon on Friday to count.

Those late-arriving ballots “will be reported once the central absentee precinct meets again after the noon deadline on Friday” said Allison Robbins, the chief elections officer of Wise County, which is on the southwestern tip of the state.

That number was small in 2020, the first year where mail balloting was available to all Virginians, coming in at about 10,000 votes out of the nearly 4.5 million who cast a ballot last year.

Election officials are urging voters to have patience as results come in. Cabrera of Fairfax City noted that “anything reported on election night is unofficial,” and it has always been that way. She said that officials go through “a series of checks and balances” to make sure official results are accurate. Election officers noted that corrections to vote totals are routine. They all also expressed confidence in running a good election in a week.

“We’re not a top-down process in Virginia. It’s local officials in the 133 jurisdictions who manage and administer elections,” said Robbins, a former past president of the state’s local election officials association. “I’m very confident in Virginia’s processes and am extremely proud of the work that our local people do.”

A recount is also possible, if the margin between the two candidates is within 1 percentage point. A petition for a recount can be made by the trailing candidate within 10 days following statewide certification of the election, which is on Nov. 15. If the race is within half a point, the state picks up the cost, and if it is larger than that the trailing candidate pays for it.

Even still, there is a window of opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of the vote count, and parts of MAGA-world beyond Trump have already started to spread those conspiracy theories.

One America News Network, the far-right cable network favored by the former president, ran a segment over the weekend urging conservatives to volunteer in Virginia to guard against supposed fraud. “Are there enough Republican volunteers to make sure there’s no midnight ballot drop?” Christina Bobb, the OAN host who has been one of the chief proponents pushing for partisan election reviews across the country, said in the segment captured by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. “Are there enough volunteers bold enough to ask questions of suspicious people doing suspicious things?”

Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, who proudly dubs herself “Trump in heels,” is on the vanguard of Republicans who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Youngkin, the Republican nominee, has not repeated those sentiments. After winning the nomination, he has said he believes Biden was legitimately elected, something he did not say directly during the primary. Youngkin said during the first gubernatorial debate that Virginia would “have a clear, fair election,” and both he and McAuliffe pledged to accept the results.

Democrats charge Youngkin is trying to have it both ways, on everything from prioritizing “election integrity” efforts during the primary and calling for audits of election machines, to accepting Trump’s support and campaigning with Chase. Youngkin, in turn, has called on McAuliffe to apologize for claiming the 2000 election was “stolen” following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, and for saying on the stump that Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams would be the governor of her state if not for voter disenfranchisement that “took the votes away.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/28/virginia-vote-count-governors-race-517401
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‘An outrage against democracy’: JFK’s nephews urge Biden to reveal assassination records

Two nephews of John F. Kennedy are calling on the Biden administration to release the final trove of secret documents on the 1963 assassination of the former president.

The records were scheduled to be made public Tuesday, but the White House announced late Friday night that it would delay their publication until at least Dec. 15 — and perhaps longer if President Joe Biden determines it’s in the nation’s best interest to keep them confidential.

“It’s an outrage. It’s an outrage against American democracy. We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told POLITICO. “How the hell is it 58 years later, and what in the world could justify not releasing these documents?”

His cousin, former Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy, said the records should be released not because of his family, but because American citizens have a right to know about “something that left such a scar in this nation’s soul that lost not only a president but a promise of a brighter future.”

“I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history,” Patrick Kennedy said.

The documents were set to be declassified in 2017, but President Donald Trump postponed the release for four years.

Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s policy of shielding the records came as a surprise to historians and experts on the assassination because he had served in the U.S. Senate when the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 passed unanimously in Congress. That act, passed in response to questions raised by the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK,” set up an independent review board to collect all government files that might have bearing on the assassination and make them public. Most records were released between 1994 and 1998. Only the most sensitive classified documents remain confidential.

Biden was first elected to the Senate nearly a decade after Kennedy’s assassination and campaigned with former Sen. Ted Kennedy, the late president’s brother and the father of Patrick Kennedy, as a youthful Irish-American kindred spirit to the political dynasty.

The White House declined to comment on the record, issuing a background statement saying that “the National Archives advised that their review of classified material was severely hampered by COVID-19 since classified material cannot be reviewed remotely and asked for more time.” The coronavirus first hit the U.S. in early 2020, more than 27 years after the JFK Records Act passed and more than 56 years after Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

Pointing to the presidential memorandum it released late Friday, the White House promised in a written statement that the “public will have access to a tranche of previously withheld records and redacted information withheld in previously released records” and that the “Biden Administration is setting up a whole-of government effort to ensure the maximum possible disclosure of information by the end of 2022.” The president’s memo also directs the National Archives to come up with a plan to digitize the entire collection of documents, more than 300,000 records.

A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment about why he delayed the full release of the records in 2017 after indicating he intended to make them public.

Among other unanswered questions, the records could shed light on whether a Central Intelligence Agency operative named Bill Harvey mysteriously traveled from Rome to Dallas before the assassination as well as the agency’s role in plots to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, its surveillance techniques.

An overwhelming majority of the 15,000 records in question are from the CIA and, to a lesser extent, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Portions of them have been released with single words or entire pages blacked out, according to the National Archives.

If the records are ever released, they probably would not reveal the identity of other potential killers of Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., brother of the president and namesake of the son who spoke with POLITICO, did not believe the official narrative of the assassination, said historian David Talbot, author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” and “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

“RFK was the first JFK ‘conspiracy theorist,’ the attorney general of the United States,” Talbot said. “Any serious journalist or historian who looks at this seriously comes to the same conclusion: that Lee Harvey Oswald was what he said he was, ‘a patsy,’ and that the Warren Commission was an effort to cover up the crime, not investigate the crime in an honest way.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. concurred with his father’s belief that his uncle was assassinated as part of a broader conspiracy. Kennedy, a controversial figure in his family because of his anti-vaccine advocacy, also said he did not believe that Sirhan Sirhan killed his father, putting him at odds with his siblings and other relatives.

Both he and Patrick Kennedy said their family had shied away from discussing the JFK assassination and related matters because it was too painful, even to this day.

Patrick Kennedy declined to comment on whether he believed the official story of the assassination. He said he wasn’t sure the documents would be released Dec. 15, but he ultimately hopes that Biden will do the right thing and make them public. He also described the president as someone “who loves my family, and this country, and has a heart that’s full of compassion and love.”

“We’re living in a time of a lot of conspiracy theories. There is a tendency to distrust government in general,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of bureaucratic obfuscation. Every agency needs to exercise their own right to redact certain portions [of the records] which you know is what fuels the whole conspiracy theory.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/24/jfk-nephews-biden-assassination-records-517049
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