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Recession

As New York Eviction Moratorium Ends, Tension Escalates

Dozens of New Yorkers marched through the streets of Brooklyn Wednesday morning before entering two landlord attorney firms buildings and Brooklyn Borough Hall calling for a ban on evictions and cancellation of rent in the Big Apple.   The demonstration comes just hours before New York's residential eviction moratorium expires, leaving thousands of tenants vulnerable to homelessness.  Fears are mounting over how many residents will manage to keep a roof over their heads as dismal research released at the end of July revealed almost half of New York renters were unable to pay rent. 

Consequences Of Inadequate Action By Congress

Without federal aid to state and local governments, millions of jobs in the public sector will be lost by the end of 2021, severely impacting Black workers, women, and veterans, who are disproportionately employed in these jobs. Additional jobs will be lost—in both the private and public sectors—if Congress fails to reinstate the $600 weekly unemployment benefit that expired last week. EPI experts weigh in on what could happen if Congress fails to act to prevent further economic shock. (1) The coronavirus shock was historically large—and the bounceback has already likely stalled. (2) UI claims and GDP growth are historically bad, (3) State and local governments have lost 1.5 million jobs since February, and (4) The Senate’s failure to act on federal aid to state and local governments jeopardizes veterans’ jobs.

Mutual Aid Unites NYC Neighbors Facing COVID-19

Nancy Perez, a 45-year-old resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, contracted COVID-19 in March. She stayed quarantined in her room for a month to isolate from her two sons and grandson. A few days before she got the virus, she'd met a volunteer with Bed-Stuy Strong — one of the many mutual aid groups around the country that have rallied to provide help in the face of the pandemic. Bed-Stuy Strong assembled an army of volunteers to help vulnerable neighbors with food deliveries and basic supplies.

US GDP Collapses And Economic Rebound Fades

This past week US economy collapsed in the 2nd quarter by 32.9% at annual rate and nearly 10% just for the April-June period. Never before in modern US history—not even in the worse quarters of the 1930s great depression—has the US economy contracted so quickly and so deeply! All the major private sectors of the US economy—Consumption, Business Investment, Exports & Imports—collapsed in ranges from -30% to -40% in the April-June period. That followed first quarter prior declines in single digits as well.

28 Million Evictions Loom As Houses Sit Empty

Congress’s inability to actually represent the real-live human beings of America, combined with an economic system that rewards lack of empathy and an excess of greed, has brought us to a dark time when an oncoming tsunami of financial ruin, destitution and evictions towers over our heads, blocking out the sunlight. The impending evictions may soon kick 28 million people/families out of their homes. To put that in perspective, only ten million people lost their homes during the 2008 economic crisis, and that was considered by anyone paying attention to be the craziest thing to ever happen.

There Can Be No Equality Without Employment Opportunity For All

The employment opportunity that privileged the white male was much more than a job. By the 1960s, growing numbers of white men had employment that gave them steadily rising real earnings, often with decades of tenure at one organization. The “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) that had become the employment norm by the beginning of the 1960s included health insurance and a defined-benefit pension, both funded by the employee’s business corporation or government agency. This white-man’s world constituted the foundation for the “vast ocean of material prosperity” to which Dr. King referred.

As Mass Evictions Loom, Practical Advice For Housing Takeovers

Federal protection against housing evictions has expired and local and state governments are not stepping up to fill in the gap leaving tens of millions of families vulnerable to homelessness during this growing pandemic and deep recession. In Philadelphia and across the country families, out of desperation, are taking over empty publicly-owned housing. It is estimated that there are up to ten vacant homes for every homeless person. We speak with Cheri Honkala of the Poor People's Economic and Human Rights campaign about the practicalities of housing takeovers from identifying empty houses to how to turn on the utilities and talk to police. Honkala has decades of experience in this and other necessary actions to survive in poverty in the United States.

COVID-19 Crisis Failure, People Must Save Themselves And The Economy

The US is at a moment of truth. This week, Congress has to face up to a pandemic that is out of control and an economy that is collapsing. The Republican's and Democrat's proposals show they will fail this test. The people will need to protect themselves and lead from below. Our actions need to be about building a people's movement that grows in power before and after the November elections. No matter who is elected, the people will need to resist, create new systems and rule from below.

GDP Shrinks By Record Amount In Second Quarter

The U.S. economy shrunk at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 32.9 percent during the second quarter of 2020 as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic spurred an economic collapse of record-breaking speed and size, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Between April and June, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk at a pace that would have wiped out roughly a third of the value of the economy if extended over 12 months, according to the Commerce Department’s advance estimate of second-quarter growth. It is the largest one-quarter plunge in economic growth since the federal government began reporting quarterly GDP data.  “This was the steepest decline since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, when output shrank by 8.4%,” wrote Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at The Economist Intelligence Unit in a Wednesday preview of the report. “The scale of the fall in the first quarter will be dwarfed by that in the second.”

Here’s How We Remake The Economy

To defend the $600 unemployment payments as both morally and economically necessary is not to suggest that the CARES Act is a sufficient solution to our economic problems. Nor, says Pavlina Tcherneva, Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and advisor to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is the Democratic-led HEROES Act, which would extend the payments through January 2021 if Senate Republicans and the Trump administration would support it. Dr. Tcherneva studies the impact of unemployment on growth, income inequality and public health, and saving people from the hardship that awaits Valerie is the focus of her work. In The Case for a Job Guarantee, which she published this summer, Tcherneva explains how the federal government could provide a living-wage job to anyone who wants one. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation about what the pandemic unemployment payments meant for the economy and how the United States could enact a Job Guarantee.

Democrats Offer Half-Hearted Measures To Impending Eviction Crisis

The best defense against a raging pandemic that has already claimed over 152,000 American lives is simply to stay home. But even this could soon become impossible for millions, as the United States is facing an impending eviction crisis of “biblical proportions,” according to the Housing Rights Initiative. Earlier this week, the federal moratorium on evictions expired, meaning the nation’s 12 million renters are now at risk of losing their homes. Renters tend to be poorer, many of whom are among the 52 million that have filed for unemployment benefits as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of extending the eviction ban, top Democrats, including California Sen. Kamala Harris and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), proposed their own solution to the crisis: new money for a fund to help renters faced with eviction access legal representation. “We must take bold, urgent action to affirm that right and protect the millions of families facing housing instability,” said Pressley, as the bill was introduced yesterday.

Fed Guarantees Unproductive Debt And Perilous Speculation

The Federal Reserve Board – our unaccountable Central Bank – needs more citizen and Congressional supervision. Fees from financial institutions fund its operations, not Congressional appropriations. It is as secret as it wants to be and that’s plenty. (See Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider). Plus, the Fed can print money at will. In the past several years it has “produced” trillions of dollars that juiced the stock market’s speculation. Fed Chairman, Jerome H. Powell, has chosen to instill “confidence” in the stock markets and credit markets by injecting trillions of dollars into the financial system to reassure the Wall Street speculators that the Covid-19 pandemic won’t crash the money markets into chaos and bankruptcies. But Powell, the Fed and the bankers who dominate the Fed and its regional branches have set the stage for this constant bailout of reckless bubbles and debt binges.

Without Federal Aid To State And Local Governments, Millions Will Lose Their Jobs

Because a weakening economy undercuts state and local tax revenues, and because states operate under balanced budget constraints, the coming months will see intense downward pressure on state and local spending. Reductions in this spending will in turn significantly slow recovery from the current economic crisis. This is not an abstract concern—the historically slow recovery in state and local spending following the Great Recession by itself delayed a recovery in unemployment to pre-crisis levels by four full years.

400,000 Marylanders Face Eviction As COVID-19 Spikes

After weeks of declining COVID-19 cases, Maryland is experiencing rising hospitalization and positivity rates, especially among those 35 years of age and under. The number of COVID-positive patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore doubled overnight from July 20 to July 21, according to two nurses who help treat patients recovering from the coronavirus at the hospital, which is helping lead the international response to the pandemic. The hospital had to transfer non-COVID patients from one unit in order to accommodate the influx of new cases, the nurses said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Is The United States A Failing State? A Failed State?

To ask whether the United States, the world’s dominant military power, is ‘a failing state’ should cause worldwide anxiety. Such a state, analogous to a wounded animal, is a global menace of unprecedented proportions in the nuclear age. Its political leadership is exhibiting a reckless tendency of combining incompetence with extremism. It is also crucial to ascertain at what point a failing state should be written off as ‘a failed state’ for which there is no longer a clear path to redemption. The November elections in the United States will send a strong signal as to whether the United States is failing or has failed.
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