Recession

28 Million Evictions Loom As Houses Sit Empty

August 4, 2020 Lee Camp, Consortium News. Resist! Evictions, Homelessness, Housing, Recession

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

August 4, 2020 By William Lazonick, Philip Moss, and Joshua Weitz, Ineteconomics. Create! Jobs, Jobs Guarantee, Recession, Systemic Racism

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

August 3, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast Evictions, Housing, Philadelphia, Recession

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.

GDP Shrinks By Record Amount In Second Quarter

July 31, 2020 Sylvan Lane, The Hill. Educate! Economic collapse, Finance and the Economy, GDP, Recession

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

July 31, 2020 Alexander Reed Kelly, Scheerpost. Create! COVID-19, Green New Deal, Jobs Guarantee, Recession, Universal Basic Income

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

July 30, 2020 By Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Educate! COVID-19, Eviction, Housing, Recession

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

July 30, 2020 Ralph Nader, Nader.org. Educate! Debt, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Recession

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

July 28, 2020 Josh Bivens and David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Austerity, Debt, Recession, State budgets

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

July 26, 2020 Jaisal Noor, The Real News. Educate! COVID-19, Evictions, Maryland, Recession

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?

July 25, 2020 Richard Falk, Global Justice in the 21st Century. Educate! Failed State, Pandemic, Recession, United States

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.

US Capitalism Is In Total Meltdown

July 24, 2020 Sarah Jaffe , The Progressive. Educate! COVID-19, Neoliberalism, Rebellion2020, Recession

In 2005, when the federal, state, and local governments spectacularly failed the residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there was a sense of shock from both inside and outside of the country. The triumphalist narrative that “There Is No Alternative”—that neoliberal capitalism was the best and indeed the only way to do things—got its first cracks there, when we saw people stuck on rooftops and others sheltering without food and water in the convention center and Superdome. Somehow reporters could get in, and private security firms like Blackwater patrolled the streets, but the government could not or would not deliver relief to the mostly Black and poor residents who had been unable to evacuate before the storm.

Capitalism May Not Survive The 2020 Global Crisis

July 24, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, RT. Educate! Capitalism, Economic Recovery, Pandemic, Recession

The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. The first was in early 2000. Because it was triggered by the absurdly high prices of dot-com stocks, it got named the “dotcom crisis.” In 2008, the trigger was widespread subprime mortgage default in the US and the crash was far more serious, one of the worst in capitalism’s history, second only to the crash of the 1930s. And now, in 2020, the trigger was a viral pandemic, and we have a far deeper crash than in 2008.

Cuba Defeated The Pandemic, Is Preparing To Face The Economic Crisis

July 24, 2020 By Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, Resumen English. Create! Cuba, Pandemic, Recession, Socialism

Possibly no other country in the world has it worse when it comes to facing what Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel has defined as the very challenging global economic scenario, after the impact of a pandemic that in the first six months of the year put almost all economies on hold and is still slowing down the most dynamic productive, financial and commercial processes on a planetary level. But surely no one else, among the small states of this unbalanced and unjust world, is in a better position to attempt another giant leap from uncertainty to risk.

Without Immediate Action, Millions Of People Will Be Evicted In The Coming Months

July 23, 2020 Jannine Jackson, FAIR. Educate! COVID-19, Homelessness, Housing, Recession

From the beginning, we have seen that if the federal government didn’t intervene in a really significant and sustained way, that we would see a wave of evictions and a spike in homelessness. And so these limited federal eviction moratoriums, and these state and local moratoriums that have been put in place, have provided some protections for low-income renters, and have helped prevent that wave from happening. But those moratoriums are rapidly expiring. As of today, there are 29 governors that have allowed their state eviction moratoriums to expire, and the limited federal eviction moratoriums expire next week. We have been tracking emergency rental assistance programs that have been created in response to Covid-19. As of now, there are about 151 emergency rental assistance programs around the country. Their main challenge is lack of resources: The demand for those emergency rental assistance programs far outstripped the resources that are available.

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