turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalThe Financial Hardships of Trump's Friends
ROBERT REICH MAY 8, 2018
Trumponomics is a thin veneer of an excuse for giving America’s rich—already richer than ever—whatever they want, while sticking it to everyone else
The Environmental Protection Agency recently granted to an oil refinery owned by Carl Icahn a so-called “financial hardship” waiver. The exemption allows the refinery to avoid clean air laws, potentially saving Icahn millions of dollars.
Icahn is not exactly a hardship case. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, his net worth is $21.8 billion. Over the last four decades as a corporate raider, Icahn has pushed CEOs to cut payrolls, abandon their communities, and outsource jobs abroad in order to generate more money for him and other investors.
In 1985, after winning control of the now-defunct Trans World Airlines, Icahn stripped its assets, pocketed nearly $500 million in profits, and left the airline more than $500 million in debt. Former TWA chair C.E. Meyer Jr. called Icahn “one of the greediest men on earth.”
No single person has done more to harm America’s working class than Carl Icahn. Not surprisingly, Icahn was a Trump backer from the start, and has benefited immensely from Trump’s presidency.
http://prospect.org/article/financial-hardships-trump%E2%80%99s-friends
Bohemian Rhapsody On The Way To School.....................Parenting and Bonding..............Cool
Open Thread: 'We Didn't Start The Fire' - Kid Culture Edition
Decade by decade Free Dad Videos (Matt, Amelia, and now Arthur on drums) reviews the pop culture history of toys and cartoons in a terrific sendup of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."
Food Stamps Aren't a Substitute for Work. They're How Low-Wage Workers Avoid Hunger.
KALENA THOMHAVE MARCH 28, 2018
Most adults on SNAP are workers, but they turn to the program when they’re between jobs or making too little.
Sarah Ormbrek’s life used to be a lot more uncertain. She didn’t always have a job. She didn’t always have transportation. And she didn’t always have a home for herself and her son. But thanks to the largest anti-hunger program in the country, she could generally rely on having food. During the time of her life when money wasn’t always a constant, “SNAP,” she says, “I could always depend on.”
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, works that way by design, with the intention that low-income people should be able to count on the program whenever they need it. Unlike other social service programs with long waiting lists, SNAP is available to anyone who is eligible. As such, it helps reduce hunger for over 40 million Americans by supplementing their grocery bills each month.
Homeless in Wyoming in the early 2000s, Ormbrek was able to get housing through the Section 8 program, alongside her SNAP benefits and Medicaid for her and her son. Housing, food, and medical stability, as well as child care assistance, enabled her to go to school and get her nursing license.
But then she had to leave Wyoming to escape an abusive situation. She moved to Ohio in 2004—“and I had to start all over,” says Ormbrek. “I ended up back on SNAP.”
http://prospect.org/article/food-stamps-arent-substitute-work-theyre-how-low-wage-workers-avoid-hunger
and this is the sexual predator plan to put bread and milk on the table, and in fact veterans currently living on food stamps get this also..................................while he gets free food and health care off the backs of veterans paying this assholes bill's.......................
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/10142054293
Why the 2020 Census Citizenship Question Matters in the 2018 Elections
Robert-shapiro MAY 7, 2018
Red states will suffer if that question is asked—but Republican state attorneys general haven’t even murmured a protest.
The decennial census is a vital instrument in how Americans live their lives. Right now, the 2020 census is at risk and, with it, much that matters to all of us.
The Trump administration, led here by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is seeking to use the census to send a message to President Trump’s base and to disadvantage their political opponents. Dismissing the advice and warnings of the statisticians and social scientists who oversee the Census Bureau, they have decided to include a question about every person’s citizenship status in the 2020 census. The result could well be a census that misses tens of millions of people, with consequences that will reverberate across the country.
Although most pundits believe that the adverse impact will be concentrated in a few blue states, closer analysis shows it could cost blue, purple, and red states seats in Congress, and cost mainly red states billions of dollars in federal funding. Yet so far, among those with the legal standing to push back against this proposal—our state attorneys general—only those in Democratic states have stepped up.
When I oversaw the 2000 Census as under secretary of commerce, I, along with the rest of the Clinton administration, took pride in our efforts to gather the most accurate information possible about everyone who lives in the United States. We knew that some $400 billion in federal funds would be disbursed annually based in part on census data—the number is $800 billion today—and that the fair allocation of seats in the House of Representatives depended on the accuracy and completeness of the census.
Even worse, perhaps, than Ross’s decision to include a citizenship question is his stated rationale, which is to help Sessions and the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act (an improbable concern for Sessions, who long has favored weakening the act). Ross’s statement raises the specter that the census will share individual personal information with law enforcement and other agencies. Such sharing would violate federal law as well as norms in place since the first census in 1790.
http://prospect.org/article/why-2020-census-citizenship-question-matters-2018-elections
West Virginia Teachers Won Their Strike. Now, They're Rebuilding the Local Economy.
How the American Federation of Teachers has taken the lead in reinvigorating the poorest county in the state
by Kalena Thomhave
May 7, 2018
his article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s early January, but the high tunnel at Mount View High School in McDowell County, West Virginia, is sweltering. High tunnels are inexpensive greenhouses, unheated but covered in plastic, that make it easier for farmers to extend the growing season for their fruits and vegetables. In this case, it’s strawberries: About 300 strawberry plants, donated by a McDowell farmer, are growing in raised beds.
The students at Mount View chose to plant the strawberries, says Jenny Totten, who works with the high school students as the McDowell County Community Development Coordinator at the West Virginia Community Development Hub. The students don’t get to make a lot of their own decisions, she says. So she lets them choose what they want to do, whether it’s the work that they’ll do in the high tunnel or what they’ll make with the harvested plants. The kids don’t just learn gardening and cultivating, but also how to make their own products from the crop, and how to sell them.
Because it’s winter, the strawberry plants haven’t borne fruit yet. When they do, the students intend to make—and sell—strawberry jam. With other fruits and vegetables that they’ll grow, the students have chosen to make and sell smoothies, jams and jellies, and ready-to-sell vegetable boxes. To make even more growing space, Totten has plans for the land surrounding the high tunnel: spread out some mulch and plant more raised beds, to protect the produce from harsh chemicals that could exist beneath the surface, because the high tunnel is built on reclaimed coal mine land. The whole school is.
http://prospect.org/article/west-virginia-teachers-won-their-strike-now-they%E2%80%99re-rebuilding-local-economy-0
i ALWAYS LOVED MY TEACHERS ..........................THEY WERE THE BEST..........THEY CARED
How to Keep Social Security Secure
Here’s a plan that eliminates the long-term shortfall in its finances and updates the system for the 21st century.
Henry Aaron
May 1, 2018
This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
For the last 35 years, official government projections have reported that Social Security will be unable to pay some scheduled benefits sometime in the middle third of this century. For almost as long, the Congressional Budget Office has annually warned that the overall federal budget is on an unsustainable trajectory. Conservatives, some of whom still yearn to roll back the New Deal and Great Society, point to these projections as support for their claim that we can no longer afford Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called “entitlements.” Their declared strategy involves sowing doubts about the sustainability of these programs and creating a coalition to scale back or replace them.
So far, this campaign has enjoyed little legislative success, but the talk of crisis has made many people very nervous. Roughly two-thirds of the American public tell pollsters that Social Security is already in crisis or faces major problems. Smaller majorities say that they don’t expect to receive some or all of the benefits they’re due.
Nervousness has not eroded Social Security’s popularity. Solid majorities of liberals, conservatives, and independents alike say that Social Security is important and that they are willing to pay more in taxes to sustain it. The last major assault on the program, George W. Bush’s 2005 proposal to replace Social Security by diverting revenues into private accounts, turned into a political train wreck when members of the president’s own party shunned his plan.
The chief, indeed the only, argument for scaling back Social Security is that current Social Security taxes plus accumulated reserves are insufficient to pay all scheduled benefits beyond 2034, if current projections turn out to be exactly correct—or a few years earlier or later, if they are a bit off. In 2018, Social Security will channel more than $1 trillion in pension benefits to more than 62 million beneficiaries; by 2035, 88.4 million beneficiaries are projected to have earned entitlement to $1.672 trillion in benefits (in 2017 dollars). Revenues in 2034 are now expected to cover just three-quarters of scheduled benefits. If Congress makes no changes in the program, benefits will fall automatically by approximately one-fourth. To avoid benefit cuts altogether at that point, Congress would have to raise taxes earmarked for Social Security by approximately one-third.
http://prospect.org/article/how-keep-social-security-secure
Catching a Breeze
America's belated push to develop offshore wind energy
Derrick Z. Jackson
April 20, 2018
This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect. Subscribe here.
Three years ago, after the collapse of Cape Wind off Nantucket Sound, renewable offshore wind energy in the United States was “a stone dead market,” according to Thomas Brostrøm, president of Ørsted North America. His Danish parent company, formerly DONG Energy, has built more offshore wind farms than any country in the world.
Cape Wind, the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt brainchild of clean energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon, was litigated to the grave by local residents as too ruinous to the Cape Cod seascape. It was resisted by liberal Kennedys and right-wing Kochs alike. Despite its environmental benefits, the project also was persistently criticized as a noncompetitive boondoggle with outrageous power costs.
The death knell of America’s first would-be offshore wind farm was arguably most felt in New Bedford, Massachusetts. That city, despite being the richest seafood port in the United States, has long been beset by high unemployment from the decline of its mills. Betting that Cape Wind would help make Massachusetts the first American hub of the offshore wind industry, Governor Deval Patrick poured $113 million into a European-grade port terminal that could handle the massive size and weight of blades and foundations and the skyscraper height of towers.
When Patrick and a host of state officials came to New Bedford in May of 2013 to break ground for the terminal’s construction, the city’s mayor, Jon Mitchell, said, “For a corner of the state that has had its hopes dashed so many times in the past wanting transformative economic development and not quite getting there, now it’s real.”
http://prospect.org/article/catching-breeze
Why America Needs More Social Housing
Subsidizing market prices to make housing affordable is a losing strategy. There’s a better way—on display for a century in Vienna.
BY Peter Dreier
This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The quest to provide what has come to be called “affordable housing” in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality. Too much housing is in the market sector and too little is in a social sector permanently protected from rising prices. The result is that supply and demand relentlessly bids up market prices. Government is required to provide deeper and deeper subsidies to keep rents within the bounds of incomes, so fewer and fewer people get any kind of help. This is true whether the form of public subsidy is tax breaks, direct subsidies, vouchers, or deals with developers to set aside some percent of units as affordable. In most cities, the median rent far exceeds what median incomes can afford. In cities with hot housing markets, homeownership is even further beyond reach for those who do not already own homes, exacerbating competition for scarce apartments.
The idea of having a permanent sector of social housing, protected in perpetuity from market pressures, has a bad reputation in the United States, in part because of misleading stereotypes about public housing. But other forms of social housing are being depleted as well, including middle-income projects built with tax breaks, such as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, which were sold to the highest bidder and converted to market housing; and government-subsidized buildings from the 1960s through the 1980s, built under federal housing programs but allowed to be converted to market-rate apartments once their original mortgages were paid off or the 20-year subsidy contract expired.
Government policymakers have made almost no provision to protect the stunted social sector that exists, much less add to it. There are some exceptions to this dismal pattern, such as land trusts that preserve a social housing sector in perpetuity, in cities like Burlington, Vermont. But for the most part, the place to look for models is abroad. And no place does it better than Vienna.
AMERICAN VISITORS TO Vienna are typically struck by the absence of homeless people on the streets. And if they ventured around the city, they’d discover that there are no neighborhoods comparable to the distressed ghettos in America’s cities, where high concentrations of poor people live in areas characterized by high levels of crime, inadequate public services, and a paucity of grocery stores, banks, and other retail outlets.
(Wendel Fisher/Wikimedia Commons)
Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, which was sold and converted to market housing
Since the 1920s, Vienna has made large investments in social housing owned or financed by the government. But unlike public housing in the United States, Vienna’s social housing serves the middle class as well as the poor, and has thus avoided the stigma of being either vertical ghettos or housing of last resort. Every country in Western Europe has some version of social housing, but Vienna’s is by far the largest and most successful. It is typically ranked as one of the world’s most livable cities.
http://prospect.org/article/why-america-needs-more-social-housing
Nannie GETS IT................................WE ON THE OTHER HAND GET WITH GREED
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