I drove southeast along the Caribou Road. It had been named for an animal that hunters had eradicated from these parts generations ago. Human beings love to commemorate the things they destroy. Building memorials to the dead and naming places in their honor is our way of recasting the past in terms that don’t hold us accountable.
– “The Bone Orchard” Paul Doiron
1.
On Labour Day, I wrote about community organizer Frank Pierson’s association and history with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Then last Sunday, what do I watch on CBS Sunday Morning’s news show but a segment on Brooklyn’s Nehemiah project which was pushed through by that very group. In the early 1980s, New York City Mayor Ed Koch agreed to sell 16-square miles of abandoned lots in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood to a group of local churches for $1 per lot. The city also offered $10,000 deferred payment loans to perspective [sic] home buyers. Around 1,250 homes were initially constructed with prices starting as low as $50,000. The project — called Nehemiah homes — created a critical mass of development and equity in the neighborhood that continues today.
More than 4,500 Nehemiah homes have been built since the 1980s in the New York City area, generating more than a billion dollars in total homeowner equity, according to the developers. The project has a less than 1 percent foreclosure rate, and a study conducted by Nehemiah found that children who grew up in the development earned 53 percent higher wages than their parents.
Then, in 2021, Chicago did the same thing. According to the AIF web site, United Power for Action & Justice (UPAJ) secured $27.6 Million in commitments and land towards the building of 2,000 Nehemiah Homes on vacant lots controlled by the city in severely blighted areas on the city's south and west sides as part of its Reclaiming Chicago campaign. UPAJ's Reclaiming Chicago campaign is modeled on the Metro IAF Nehemiah Housing strategy which has built more than 6,500 homes for first-time home-buyers, creating over $2 Billion in wealth and with a foreclosure rate of less than 1% in New York, Jersey City, Baltimore, Chicago, Prince George's County, Philadelphia, Memphis and Washington DC.
This is a hopeful road to equity for those who have been left behind over the many years of discrimination.
2.
I’ve written a couple times about corporate banks vs public banks. It was a year ago I posted about California’s State Assembly bill to create a pathway for cities, counties and regions in California to set up their own public banks, which passed by a wide margin in 2019. So far, I have not found evidence that any have actually been created, but I did find an article from last May in 48Hills whereas San Francisco began formulating a plan to establish their first public bank since the city was founded more than 200 years ago. They even have a web site created (San Francisco Public Bank), but it seems incomplete, as if the project has been stalled.
I’ve read many arguments against the idea of public banking; from the Week, the LA Times, and, of course, American Banker.
In that post from a year ago I raised the point that The Bank of North Dakota, the only existing publicly-owned bank in the U.S., is more profitable than Goldman Sachs, has a better credit rating than JPMorgan Chase, and was the only state not deep in red ink as a result of the 2008 financial crash.
This month, the Roosevelt Institute’s Emily DiVito, Senior Program Manager for the Corporate Power program, has published a brief that outlines the case for public banking. In field surveys it’s been found that access barriers to in-person banking underscore the shortcomings of the current banking industry.
– Race and language disparities in access to information and equal treatment while at bank branches;
– A prevalence of overdraft-fee-based accounts and a reticence on the part of bank staff to disclose cheaper alternatives when those options exist; and
– A near-total lack of no-fee, no-minimum balance account options at surveyed banks.
In conclusion she said:
Money is a public good, and providing full and free access to the physical and civic infrastructure through which it is stored is a necessary public service. But America’s current banking and payments system is exclusionary and expensive, creating a tiered and dysfunctional economy
wherein millions of individuals and families are left—or pushed—out of the formal banking sector and toward predatory non-bank alternatives that coerce them into paying exorbitant fees to access their own money.
Recent results from a field survey conducted in California shed light on the obstacles millions of Americans encounter when trying to bank. Though not representative of the universal experience when banking—if such a thing exists—this survey finds persistent and specific barriers to full financial inclusion facing prospective consumers, especially those who are Black, brown, Spanish-speaking, and/or living in communities of color.
To fix the distortions that pervasive financial exclusion has wrought on the US economy, we need more inclusive banking options. This could be accomplished through a variety of policies, including FedAccounts and postal banking at the federal level and local public banks and state-run no-cost, no-fee account programs at the local level. This analysis of the status quo provides clear evidence that the current banking system has left coverage gaps that it will inevitably always sustain without federal, state, and/or local interventions.
3.
This is comforting…North Korea will launch a nuclear retaliation “automatically and immediately” if Kim Jong Un is incapacitated in an attack. Sheesh, guy.
4.
In just another story of ‘How We Sure Love Our Fetus’s” in the old USA, pregnant women arrested for drug offenses in Alabama are not allowed to post bail and go free, the way other people are. They have to stay in state custody: either in jail, or in a residential drug rehab program. The logic is that the women are a danger to their fetuses: they need to be imprisoned by the state, and kept from their freedom, in order to protect their pregnancies, according to the Guardian.
The land of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail may have perfect grass but Alabama criminalizes more women for pregnancy than any other state Just last year, Kim Blalock, a mother of six from Florence, Alabama, was charged with a felony for filling a longstanding prescription from her doctor while pregnant. Prosecutors charged that the medication, which Blalock was taking as prescribed, could have hurt her fetus, and that she should have known not to refill it. Etowah county seems to lead the way jailing 150 pregnant women in recent years, and as many as 12 are currently held in its jail. You may want to rethink those Alabama vacation plans.
5.
And to add a cup of sugar to the Alabama saga, here’s to hoping that Republicans doubling down on their anti-abortion stance will haunt them come the mid-terms. Lindsey ‘Huckleberry Butchfella*’ Graham held a press conference last Tuesday to announce an updated national abortion restrictions bill, which would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy nationwide. Great. Standing beside Graham was Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Pro-Life America who has been fighting to pave the way for states to prohibit women from terminating pregnancies at any stage for any reason, and criminalizing acts by providers or others who seek to help those women. She maintains close ties to top Republican leaders, including former President Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Politico led with the headline Graham's abortion ban stuns Senate GOP as he may well have rankled some of his colleagues cockles with this rogue announcement, as several Republican senators said they are largely disinterested in rallying behind the bill at a critical moment in the battle for the Senate. Colorado GOP Senate nominee Joe O’Dea said “A Republican ban is as reckless and tone deaf as is Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer’s hostility to.”
As far as reaching across the aisle, read Lee Papa’s piece Abortion Rights and the Lie of "Reaching Across the Aisle.” While the abortion extremists of the right like to say that allowing abortion without restrictions or even codifying the Roe v. Wade decision is radicalism on the left, that's just not right. Telling people that they have the choice when it comes to their own bodies isn't radical at all. Really, it's not a stretch to come up with what extremism on the other side of the anti-choice coin is. If one side is forced birth, then the other would be forced abortion. If the Democratic Party believed in forcing people to end pregnancies that might result in disabled children or forcing abortions on women who are deemed unfit for one reason or another to be a mother, then you'd have extremism. But no mainstream Democrats or, indeed, no one in the realm of mainstream on the pro-choice side believes in this (hence the word "choice").
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said, “Republicans are coming after your rights. We have already seen the devastation, the health-care crises, that these extreme abortion bans have caused: patients who are unable to get a prescription filled, doctors who are unsure if they can do their jobs — forced to wait until patients get sicker, until their lives are in danger, before they can take action. That’s what we’re seeing in Republican states right now. And it is a nightmare they now want to impose on every single corner of our country.”
Charles Pierce weighed in with They are blind rats in a maze of their own devising, staggering into and colliding with each other, trying not to look as complicit as they are in immiserating the lives of American women and their families. They might save some races—they might even win back their Senate majority—but they’ll never be anything more than the party that supported the revocation of a constitutional right based on a cynical disregard for the health of 51 percent of the population.
*nickname by Mike Finnigan (RIP)
6.
Maybe there will be a reckoning for MAGAs after all…in Boise, High school senior Shiva Rajbhandari won a seat on the Boise school board over his opponent, Steve Schmidt, who was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs. Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt, “This is a hate group. They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Shiva went on to say, “You won’t succeed. You won’t succeed in silencing student voices. You won’t succeed at bringing Idaho back to the 1800s. You won’t succeed at abolishing public schools as the Freedom Foundation aspires. And you won’t succeed in being elected to the executive branch of state government, which I feel is the true purpose of this. And you won’t succeed because despite all your efforts, we Idahoans are smart, we’re educated, and we can’t be fooled into believing that something exists when the opposite is true. All across the state, there are young people like me who will vote in the Republican primary for the first time in 2022.”
Along these lines, read Rebecca Solnit’s piece in the Guardian titled Want to see political change? Look to the margins. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.
And now…
Hey, you, subscribe!