Disastrous US school openings lead to 3,000 infections across 44 states

Evan Blake

Within weeks, the reopening of schools across the United States has already become a complete catastrophe. Outside of the mobilization of educators, parents and the broader working class to halt this homicidal policy, there will be rapid acceleration of the spread of the deadly COVID-19 disease throughout every region of the country.

Because no government agency at the local, state or federal level is systematically tracking work-related COVID-19 cases and deaths, Kansas teacher Alisha Morris took it upon herself to begin compiling this data in a spreadsheet. The list, which is now curated by roughly 35 people, has been shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have been set up to oppose the unsafe reopening of schools and has been viewed tens of thousands of times by educators, parents and students.

The spreadsheet, which the WSWS utilized to produce a map that has also gone viral, paints a chilling picture of the spread of the pandemic in schools across the US.

According to this data and an official account from Mississippi released Monday, since schools began reopening during the week of July 27, roughly 3,000 teachers, students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 from hundreds of schools across the country. All but six states—Alaska, Washington, Delaware, Vermont, North Dakota, and New Hampshire—have at least one school that has already experienced an outbreak of COVID-19.

Map of over hundreds of reported COVID outbreaks in US schools

As of Tuesday, there are over 900 entries on the spreadsheet, with each one representing a separate school that has had at least one positive or suspected case since the start of the pandemic. Most entries are based on local news reports since the beginning of August.

The devastation has been most extreme in the South, which for weeks has been a major epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Largely controlled by the Republican Party, these states most closely followed the “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, as advanced by the Trump administration. These officials were the most aggressive and earliest to reopen their economies and have now been the most strident in demanding full in-person instruction, often with the bare minimum of personal protective equipment (PPE) provided to teachers and staff.

The heaviest-hit Republican-led states include:

• Mississippi, where 71 of the state’s 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools. As of Tuesday, 199 students and 245 teachers have tested positive statewide, while 2,035 students and 589 teachers have been forced into two-week quarantines.
  
• Florida, where at least 331 students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 11 have died, many from earlier in the summer.
  
• In Georgia, there are now at least 296 known cases and 481 suspected cases at 67 different schools.
  
• In Texas, at least 140 different schools have reported a combined 380 cases.
  
• Indiana now has over 100 confirmed cases from at least 75 different schools.
  
• Tennessee now has at least 99 confirmed cases from 44 different schools.

In total, at least 406,109 children have now tested positive for COVID-19 in the US, representing 9.1 percent of all cases. One of the chief lies used by state officials to justify reopening schools, that children are less susceptible to the virus, stands thoroughly exposed.

While the Trump administration and his state and local backers have been most aggressive, the back-to-school and back-to-work policy also has the fulsome support of the Democratic Party at every level.

With the Democratic National Convention (DNC) taking place this week, the party is fully geared towards covering up their record of facilitating the homicidal policies demanded by the ruling class. On Monday, New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo absurdly claimed that his response to the pandemic was spotless, covering up the fact that nearly 33,000 people have died in the state under his watch. Cuomo has sanctioned the reopening of schools across the state, including in New York City, the largest school district in the country. Schools are also opening up in Michigan, led by Governor Gretchen Whitmer who also spoke at the Democratic National Convention Monday.

The Biden-Harris campaign website states, “Everyone wants schools to fully reopen for in-person instruction. Creating the conditions to make it happen should be a top national priority.”

The statement goes on to place the blame for the crisis solely on Trump, while proposing that schools can be reopened “safely” simply with some more funding for testing, contact tracing and PPE for educators. There are no specifics whatsoever on the level of community spread Biden thinks is “safe,” leaving the door open for districts to resume in-person learning whenever they choose, which is the exact same policy pursued by Trump.

If there is any tactical difference between Trump and the Republicans on the one side and the Democrats on school openings it is the latter’s use of the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and other unions to dissipate anger through temporary delays, hybrid online/in-person learning and other maneuvers to buy time for the full reopening of the schools. Above all, the unions are doing everything they can to prevent a nationwide strike increasingly being demanded by educators because this would lead to a direct confrontation not only with Trump but Biden and the Democratic Party.

The campaign to open schools over the next few weeks in New York City and Los Angeles—both overseen by the Democrats—will set a major precedent for districts across the US. On Tuesday, Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, warned of the immense dangers posed by opening schools in New York City, telling WNYC, “Schools are going to become hotbeds for the infections to take hold again and spread through the community.” He added, “It’s almost inevitable if we are in fact going to even hold some classes in real time in real classrooms,” exploding the myth that the “hybrid” model is in any way safe.

Significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have already happened in multiple Democrat-led states where at least some districts have fully reopened, including the following:

• Illinois already has at least 67 cases from 20 different schools.
  
• In Michigan, 16 different schools report a combined 27 confirmed cases, mostly student athletes at summer training camps.
  
• In California, there are at least 22 known cases from at least six schools, including 13 cases at the El Centro Elementary School District in the Central Valley.
  
• Pennsylvania reports at least 25 confirmed cases from 19 different schools.
  
• Hawaii now has at least 11 known cases at 12 different schools.
  
• Massachusetts has at least 17 confirmed cases at 12 different schools.

The explosion of cases at schools nationwide has provoked a huge backlash by educators, parents and students, who have already organized well over 100 protests over the past month and have assembled by the tens of thousands in dozens of Facebook groups in nearly every state.

There are growing calls for mass sickouts and nationwide strike action to halt the drive to reopen schools. In Arizona, 109 out of roughly 250 teachers and support staff in the suburban Phoenix JO Combs Unified School District called in sick Monday, canceling all classes that day. The shutdown of schools was extended through Wednesday, and teachers remain defiant and unwilling to sacrifice themselves.

Facing concerted pressure from educators and parents, the Newark Public School District in New Jersey was forced to reverse course Monday and start the school year online, after having pushed for in-person instruction for weeks. Significantly, the Newark Teachers Association had been promoting the equally unsafe “hybrid” model and, sensing huge opposition among rank-and-file educators, made an about-face on Monday.

On Wednesday in Detroit, teachers are expected to overwhelmingly support a “safety strike” in a vote organized by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which is fearful of a revolt by the city’s 4,000 teachers.

Facing a similar groundswell of opposition, the Little Rock Education Association in Little Rock, Arkansas is now posturing as a defender of teachers’ and students’ safety. However, the union is simply demanding that in-person learning resume once the positivity rate in the county remains below 5 percent for 14 consecutive days. This elevated figure represents a high degree of community spread, and under conditions in which testing is being deliberately curtailed would be specious and wholly unsafe.

The central question facing teachers, education workers, parents and students is the need to build new forms of organization, independent of the unions, to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. It is for this reason that the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded, in order to unite the immense opposition to the homicidal policies of the ruling class.

This national body is serving as a central organization to coordinate the building of a network of independent, rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood. The committees must fight to link up with broader sections of the working class facing the same deadly working conditions, in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening of schools and the broader return-to-work campaign.

TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellowship 2021

Application Deadline: 27th August 2020 at 11:59pm EST.

Eligible Countries: International

To Be Taken At (Country): USA

About the Award: The fellowship is a twelve-month residency on Capitol Hill, running from January to December, with an optional 13th month the following January.  Fellows work directly for a Member of Congress or Congressional Committee for the duration of their residency and may spend their time on technology-related issues like emerging technologies, AI and automation, election security, data privacy, encryption, cybersecurity or defense technology policy.  Typical duties may include:

• Briefing Members and staff about technology issues
• Researching legislation
• Preparing for hearings or markups
• Meeting with stakeholder groups and building coalitions

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Citizenship is not a requirement to apply.  TechCongress is unable to assist with visa applications or renewals but anyone legally authorized to work in the United States through the duration of the fellowship and holding a US bank account is eligible to apply.
Applicants should:

• Have experience working in or with technology, and the ability to convey complex technical subjects to less-technically savvy individuals.
• Have some professional experience or be enrolled in or near completion of a graduate level program.
• Have a strong desire help build the Congressional Innovations Fellows program.  As part of the 2020 class, fellows should expect to give ongoing feedback about fellowship activities, rapidly prototype and help build the pipeline for technological expertise into Congress.

Selection Criteria: Fellows are selected by an independent selections board using criteria that includes:

• Potential for leadership in technology policy
• Professional achievements and technical ability.
• Commitment to building a diverse and cross-sector technology policy ecosystem.
• Potential for future growth and career advancement.
• Interpersonal, communication and “tech-translation” skills.
• Individual plans for incorporating the fellowship experience into specific career goals.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Congressional Innovation Fellowship provides a unique opportunity to change Congress by injecting desperately needed technological expertise into the Legislative Branch.  Fellows receive competitive stipend and benefits during their nine month residency to ensure that they can achieve maximum impact.
Benefits include:

• $85,000/year equivalent stipend
• Health insurance supplement of up to $400/month*
• Relocation allowance of up to $2,500
• Equipment or travel allowance of up to $2,500

Duration of Programme: 12 months running from January 2021 to December 2021.

How to Apply: APPLY

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Needed: Indicators for Measuring Injustice and Societal Decay

Ralph Nader

Economic indicators – data points, trends, and micro-categories – are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society’s democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision.

We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started “re-defining progress” and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations.

Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

1. A society is decaying when liars receive mass media attention while truth-tellers are largely ignored. Those who are chronically wrong with outrageous and baseless predictions are featured on news broadcasts, op-ed pages, and as convention and conference speakers. On the other hand, those who forewarn and are proven to be accurate are not regaled, but instead, they are excluded from the media spotlight and significant gatherings. Consider the treatment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz post-Iraq invasion, compared to people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who factually warned Washington not to attack illegally a country that didn’t threaten us.
2. A society is decaying when rampant corruption is tolerated, and its perpetrators are rewarded with money, votes, and praise. When President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a textile manufacturer, he was forced to resign. The daily corruption of Trump and the Trumpsters towers beyond measure over Adams’ indiscretion. Yet calls for Trump and his cronies to resign are rare and anemic. Tragically, the law and the norms of decency have done little to curb the corrupt, criminogenic, and criminal excesses of Trump & company. Even government prosecutors and inspectors generals have been fired, chilled, and sidelined by Trump and his toady,  Attorney General Barr.
3. A society is decaying when a growing number of people believe in fantasies instead of realities. Social media makes this an ever more serious estrangement from what is actually happening in the country and in the world. Believing in myths and falsehoods leads to political servitude, economic disruption, and social dysfunction. The corrupt concentration of power ensues.
4. An expanding economy focusing increasingly on ‘wants and whims’ while ignoring the meeting of basic ‘needs and necessities’ shatters societal cohesiveness and deepens miseries of many people. Adequate housing, healthcare, food, public services, education, mass transit, health & safety standards, and environmental protections are the prerequisites for a humane democracy. The economy is in shambles for tens of millions of Americans, including hungry children. Minimal economic security is beyond the reach of tens of millions of people in our country.
5. With few exceptions, the richer the wealthy become, the more selfish they behave, from severely diminished contributions to charities to the failure to exert leadership to reverse the breakdown of society. Take all the failures of the election machinery from obstructing voters to simply counting the votes honestly with paper records. The U.S. Senate won’t vote to give the states the $4 billion needed for administering the coming elections despite the Covid-19-driven need for expanded voting by mail. The Silicon Valley, undertaxed, mega-billionaires could make a $4 billion patriotic donation to safeguard the voting process in November and not even feel it.
6. Rampant commercialism knowing no boundaries or restraints even to protect young children is running roughshod over civic values. Every major religion has warned about giving too much power to the merchant class going back over 2000 years. In our country, justice arrived after commercial greed was subordinated to humane priorities such as abolishing child labor and requiring crashworthy cars, cleaner air, water, and safer workplaces. Mercantile values produce predictable results, from excluding civic groups from congressional hearings and the mass media to letting corporations control what the people own such as the vast public lands and public airwaves.
7. Then there is the American Empire astride the globe, enabled by an AWOL Congress and propelled by the avaricious military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower presciently forewarned that “[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” All Empires devour themselves until they collapse on the countries of their origins. Over 55% of the federal government’s operating spending goes to the Pentagon and its associated budgets. The military-industrial complex increasingly leads to quagmires and creates adversaries abroad, as it starves the social safety net budgets in our country. Our country’s military spending with all its waste is surging and unaudited. The U.S. spent more than $732 billion on direct defense spending in 2019; this is more than the next ten countries with the largest military expenditures.
8. A society that requires its people to incur crushing debt to survive, while relying on casinos and other forms of gambling to produce jobs, is going backward into the future.
9. Public officials who repeatedly obstruct voters from having their votes received and counted accurately and in a timely fashion continue with impunity to try to steal elections. Then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (now governor of Georgia) “stole” the election in 2018 from gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams said Kemp was an “architect of voter suppression.” And that because Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State during the race, he was “the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper” for the 2018 gubernatorial election. He escaped accountability. Democracy decays.
10. Access to justice is diminishing. Tort law – the law of wrongful injuries – has been weakened in many states with arbitrary caps on damages for the most serious injuries. It also is harder than ever for citizens to get through to real people in government agencies.

How Software Companies Might Lead Us Out of Our E-Waste Dilemma

Julian Vigo

I first came across the subscription model when, immediately following a software update, my Adobe Acrobat system failed to work and I was forced to reinstall it. But when I got to the step for entering the serial number I was instead deferred to an Adobe website where I was told to sign up for their subscription services. I didn’t have the time to write to Adobe to complain nor did I want to subscribe to something I already purchased. So, instead of subscribing, I sought out a freeware alternative which has more or less done the job over the years.

Since this event occurred, however, I began to notice the subscription model sprouting up everywhere: my email program uses this model, so too do many apps, and my WordPress themes have also switched to this payment mode. It is estimated that about 80% of historical software vendors will now have subscription services also known as software-as-a-service (SaaS) model over the previous sales model. While this might seem trivial to some, it is a huge price difference to many of us who make do with our computers long after they need to be replaced using similarly slow software that won’t outpace the hardware. Moreover, the subscription model is quite expensive comparatively, especially if we use certain software occasionally. How did we get here that a software leasing system is becoming the preferred model for small businesses?

First, I am aware that the obvious answer here this: capitalism. How could we not foresee that asking someone to plop down $300 for one piece of software would be—in this economic climate especially—a lot more difficult to sell. Getting consumers to pay for what appear to be smaller fees within a monthly subscription model has brought forth a boom in the subscription model among a client-base that is cash-poor.

What originated targeting the enterprise sector around 2015 soon caught on in the consumer market as it proved challenging to crack the sale of expensive software to people whose salaries were being downsized while also experiencing a fall in the quality of living. After all, is it feasible to sell a $699 Adobe suite product in one go, or might selling a $9.99 a month subscription be the better deal? Obviously, for startups, the monthly fees save enormously for what might be untenable first-year expenses. But, for individuals, it seems like the software market will never level off, growing in expense year by year such that subscription models for some seemed to take the bite off spending hundreds in one go. For instance, when I lost the use of Adobe, I couldn’t afford to subscribe but I also could not find an inexpensive or free replacement to do markups on PDF aside from some light proofreading tools contained in Apple’s Preview that came with my computer. Finding cutting edge software, as the saying goes: you get what you pay for.

The market which educates us about where to buy and what to buy tends to be heavily focused within media journalism where people who buy software tend to inform themselves about these products to include the comparable freeware and less expensive versions of software they can no longer afford. Many websites specialise in teaching the consumer what to look out for in new software, which freeware contains malware or which software is best to use for website design, for instance. While SaaS might seem to some hardly suitable for a population losing work in the era of COVID-19, unable to afford new software, when the math comes in, it might just be that SaaS is the least expensive and more efficient.

The software industry has faced its biggest hurdle in sales as people have lost jobs in unprecedented numbers since the invention of the home computer or laptop and even since the Great Depression. In fact, along with the race to find the vaccine to COVID-19 is the race to keep software sales up for companies whose clients are now under- or unemployed. The enterprise software that set the subscription model as the default payment model is now no longer a given as businesses are questioning their need to pay into what is a costly exercise in this economically slow era. While US small businesses are suffering particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, companies like Zoom have learned from their popularity during lockdown: consumers cannot afford to upgrade their hardware to run the latest software. Enter stage left, Zoom’s HaaS (hardware-as-a-service) model where now we can rent computer hardware for $75 a month.

While there are many ways to look at SaaS and now HaaS from the more cynical to creative analytical perspectives, it’s hard not to be skeptical about companies cashing in even during a financially strapped period of our collective history. At the same time, for those of us facing computer hardware issues (I am writing this from my computer jimmy-rigged to a cheap screen as I hold out for computer prices to drop this autumn), maybe the subscription model would be the best of all worlds as we can at least ask for quality and hardware that can keep up with the software, and vice versa.

Of all the trends I never expected to change as a result of this global pandemic, the formats for selling computers and software would have been the last on my list—if even at all on my list. Perhaps, the future of leasing our technology, privacy issues aside, might also provide us with a more ecological way of using and reutilising hardware where the companies who source technology to us are ultimately the bodies left responsible for recycling or shipping old tech to recycling centres. Still, this model in the private sector will be a hard sell for those of us who are more possessive of our laptops than we are our toothbrushes.

Still, just as some experts claim that “the future is the subscription model” regarding software, we might begin to consider the HaaS model currently being ramped up in the business sector and all the possibilities it offers us both as consumers and ecologically-minded individuals. While we can keep up with the latest news on digital waste and recycling, the reality is that we are producing 40 million metric tons of e-waste (electronic waste), much of which can be recycled, much of which cannot. The disposal and recycling of components containing lead, cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame retardants are not always straight-forward and inevitably pose a significant health risk to those workers who handle these materials in addition to their families and the communities that come into contact with these substances. With e-waste having increased 21% over the past five years according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, the thoughtful use of hazardous materials needs to take the front seat to our predilection to buy, buy, buy.

Here’s the hard part for those on the left concerned about our ecological contributions to the planet’s destruction and our responsible use of technology: we need to consider for a moment that SaaS and HaaS, for all the capitalistic contrivances they so clearly embody, might also offer us a short-term solution to e-waste. After all, the writing is already on the wall with the federal government having announced last week that it would stop buying used computers. Short of curtailing our computer spending, we need to stop buying disposable devices entirely which is not a feasible option for most of us who use computers for our survival or we need to insist upon all tech products being upgradeable, unlike Apple’s retina series Macbook which leaves users at the mercy of tech companies building updated systems instead of demanding that tech be held accountable for e-waste and that they offer the possibility to swap out older components to improve efficiency. For some pundits, we already don’t really own our computers which, although debatable, does offer us another perspective into how owning a device implicates us in the need to constantly pay into updating these system’s software and hardware. In this sense any form of tech ownership is already a leasing into the future of invariable crashes, fixes, and updates.

Might the best compromise between ecological waste and capitalistic excess be a hybrid solution where the public and private sectors demand that hardware devices are made adaptable to upgrades while the leasing—and not the sale—of hardware is considered as the future model of technological acquisition?

The Basic Case for a Wealth Tax

Bob Lord & Lee Price

Changes in tax policy since 1980 have been driving U.S. inequality to levels not seen since the original Gilded Age. Reversing that trajectory — and restoring a more egalitarian society — will require a complete overhaul of the changes in tax policy we’ve seen over the past four decades.

Taxes as a share of national income have now been remarkably stable for 40 years. Total federal tax revenue last year stood at 17 percent, about the average for the last half-century. Income taxes, meanwhile, have stayed steady at 8 percent of the economy.

These stable percentages should be a cause for alarm, not satisfaction. In any tax system based on progressive tax principles, federal income tax revenue should increase as a greater share of income goes to people in the higher tax brackets. But that hasn’t happened. The big tax cuts that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump have signed into law have tilted our tax structure in favor of those at the top.

Thanks to these cuts, our wealthy have spent the last four decades paying taxes at significantly lower rates. The taxes they pay have dropped so much that total federal revenues have remained stable only because average Americans are paying, as a share of the economy, far more in regressive payroll taxes.

Some numbers: Between 1980 and 2018, tax law changes favoring the nation’s rich left our billionaires paying 79 percent less in taxes, as measured as a share of their wealth. The country’s top .01 percent, a group consisting of households with wealth in excess of $100 million, have seen their tax payments as a share of their wealth drop by almost as much, 73 percent.

Most of us reliably consume most of any boost in income we see. Not people with massive wealth. An ultra-wealthy household that realizes $25 million in tax savings doesn’t rush out and spend that extra $25 million on food, home improvements, or new clothes. Most of those added millions just add to that ultra-wealthy household’s wealth, and that in turn increases the household’s future income — and future wealth.

In other words, wealth begets wealth, and the giant cut in the taxes our rich people pay, as a percentage of their wealth, has turbocharged how rapidly our nation’s wealth is concentrating. The share of America’s wealth that our top .01 percent hold has quadrupled, rising from 2.3 percent in 1980 to 9.6 percent in 2018. The incomes of the top .01 percent of our nation’s earners have, over the same years, jumped from 1.5 percent to 4.6 percent.

Restoring the tax structure our wealthy faced back in 1980 would certainly slow our nation’s growing inequality of wealth and income. But simply restoring what we had in 1980 isn’t going to reverse the absurd concentration of America’s wealth we have now. The billions our richest have already accumulated will continue to pile up ever higher if we merely go back to the 1980 status quo. Jeff Bezos is currently sitting on well over a $100 billion appreciation in the value of his Amazon stock. None of the value of that stock will land on his federal income tax return until he sells his Amazon shares.

So what can we do? A tax on wealth would be the most direct and rational way to address America’s obscene level of wealth concentration.

Relying solely on taxes on income or real estate property or consumption is never going to adequately reverse how concentrated our nation’s wealth has become. Yes, the wealthy should pay much higher income tax rates on their earnings from wealth. Yes, they should face property taxes and excise taxes on consumption like the rest of us. But the wealthy should also face an additional tax on their actual wealth.

Such a tax would function as a constraint on the accumulation of additional wealth and also raise significant revenue, even if some rich evaded this new levy. Household wealth in excess of $172 million, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, would represent a tax base of $6.3 trillion. Household wealth in excess of $31 million would represent a tax base of over $13 trillion.

Senator Elizabeth Warren last year proposed a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3 percent tax above $1 billion. If this tax had been in place in 1982, Saez and Zucman calculate, the Fortune 400 share of our nation’s wealth would have increased from 1 percent to 2 percent in 2018. In real life, without that tax in effect, the Fortune 400 share rose to 3.5 percent in 2018.

According to Saez and Zucman, a 10 percent tax rate on wealth in excess of $1 billion would have, if begun in 1982, kept the Forbes 400 share of the nation’s wealth at its 1982 level of 1 percent.

We can’t turn the clock back to 1982. But we can take serious steps to undo the inequality damage we’ve experienced since then. Our suggestion: Let’s add a third tier to Senator Warren’s proposal. On wealth in excess of $5 billion, let’s now impose a 10 percent tax.

Might this levy cause those fortunes well above the $5 billion mark to actually shrink over time? Perhaps, but that wouldn’t be so terrible. After all, any rich household with a mere $5 billion would still have enough wealth to cover $100,000 per day of expenses for over a century.

We would see a far worse result — for our democratic well-being — if we permitted fortunes over $5 billion to grow ever larger. So let’s err on the side of reversing America’s obscene inequality, not protecting multibillionaires.

The COVID Pandemic and the Housing Crisis

Yixia Cai & Shawn Fremstad

Over 20 million people lost jobs and wages during the initial months of the pandemic. In July 2020, the economy was still down nearly 13 million jobs from its February level. The CARES Act, which was signed into law on March 27, 2020, included a number of provisions designed to replace lost income and keep people in their homes. These federal measures, along with ones adopted in some states and cities, have undoubtedly helped millions of people stay in their homes during the pandemic. Yet, housing insecurity — as measured by missing or deferring rent or mortgage payments, or having little confidence in one’s ability to make rent or mortgage payments — was very high during the initial months of the pandemic.

A forthcoming CEPR report will document trends and disparities in housing insecurity before and during the pandemic. This preview reviews the main findings of the forthcoming report. The findings include:

+ Nearly one-in-three renters experienced housing insecurity, on average, each week from late April 2020 through July 2020. Among homeowners, about one-in-six were housing insecure during this period.

+ Hispanic and Black renters have seen particularly large increases in housing insecurity, with roughly 45 percent of renters in both groups reporting housing insecurity during the pandemic, an increase of about 13 percentage points for Hispanic renters and 8 percentage points for Black renters since 2019.

+ Among households with children, racial and ethnic gaps in housing insecurity — between white and Black households and white and Hispanic households — narrowed between 2017 and 2019. But this progress has been lost. Roughly 44 to 45 percent of Hispanic and Black households with children were housing insecure each week between April and July 2020, and the racial and ethnic gaps in housing insecurity were wider than at any point in 2017 to 2019.

This preview also uses logistic models to examine the relative contribution of certain demographic characteristics and labor market factors in predicting housing hardship. Findings that use these models include:

+ Renters who lost jobs or earnings were 2.7 times more likely to be housing insecure than their job-stable counterparts. Similarly, mortgage holders who lost jobs or earnings were three times as likely to experience housing insecurity as job-stable mortgage holders.

+ Low-income households, people of color, and households with children generally all had higher odds of housing insecurity compared to their reference groups (respectively, households with income of $50,000–$99,999, white people, and households without children).

+ Black women had the highest probability of housing insecurity, while white men had the lowest. Black men were just behind Black women in terms of risk. Next were Asian women, and then, all with roughly similar risks, were Hispanic women, Hispanic men, and Asian men.

Several of the CARES Act measures that were designed to replace lost income and keep people in their homes expired in late July, including a $600 per week increase in Unemployment Insurance and a  federal moratorium on evictions in federally assisted housing. The HEROES Act, passed by the House of Representatives in May, would extend and expand the eviction moratorium, renew the UI benefit increase, and provide $200 billion in new funding for housing and homelessness programs. The Senate, however, has yet to pass similar legislation, and negotiations between Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse. Absent a massive increase in direct financial assistance to struggling renters and homeowners, these findings suggest that millions of strapped renters and homeowners will go deeper into debt, face more hardship and insecurity, and ultimately lose or be evicted from their homes.

Housing Cost Burdens Before the Pandemic

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), renters and homeowners are housing cost burdened if they spend more than 30 percent of household income on housing and utilities. Prior to the pandemic, approximately 20.8 million renter households — nearly 48 percent of all renter-occupied households — were housing cost burdened, including about 10.9 million who spend over half of their income on housing.

Low-income households with children are particularly likely to have heavy rent burdens. Figure 1 shows the percentage of households with children that are rent burdened in each income quintile. Over three-quarters of households in the first quintile (with pretax money income below $21,400) were severely housing cost burdened, meaning they spent more than half their monthly income on rent and utilities. Over 30 percent of households in the second quintile (income between $21,400 and $39,000) were severely housing cost burdened. By contrast, hardly any households with children in the 4th income quintile (with income between $60,000 and $94,400) were severely housing cost burdened.

Housing Insecurity Trends Before and During the Pandemic

Figure 2 shows the percentage of households that have experienced housing insecurity — specifically, concern about being able to pay next month’s rent or mortgage — since 2017, by race and ethnicity. Figure 3 shows the share of households with one or more children that have experienced housing insecurity over the same time period. The 2020 data are from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a weekly experimental survey which began on April 23, 2020. The data for 2017 to 2019 are from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). The SHED question is similar to the HPS question, but with some wording differences. (see Methodology, below, for more details.)

As Figure 2 displays, on average, nearly one-in-three renters experienced housing insecurity each week from late April 2020 through July 2020. Among homeowners, about one-in-six were housing insecure, a figure roughly the same as in the 2019 SHED. The lack of an increase in housing insecurity among homeowners overall may be surprising, but is likely due to differences between renters and homeowners, including in demographic and job-related factors, and differences in the surveys.

As shown in Figure 2, there is a clear widening of housing insecurity by race and ethnicity among both renters and homeowners. In 2020, approximately 45 percent of Hispanic renters and 44 percent of Black renters were housing insecure, up by about 13 percentage points and 8 percentage points, respectively, since 2019. Among Hispanic homeowners, insecurity also increased between 2019 and 2020, but much more modestly.

Housing Insecurity Among Households with Children

Figure 3 shows housing insecurity among households that include one or more children (in this figure, renters and owners are combined). In the three years before the pandemic, the housing insecurity gaps between white and Black and white and Hispanic households had been narrowing. But during the past several months this progress was lost and these gaps are now greater than in prior years with roughly 44 to 45 percent of Hispanic and Black households with children experiencing housing insecurity. Over the past three years, the housing insecurity gap between white and Black and white and Hispanic households with children has ranged from 15 to 20 percentage points; this has increased to 26 percentage points because of recent job losses. These figures do not directly measure eviction, foreclosure, or other involuntary housing transitions. But given that Black and Hispanic families generally have lower incomes and fewer assets to draw upon than white families, they are much more likely to face negative housing transitions in the coming months.

Relationships Between Jobs and Earnings Losses, Household Characteristics, and Housing Insecurity During the Pandemic

This preview uses logistic models to estimate the relationship between a households’ characteristics and two measures of housing insecurity in the past several months: (1) deferring or not paying last month’s rent or mortgage (past insecurity), and (2) having no or only slight confidence in paying next month’s rent or mortgage, including having already deferred, or planning to defer, the upcoming payment (future insecurity). An odds ratio greater than one suggests that the likelihood of the outcome was higher than in the reference group; values less than one indicate a lower likelihood of the outcome compared to the reference group.

As shown in Figure 4, households in which someone has lost a job or employment income since the beginning of the pandemic had considerably higher odds of housing insecurity than those without recent job or earnings losses. Renters who had lost jobs or earnings had 2.7 times higher odds of housing insecurity than their job-stable counterparts.

Similarly, low-income households, non-white people, and households with children generally all had higher odds of housing insecurity compared to their reference groups (respectively, households with incomes of $50,000–$99,999, white people, and households without children).

+ When asked about their confidence in paying next month’s rent or mortgage, the odds of Hispanic households feeling less confident were about 70 percent higher than those of their white counterparts regardless of housing tenure. The odds for Black households were even higher, more than twice that of white renters who may struggle with rent payment.

+ Renter households with children had significantly higher odds (68 percent) of falling behind on rent compared with childless households. Among owner-occupied households, having children increases the odds of housing hardship by about 40 percent.

+ Unsurprisingly, the most financially disadvantaged households, regardless of housing tenure, exhibit exceptionally higher odds of falling behind on housing costs (about two times greater), or lacking confidence about upcoming payments (three times greater), than those with annual incomes between $50,000 and $99,999.

One striking finding shown in Figure 4 is that homeowners have not been immune to the pandemic’s adverse effects on housing security, despite the seemingly stable overall trend shown in Figure 2. Homeowners who have lost employment income since the beginning of the pandemic (or live with someone who has) are roughly three times as likely to report mortgage payment difficulties as homeowners who have not lost jobs. Similarly, the odds of lacking confidence about mortgage payments or deferring payments are approximately 2.6 times higher for Black homeowners compared to their white counterparts.

Finally, this preview examines whether racial and ethnic differences in housing insecurity (pooling renters and homeowners) vary by respondent’s gender, while controlling for various other characteristics, including age, education, presence of children in the household, household size, income category, employment status, employment sector, and state of residence.

As Figure 5 shows, the largest differences in housing security are by the respondent’s race or ethnicity. But women are generally more vulnerable than men regardless of race and ethnicity. Hispanics are an exception, with both genders having about the same risk of housing insecurity. Black women have the highest probability of housing insecurity (0.25), while white men have the lowest, with the difference in risk being about 13 percentage points. Black men are just behind Black women in terms of risk. Next are Asian women (0.20), and then, all with roughly similar risks, are Asian men, Hispanic men and women.

Discussion

As a result of the pandemic and the associated economic crisis, millions of renters and homeowners have fallen behind on their housing payments. Housing insecurity is much higher today, particularly among renters, than before the pandemic. Hispanic renters have seen the largest upward surge in housing insecurity since last year, followed by Black renters. The pandemic has erased the mildly declining patterns of housing deprivation among households with children over the past three years, and widened the disparities across racial and ethnic groups seen since 2017.

It is worth noting that due to differences between the SHED and the HPS surveys, as well as the experimental nature of the HPS, the trends documented in this preview may not fully reflect the exact magnitude of rising housing insecurity during the pandemic. A consistent survey that used the same methods and questions from 2017 through 2020 might show larger changes in housing insecurity between 2019 and April-July 2020, including for white renters and homeowners. However, the overall picture is clear: households that have lost jobs and employment income during the initial months of the pandemic are much more likely to be housing insecure than job-stable households, and racial and ethnic gaps in housing insecurity have widened.

Our analyses that adjust for a range of demographic and other factors further confirm this pattern. Recent household job or earnings losses are significantly associated with housing insecurity. Members of racial or ethnic groups are more likely to be housing insecure. This finding holds for both renters and homeowners. Among owner-occupied households, the odds of skipping last month’s or lacking confidence for next month’s housing payment for Black people is nearly twice that for Hispanics, when compared to their white counterparts. Measures that could prevent foreclosure for homeowners are as important as any rent relief that would help stabilize renters’ financial situations.

Combining data on renter- and owner-occupied households, we find that a typical Black household (irrespective of the respondent’s gender) has a much higher probability of experiencing housing insecurity, even after adjusting for other individual or household characteristics. As a result, the crisis is likely to increase the debt burdens on Black renters and homeowners, increase the number who are evicted or end up in foreclosure, and reduce the ability of Black renters to purchase homes. The combined result is likely to be a widening of the already well-documented racial wealth gap.

Rent and mortgage payments that are deferred or otherwise unpaid become debts that households remain liable for, even during periods covered by federal, state, or local moratoria on evictions and foreclosures. As households that missed or deferred payments gradually work to get back to their financial floor, they will be saddled with large debts. These will be particularly unmanageable for the millions of low-income households that were cost-burdened even in the best of recent times. This makes it particularly important for Congress and the President to quickly come to an agreement on pandemic relief legislation that includes a large increase in direct financial relief to low- and middle-income renters and homeowners who have deferred or otherwise missed past housing payments, and those who will be unable to make housing payments in the months ahead.

Methodology

The 2020 data on housing insecurity are from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a weekly experimental survey which began on April 23, 2020. Two survey questions in the Census HPS measure housing insecurity: (a) whether households paid or deferred last month’s housing payment, and (b) how confident respondents were that their household will be able to pay its next rent or mortgage payment on time. The listed answers for the second question were  no/slight/moderate/high confidence and payment is/will be deferred. We categorize answers to the second question as a dichotomous variable and define households as lacking confidence about upcoming payments if they reported no or slight confidence or if they anticipated deferring, or had already deferred, next month’s payment. The data on housing insecurity in 2017 to 2019 are from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). The specific question asked in the 2019 SHED is: “Are you expecting to be unable to pay or only make a partial payment on each of the following bills this month?” with “rent or mortgage” being one of the listed bills.

Gassing Immigrants with a Highly Toxic Industrial Disinfectant in Detention

Dave Lindorff

As the first and hopefully only presidential term of Donald Trump nears its November 3 moment of truth, the accusations of fascist or even Nazi tendencies and actions by him and his administration have multiplied.

But this latest one I’m calling out is particularly horrific: The use of a powerful “for industrial use only” disinfectant called HDQ Neutral on captive immigrants at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a Trump administration-funded for-profit detention center outside of Los Angeles, CA.

According to a report in the Independent, a UK newspaper, the powerful toxic ammonia-based chemical made by Spartan Chemical Co. is being sprayed in the occupied detention facility despite company warnings on the label that it only be used near people outdoors, not in confined spaces. Worse yet, there are allegations from detainees that the chemical is being sprayed directly on them, though the company’s label warns that exposure to the eyes can cause “permanent eye damage” while inhaling it can cause lung damage , breathing difficulty and asthma.

The Nazi connection?  As Charles Vidich, author of a powerful and timely new book due out later this year on the history of quarantines in the US, dating back to the earliest days of the Colonies in the 1600s down to the present (Germs at Bay, Praeger),  notes, Zyklon B, the extermination gas of choice of Hitler’s Third Reich for its extermination camps, was actually a powerful cyanide-based insecticide invented during the late 19th Century. It was for decades, well into the early 20th century, used to fumigate ships engaged in international trade in order to kill rats, mice, fleas and other vermin.  The Nazis adopted a variant of the product to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, people with deformities or retardation and other “undesirables” during the war years.

Now we have the administration of Donald Trump, whose own family had a history of Nazi sympathies and who himself has referred to Nazi demonstrators in the US as “good people,” similarly using an insecticide/disinfectant that is highly toxic and life-threatening on detained immigrants awaiting deportation

.Investigations by Reuters an organization called the Shut Down Adelanto Coalition and a not-for-profit legal organization called Earthjustice, have learned that immigrants locked indoors in detention at Adelanto have been getting sprayed “as often as every 15-30 minutes,” sometimes directly at them, with a chemical that the company says should only be used outdoors or in well-ventilated areas. They are reporting rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, headaches and breathing difficulties among other symptoms following the spraying.

I must point out that when I first learned about the vicious way African slaves were treated in the colonies and later in the United States by their owners, it struck me, even as a youngster, that it was strangely worse than these white owners treated their own beasts of burden. I wondered at that, only coming to understand later as I got older, that the abuse of slaves — the whippings, the starving, the over-working, etc. —  was a control mechanism, a dehumanization process of both owner and slave that wasn’t necessary in dealing with horses or cattle. I recognize that the same analysis applies to the way ICE and its detention center contract employees cruelly abuse their immigrant captives.

HDQ Neutral thankfully isn’t as toxic as the Zyklon B gas used by Nazi death squads at the German extermination camps, but what is being done is still a grotesque chemical assault on America’s “undesirables,”  differing from the Nazi efforts against their human victims only in degree.  The inhumanity of the overlords administering this toxin to their captive victims is little different from that which was punished, often with death sentences, in the Nuremberg Trials that followed World War II.

One can only hope that when this Trumpian nightmare is over in the US, Donald Trump and his criminal henchmen in the Homeland Security Department will be similarly hauled before a court to face crimes against humanity charges for their abuse of immigrants, including young children, as well as for their other grotesque crimes.