by Julia C. Reinhart

While President Obama tried to improve the plight of the homeless, a President Romney wouldn’t even try. Without a major change in Congress, the fate of America’s homeless is unlikely to improve. States just don’t have money to deal with the problem.

With the US Presidential elections upon us, much is still talked about the economy, foreign policy, and ‚yes, whether Barack Obama is actually a naturally born citizen, and thus eligible to be president – never mind it’s the job he has held for the past four years. Conservative Republicans trip over themselves in making offensive statements about abortion and rape, scaring women voters with a sense of self-determination. Liberal pundits meanwhile try to outbid themselves in doomsday scenarios on how the world would end should Mitt Romney be elected. None of these realize that there is a group of Americans who will be losers, no matter who wins the race for the White House: Middle and lower class Americans, from a high school teacher all the way down to the homeless man on the street.

The big white elephant in the room that rarely gets discussed during American electoral politics is the systematic neglect of the country’s infrastructure, and the policy consequences that have sprung from that, especially in the area of affordable housing and combating homelessness. According to a white paper published by the Political Research Institute at Brown University, non-military infrastructure spending in the United States from school buildings to highways and affordable housing has declined from 3.8% to 1.8% of all government held assets between 1951 and 2011. Since then, the country has seen six Republican and six Democratic presidents, hence this is hardly a partisan issue. Core elements of the infrastructure, such as electricity grids and phone systems, have been economized, meaning that profitability aspects drive availability and maintenance rather than need.

In rural areas as well as in low income neighborhoods in large cities, electrical grids are regularly delivered via overhead lines, as there are fewer customers and those that buy the services can’t afford the added value services that drive corporate profits. Meanwhile in areas of high density and high income, electrical wires tend to run underground, protecting them from falling trees, swirling tornados, and heavy snowfalls brought on by America’s often harsh weather patterns. Power outages in New York City brought on by Hurricanes Irene and Sandy are an illustrative example: While Irene brought on heavy rains over the five boroughs of the world’s financial capital, Manhattan suffered some flooding but little lasting consequence once the storm passed. Long Island and low lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens however, which are more exposed to cross-winds from the sea, and also subjected to the storm surge brought on by the Hurricane suffered measurable structural damage, downed trees and power lines, and about 4 feet of flood waters covering the lowest parts of Long Island’s southern shore and Staten Island, bringing on substantial beach erosion, but no deaths.

If Irene was a dry run, it did not prepare New York City’s infrastructure for a storm the size and power of Hurricane Sandy. While government officials went through the same preparation proceedings that helped them safeguard the city’s 8.5 million population during Irene, little was done to improve or protect the power grid from flooding. For days, weather forecasters announced that the storm surge with Sandy could be significant, and sandbags were duly deployed around lower Manhattan – rows of them 1-2 feet high leaning against doors and entranceways of buildings. Yet the South Ferry subway tunnel remained open towards the sea, and many of the transformer stations run by Con Edison, the local utility company, that were underground did not receive sufficient flood proofing.

So, when the storm surge came, transformer stations blew out as electric equipment, under high voltage at the time, was introduced to salt water, an explosive and corrosive mixture that left half of Manhattan and significant parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island in the dark. Subway tunnels flooded from above when the East and Hudson Rivers jumped their embankments and from below once water pushed into the South Ferry Tunnel and from there all the way up through the system. This time, the infrastructure shortages were hard to ignore, because they also significantly affected Manhattan. Weather damages in the outer boroughs, while having a significant impact on the local communities, go largely ignored in the public discourse of the city. Government officials, most of them Governor Andrew Cuomo are now loudly calling for infrastructure improvements in light of changing weather patterns.

While a good part of Manhattan’s intellectual elite, who live in areas like SoHo, Chelsea, and other Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, had to survive several days without power and water, leaving fresh food, drinking water and cell phone coverage in short supply, the worst impact of the storm disproportionally affected blue-collar and low income communities. Affordable housing in New York City is in short supply, and the housing projects and affordable single family homes that do exist are built on relatively cheap land, low lying areas and landfills that no high-level real estate developer would touch or use. Also, much of the lower priced single family homes were build before 1970, making for an aging housing stock build from cheap materials, which have a harder time resisting high winds and rising waters. Gas and waterlines tend to be old, cell phone coverage spotty even at the best of times, and power lines more often than not run tangled above ground. With the power out for as much as two weeks, and temperatures falling to the freezing mark, elderly residents of affordable housing units have already started to die from exposure. As the freeze and the power outage in the outer boroughs continues, many more may follow.

Many residents of public housing projects live on welfare and food stamps, a government allowance of $200 / month for a single person or $367 / month for a family of two. This amount often barely covers their basic needs for feeding their families, and leaves them ill-prepared to carry the extra burden of stocking up on food reserves when storms approach. The Rockaways, a particularly hard hit, and also very poor part of Queens located on a barrier island in the Long Island sound, saw survivors of Hurricane Sandy scrounge for food when emergency relief aid was slow to arrive. All the power lines to the island were cut, the bridge for cars was closed, and the subway tracks were flooded. Residents of the Rockaways were trapped on their island with little ability to go search or receive aid supplies, leaving them both cold and hungry for days before government relief services ramped up.

The lack of affordable housing combined with an outdated attitude towards the causes of homelessness is also one of the key drivers behind the city’s rising homeless population. In the early 1970s, as scores of veterans returned from Vietnam and struggled to re-integrate into society, many of the ideas shaping today’s governmental policy towards poverty and homelessness were formulated, operating on what then were perceived to be the key factors for homelessness: Drug or alcohol abuse, and mental illness. Unemployment, while existent, was less perceived to play a role. Fatima Shad‚ a Red Cross worker focusing on homeless outreach explains: “They thought, you choose to be homeless, and yes, they basically assume that it’s your fault that you’re homeless, you had to be a druggie, a drunk, crazy, or all three.”

The mentally ill have formed a large group among the homeless population, ever since the US government started to shutter mental health institutions in the 1950s, leaving many in need of serious long-term care without a support network that could keep them in a home. Many of the Vietnam veterans who wound up homeless did have mental and substance abuse issues, as did many other homeless who followed.

However, as Shad points out, the face of homelessness is changing dramatically: A long-standing trend of redevelopment and gentrification started in the 1960s, where entire poor neighborhoods are condemned and leveled to make room for real estate development projects that promise higher tax revenues to city and state governments. Due to a lack of funding for alternative low income housing and the recent flood of foreclosures brought about by the 2008 financial crisis, this gentrification process has given rise to a new form of homeless population: Those who simply can no longer afford to pay the rent or mortgage, because they’re either underpaid or underemployed. If you go into the housing courts, they’re packed, and everybody is two seconds away from an eviction: Shad explains: “It doesn’t stop. Monday morning through Friday night, case after case, people are begging marshals for mercy, and the court system, depending on the borough you’re in, might be a little more lenient, giving you another week or two before you’re being evicted. But once people go to shelters, if they don’t go to somebody’s sofa, they’re entering a very challenging world.”

It is also important to note that homeless statistics provided by the New York City government only count those actually housed in shelters. They don’t count people living on somebody’s couch, those living in subways, or those on the street who are not in a shelter environment. The official number of shelter beds in New York City is 46,000, which is the number of homeless Mayor Bloomberg keeps quoting. However, the number of people actually without a permanent home of their own is a high multiple of that. Most that do enter the shelter system are either part-time or fulltime workers, and get assigned to so-called “working shelters” where every resident is working.

Once homeless, keeping down a job becomes incredibly difficult. The New York City shelter system – still operating on the assessment that anyone homeless must have mental and substance or alcohol abuse issues – requires residents to attend a rigorous schedule of meetings and assessments in order to comply with requirements that allow them to stay. The appointments range from medical and psychological assessments, to workplace trainings. If a homeless person still has a full-time job, keeping these appointments is extremely difficult, as they’re usually set during business hours. This way a homeless person is trapped in a catch-22: On the one hand they have to go to work to earn a living that may be able to get them back on their feet and back to permanent housing, on the other hand, if they don’t keep the appointments requested by the shelter system, they get thrown back out into the streets. Once inside the shelter system many homeless do wind up losing their jobs, as employers tend to be unsympathetic with regards to the absences required by the shelter system. As Shad puts it, the homeless are being put on a hamster wheel with little chance of ever getting anywhere meaningful – and she thinks that is entirely by design.

Homeless shelters in New York City are private enterprises, which are reimbursed by the city for each bed and service they provide. For every mandatory meeting and assessment, the shelter receives a fee from the city in addition to the fees billed for the beds they provide. Furthermore, a homeless person that qualifies for food stamps gets their allowances confiscated by the shelter system, on the basis that they are being provided with three meals a day. A single person, who would normally receive $200 a month, is left with only $16.50 a month in food stamps for personal use. However, many in the shelter system are either on appointments or at work when the meals are served, so they miss out on them and are forced to find alternate sources for food.

If a homeless person works, the money that could be saved up for the security deposit on an apartment must so be used to buy food instead. Also, the meals that are served in the shelter system are highly dubious in nutritional value. No consideration is given to vegetarians, or those in need of a heart-healthy diets or ones for other specialist medical needs. Shad calls it “straight-up slop.”

One way to address the shortage of funds for food is to apply for public assistance, which results in more meetings and appointments for the shelter resident to attend, making it even more difficult for the person to keep down a fulltime job while conducting all the appointments and meetings imposed by the public assistance and housing authorities. In this day and age, and particularly in this economy it’s impossible for a person to do all these appointment and keep down a job. Shad elaborates, “More and more people come crying to me saying ‘I just lost my job.’ And when I ask why, they say, ‘I had to go to my public assistance meeting or I’d be kicked out of my shelter.’”

To make matters worse, Shad contends that shelter officials often schedule competing appointments with the public assistance authorities to compound the complications. Remember, they think it’s your fault you’re homeless, so you’re not supposed to succeed, because in their eyes you can’t.

Another side effect of a shelter resident applying for public assistance is that the shelter will receive a rent allowance in addition to the government subsidy these shelters receive for offering beds to homeless. Shad continues, “From there it just goes on and on, this is a money making enterprise. It’s human warehousing at its finest.”

The shelter system is incentivized to see its residents fail at re-integration. And how’s it even possible if there’s no affordable housing. Lack of investment in new stock has ensured that waiting lists for the homes that do exist are several years long. Voucher systems, which subsidized 70% of a person’s rent in the first year with an option of 50% subsidy in a second year, called Advantage systems, were introduced under President Clinton as a stop-gap measure to help reintegrate homeless shelter residents into the regular rental market. However, in the meantime, only very few new affordable housing units where built, and many landlords, especially in New York City, abused the system, by charging 30% above regular rates. With increasing budget pressures brought on by the 2008 financial crisis on federal, state, and city budgets, funding for these vouchers was finally cut completely in mid 2012. According to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress prepared by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 40% of homeless today are families, usually a single mother and children. Many of these families had Advantage housing vouchers that allowed them to transition out of a shelter into regular apartments. With the end of the Advantage voucher payments many of these families are now moving back into an already overcrowded shelter system.

Adding to the problem is the waves of veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom are suffering from PTSD. While President Obama has talked on occasion about addressing homelessness amongst veterans, recently saying at a campaign event that “nobody who serves, nobody who fights for this country should have to fight for a job or a roof over their heads when they come back home,” little has been done in terms of tangible policy achievements. While his 2009 stimulus package did include allocations for affordable housing, his primary focus in this area was on mortgage owners under threat of foreclosure to refinance. However, Obama’s Affordable Refinance Program wound up helping only a small number of the targeted recipients, leading the Republican controlled house to kill the foreclosure relief program in 2011, calling it a waste of money, since the program only helped about 750,000 distressed homeowners, instead of the targeted 7 million. According to a Congressional Panel that studied the program before it ended, a major reason for the program’s failure was that “loan servicers, who act as middlemen between the distressed homeowners and the investors who own the mortgage, often find it more profitable to foreclose than to modify.” In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama announced revisions to the program aimed at simplifying the process, but the plan is still awaiting Congressional action.

In 2010, Obama announced a plan, called “Opening Doors” that would, as he claimed, end homelessness in American by 2020. Lauded by advocates of homelessness issues as a major breakthrough, the initiative ultimately went nowhere as Congress declined to provide the $1 billion in funding it required.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, when touring Louisiana in September for his campaign, told victims of Hurricane Isaac, who became homeless after the storm to “Go home and call 211” – the number that provides information about health and human service programs to Louisiana residents. According to his campaign website, Romney’s housing plan consists primarily of making the government sell the roughly 200,000 homes currently vacant due to foreclosure and an easing of bank regulations to “restore a functioning marketplace and restart lending to creditworthy borrowers.” This plan also calls for an end to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government agencies who underwrite most mortgages issued to middle and low-income homebuyers. Those already without a home are not mentioned in Romney’s policy papers at all.

While President Obama tried, but failed, to improve the plight of the homeless, a President Romney wouldn’t even attempt to alleviate their plight. Without a major change of heart in Congress, the fate of America’s poor and homeless is unlikely to improve, no matter who wins the election today.

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Blood And Thunder: New York After Hurricane Sandy
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by Laurie Penny a.k.a. @PennyRed

In the forty-eight hours since I landed in the United States, flying into storm-torn Brooklyn just days after a bunch of cars floated down Wall Street, nobody has mentioned the election to me once. You know, the presidential election, the one that’s happening in – what is it, three days? Right now, New Yorkers have more important things on their minds.

Access to food, fuel and electricity, for a start. People who do have these things are opening up their homes to friends and strangers who don’t. Across the city, volunteers are packing cars and heading to the disaster zones of Red Hook and the Rockaway, as well as to Staten Island, the borough worst hit when Hurricane Sandy battered through to flatten homes and devastate lives.

Like I said, nobody’s talking about the election. The island I always privately think of as Starship Manhattan spent days cut off from the rest of New York state, all of the lights out for days under 34th street, basements choked with brackish water, old people stranded in their homes. There’s an actual crisis taking place: houses have been destroyed, lives lost. The eighteen-month media circus that passes for representative politics in this country seems worlds away from the women in Staten Island weeping in front of the remains of their family homes on the nightly news.

With it being practically impossible for anyone without a car and a full tank of fuel to cross the city, I’ve just come back from volunteering down the street at the Williamsburg Church emergency blood drive. Right now New York is in a blood crisis. When the hospitals were evacuated during the storm, there was no time to collect the blood left in storage banks when the power went out, and by the time they got everyone to safety, that blood had rotted. Now they need new blood desperately.

When me and my friend Veronica Varlow went down to the Church to open our veins for the cause, I was told that my tangy British blood was not acceptable because I might be riddled with mad cow disease (this from people who haven’t even read my Twitter feed). They did, however, need volunteers to help shepherd those donors who were waiting patiently in line for up to three hours to hand over pints of superior all-American hemoglobin. So, I pinned on a badge and spent a few hours buzzing around filling out forms for people, cleaning tables and chairs, handing out snacks and tea and generally making myself useful. Even doing something so small to help the people helping to rebuild the city felt powerful.

Blood: when disasters happen, I’m always struck by the readiness with which people queue up to restock the banks of blood, platelets, and plasma. In the days after September 11, 2001, the donation centers had to start turning people away, and indeed, here at the Williamsburg Church we’re doing the same thing; with the donation line already thirty people deep, we’re running around with sign-up sheets where eager donors can leave their name and number in case we need more blood tomorrow.

There’s something so tender about that impulse. Sure, it says, we could raise money or go and help pump water out of basements in the Lower East Side, but wouldn’t it be simpler just to give you this part of my own body that was pumping in my heart five minutes ago? I’m pretty sure that if the New York blood centre were to put the call out tomorrow asking people to donate a pound of flesh cut from the chest closest to the heart because someone stranded on Staten Island needs it, there’d be plenty of volunteers, and not all of them would be kinky Shakespeare fetishists.

When there’s a crisis on, people want to help. Running around with the snack basket I was reminded of the floods of volunteers who gave their time, money and expertise to the Occupy camps last year. Practical anarchism. Everyone so keen to do whatever they could to help. Not just the kids from all over the country who kicked in their lives to sleep in the cold and be arrested multiple times in the name of a better future, but the shop owners who shipped out their spare produce. The trained nurses who turned up to administer basic medical care to those who had none. The parents who donated freshly-baked pies and soups to the kitchens. The librarians and academics who created an enormous library that, almost a year ago, I watched the NYPD rip apart and hurl into dumpster trucks, just because it was messing up their nice clean corporate dead-zone.

It’s no accident that the original Occupy Wall Street organizers were among the first to set up and co-ordinate volunteering efforts across New York. The group, which has drifted in recent months, immediately set about organizing teams and transportation to the worst-hit areas. The Zuccotti Park protest camp which was evicted last November and the enormous post-Sandy volunteer effort going on this week are different expressions of the same thing: overwhelming human response to crisis.

Crisis is what people in the United States have been living with for at least four years. Active emergency, turning people out of their homes and into the cold, destroying lives. It’s not crass to compare a climate disaster to a juddering crisis of capitalism, because the two are connected, not least because those most responsible are also those most likely to be snugly tucked away in gated compounds shrugging their shoulders when the storm hits. Like the crash, Hurricane Sandy hit the poorest hardest, smashing through Staten Island and Rockaway while the lights stayed on on the Upper East Side.

Nobody expected it to be quite this bad. Last year’s Hurricane Irene was bearable for most. But what I’m seeing here, at least in Brooklyn where I’ve been stuck for two days, is a city coming out of a six-month paralysis: finally, there’s a concrete task that people can put their hands to.

Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant piece at Jacobin draws attention to Rebecca Solnit’s work on the communities that arise in disaster zones:

“There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks.”

Volunteerism, of course, can be regressive as well as radical. I am reminded of those “broom armies” in London in the middle of the August riots last year; the sea of white, middle-class faces holding up brooms they’d brought to unfamiliar areas of the city, the sweet intention to mop up after a disaster tempered by the idea that the kids from deprived areas who came out to fight the police could just be swept away like so much filth. Like any desperate human impulse, volunteerism can easily be co-opted, twisted into something violent, calcifying.

Greece, where I spent part of my summer documenting the human effects of economic collapse, isn’t the only developed country where people have been living in crisis for so long they are starting to numb down and accept it. As Imara Jones pointed out in The Guardian today, 50 million Americans, the same number as those in the states hardest-hit by Hurricane Sandy, are living in acute poverty, and nobody in the presidential race has deigned to talk to or about them, despite the fact that they also have votes.

How do we respond to crisis when crisis has become status quo? That’s the question facing the entire developed world this year, and neither of the men jostling to lead the nominally free world appear to have any sort of answer. The Occupy Sandy operation is not an answer either, not even the shadow-play of an answer, but it is deeply radical and compassionate. That means someone’s probably going to try to shut it down reasonably soon, especially if it continues to provide food and assistance to the needy after the floodwaters have receded. A community response to immediate external crisis can be spun as good PR for an administration, but a community response to structural, internal crisis is just embarrassing. In every case though, the most dangerous thing you can do in any crisis – the absolute worst thing you can possibly do – is sit at home and accept it.

Back to blood. Funny thing about blood: until the 1970s, America used to buy it. Blood donation, as the United States quickly discovered, is not something you want to inject with a market incentive when you have to juggle things like infection risks and supply shortages. All that changed when Richard Titmus’ book The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy was published in 1971, explaining why the values of public service beat the private market every time when it comes to social care. The private market in American blood was regulated until it became something like the British voluntary model – people coming in to open their veins for a biscuit and a cup of coffee, just because somebody else needs their blood more than they do. Quite a lot of my job at Billyburg church today was handing out packets of Oreos to younguns waiting in line to do just that – I still have no damn idea who donated those biscuits – and telling the people massing at the door that no, we have all the blood we need for today, thank you, come back tomorrow.

“There is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt,” wrote Titmus. “In not asking for or expecting any payment of money, these donors signified their belief in the willingness of other men to act altruistically in the future.” There is still enough blood beating in the cynical hearts of New Yorkers to pound out an immediate, compassionate response to crisis. Today that gives me hope.

Occupy Sandy Relief information here can be found at interoccupy.net/occupysandy/ – a website put together by the good folks at OWS, which contains all you need to know about what you can do to help. Click here for the NYC Blood Drive list of donation centers and opening times.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, feminist, and political activist from London. She is a regular writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, and has also contributed to the Independent, Red Pepper, and the Evening Standard. She is the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011) and Discordia (2012). She has presented Channel 4’s Dispatches and been on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions. Her blog, “Penny Red“, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize in 2010.

by Steven Whitney

Daily tracking polls – and there are many – estimate the number of still undecided voters heading into this last weekend before the election hovering between 3 and 7%. That’s an astonishingly high number and even if half these voters are “undecided” merely because they crave media attention, in a race labeled a dead heat, even ½ of 1% could be decisive, especially in swing states.

For those voting strictly along party or ideological lines, the choice is clear. But for independents who vote more pragmatically, haunting indecision is an understandable reaction. Campaigns have always had their share of misrepresentations, deceptive advertising, the twisting of facts to suit particular messages or candidates, and outright lies. But never more so than this year, when the clear waters of choice have been muddied by the unprecedented amount of special interest money flooded into the race courtesy of Citizens United. Money used to fire a barrage of advertisements, commercials, direct mailing, and robocalls unparalleled in history, leaving the electorate overwhelmed, disoriented, and confused.

So let’s bullet point some of the more important issues – some hotly debated, others hardly mentioned at all – keeping it brief, simple, and factual.

The Economic Recovery:

According to TIGER (Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery), the U.S. economy is “the sole bright spot” in a sluggish world economy.

“The global economic recovery is on the ropes, battered by political conflicts within and across countries, lack of decisive policy actions, and governments’ inability to tackle deep-seated problems, such as unsustainable public finances that are stifling growth,” their report states. “The U.S. economy remains the sole bright spot, with economic activity, employment and financial markets all showing unexpected although still modest strength.”

Think about that – in a worldwide cascade of drowning nations, and under the guidance of the Obama administration, the U.S. is the only one staying afloat.

In comparison, those countries following the Romney/Ryan plan of extreme austerity are sinking faster than a mob informer wearing cement overshoes.

The Debt:

For the last four years, the question of what to do about our almost $16 trillion of debt has caused much division and the rise of the Tea Party. Too often forgotten in all the hullabaloo is the fact that the Democratic Clinton administration ended its term in office with a huge surplus which the Republican Bush/Cheney administration turned into a devastating deficit, bringing the entire world to the edge of financial disaster. The debt added by the Obama administration occurred mostly through the much-needed economic stimulus, and spending on our infrastructure and social programs.

As our slow but successful recovery proves, the money spent of the stimulus allowed the U.S. to stand out as the only shining light in the world economy.

As for money spent on our infrastructure and social programs, the first not only provided jobs but much needed repair on our roads, bridges, buildings, and highways while the second supported the very survival of those Americans hardest hit by the financial crisis.

Last weekend on Up with Chris Hayes, Ilyse Hogue of The Nation neatly clarified our two choices in handling the debt. We can clear our debt ASAP by expediting payments to China and Wall Street – our two biggest creditors – or we can invest in our own future – in education and training, in rebuilding our vital infrastructure, and by stimulating growth – while paying down our debt on a sustainable schedule.

Obama/Biden proposes investing in America’s future by cutting costs and raising taxes on the richest 2%.

Romney/Ryan wants to clear the debt quickly, so long as our wealthiest citizens and corporations are not taxed even one extra penny, by cutting education and social programs. They also want to cut funding to the arts, particularly PBS, despite the fact that Elmo of Sesame Street played a vital role in calming children during Superstorm Sandy.

Jobs:

850,000 jobs per month were lost during the last year of the Bush administration which, along with the mortgage and debt crises, brought our country to the precipice of another Great Depression. Recovery was understandably slow, but starting in February, 2010, the Obama Presidency has added jobs each month since, despite the fact that House Republicans have killed every single Jobs Act proposed. Last month, House Republicans even rejected the Veteran’s Jobs Act which would have provided training and jobs for 20,000 veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Romney/Ryan has promised more jobs with more tax cuts, just as Bush did. But the Senate Research Committee released a study this past September which incontrovertibly showed that cutting taxes for the rich does not increase jobs. Senate Republicans squashed the report and it was leaked only this past week. Yet both Romney and Ryan kept hitting the stump with the same old trickle-down economics theory that has failed on a grand scale everywhere it’s been implemented.

Healthcare:

Obama instituted the Affordable Care Act and Patient Protection program, commonly called Obamacare, which eventually provides healthcare to every American, allows those with pre-existing conditions to be covered, and, importantly, cuts the costs of the programs. He supports Medicare, Title X, and Medicaid.

Romney intends to repeal Obamacare and go back to the insurance-run health programs that led to the explosive run-up in health care costs and 50 million uninsured Americans. He wants to replace Medicare with a voucher system –and vouchers will not help get you covered if you have a pre-existing condition. He also wants to hand responsibility of Medicaid to the individual states and eliminate Title X, a program that delivers comprehensive care to the poor.

Social Security:

Obama/Biden support Social Security and want to expand funding by raising the limit of employee contributions.

Romney/Ryan want to privatize Social Security without explaining what would have happened to those accounts during both the 2000 dot.com crash and the 2008 Bush/Cheney financial disaster.

Supreme Court:

At least three of our aging Supreme Court justices will retire in the next four years, most likely Ginsburg (79), Breyer (74), and Kennedy (75). Ginsburg and Breyer are often labeled liberal justices, while Kennedy has been rightly or wrongly considered the swing vote between the 4 conservatives and the 4 liberals.

If Obama selects the replacements, the Court would remain about the same, perhaps giving the so-called liberal justices a 5-4 advantage.

If Romney is elected, he would appoint solidly conservative justices, probably in their late 40s or early 50s, giving the Court a 7-2 plurality of conservative judges for years to come.

Human Rights:

Obama/Biden pledge equal rights for all Americans, regardless of race, color, and creed.

Romney/Ryan hope to kill the Equal Rights Act, the Voting Act of 1965, college grants, arts grants, and social programs that help seniors, minorities, and the poor. They also seek to place into law the Defense of Marriage Act, a constitutional provision that would define marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman (no LGBTs need apply).

Religion:

Obama/Biden stands by the 1st Amendment right of Freedom of Religion, allowing all to practice their own personal spiritual choices without government interference.

Led by the Religious Right, Republicans want to introduce into law wide-ranging faith-based policies born of extreme Christian doctrine.

Women:

Women’s issues would normally come under Human Rights, but the Republican War on Women makes it a separate category in this election cycle.

Obama/Biden support all women’s rights and claims of equal status, including the right to preventative healthcare and the right of choice over their own bodies.

Romney/Ryan advocates repeal of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that mandates equal pay for equal work for women (and all minorities). They support the Religious Right in ordering government control over women’s bodies. And Republicans engage in frequent sexist invective to put women in their place. For a fuller assessment of their stand, read this short post on the War on Women.

Disaster Relief:

Especially in light of Hurricane Sandy this past week, it’s important to emphasize that the Obama administration has rebuilt and streamlined FEMA to not only respond to natural disasters but to prepare for them as well.

Romney/Ryan plan to dismantle FEMA and put individual states in charge of their own relief. This would, of course, give rise to uneven programs – some good, some bad – but none with the resources of the federal government. And, too, how does a state even initiate disaster response when its entire infrastructure has been destroyed? Other Republicans, like Eric Cantor, want to fund disaster relief only if it’s paid for in advance, as long as none of this money comes from the upper 2%.

The Environment:

Obama has pledged to fiercely combat Climate Change by sparking the birth of Alternative Energy Sources – and his administration has done just that, investing in clean, renewable, and sustainable energy projects. Some, like Solyndra, have failed, but his success rate of 93% is extraordinarily high for start-up companies. Indeed, it’s far better than the 80% success rate Romney had investing in already going concerns businesses for Bain Capital, even counting all the jobs Romney slashed or moved overseas to increase his own profit.

Neither Romney nor Ryan are convinced that Climate Change is real, and therein is a huge problem.

The War on Terror:

After 9/11, the Bush/Cheney administration over-reacted to such an extent that a new National Security nation was born within our borders – a true Orwellian nightmare.

Most troubling was both the use and potential abuse of NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) – allowing troubling practices such as rendition, indefinite detention, “enhanced interrogation,” and even assassination – alongside surveillance programs such as Trapwire, and the deployment of drones.

An old maxim states that leaders of countries never give up powers they have inherited from others. So the electorate must judge how each candidate might use those powers in the future – and in whose hands they might be used with the least potential for harm.

While there has been far too much collateral damage from the use of drone air strikes, we’re out of Iraq and we’ll be out of Afghanistan in 2014 – so it appears as if Obama is using these powers to shorten and end our involvement in these wars. And, too, Obama initiated and signed a START treaty with Russia that greatly reduced the number of nuclear weapons in both arsenals. He has also pledged to reduce all U.S. nuclear weapons by an astounding 80%, cutting our stockpile back to a level we haven’t seen since the 1950s. Plus, his projected budget cuts Defense spending.

Romney, on the other hand, is surrounded by the same neo-con advisors that served Bush and the Cheney/Halliburton combine. He has promised to dramatically increase Defense spending by as much as 40% and has already said we should confront Iran militarily.

So Obama – a man working toward a streamlined military – sounds like a much more responsible caretaker of these dangerous powers than Romney, who clearly wants to expand them.

Foreign Policy:

As has been clear for the last five years, Obama is respected as a global leader with integrity and credibility. He has improved relations with countries that Bush and Cheney insulted, and has worked in efficient partnership with many nations.

Romney, on the other hand, embarrassed himself everywhere he went on this past summer’s overseas trip. He knows absolutely nothing about foreign affairs, even claiming Russia is our fiercest enemy, and has insulted The U.K., China, Japan, and almost every other nation he talks about.

Platforms:

If you think your country’s future is worth an hour or two of your time, read the platforms of both the Democrats and Republicans. Each one cuts through the verbal hijinks of candidates on every level by specifically stating party positions.

After reading these documents, if you still cannot divine the differences between the parties, or if you do understand all the variances but are still ambivalent, give it up – you probably shouldn’t cast a ballot you may later regret.

But since this election may very well define our destiny, the rest of you must decide which direction you want your country to take…and vote.

[..]

by Lee Camp

Obama and Romney have done a stellar job of ignoring climate change, but why are they not courageous enough to take it a step further?? I’m willing to ask the hard questions that the media backs away from…

[..]

by Rachel Allshiny

Occupy Wall Street has hit the streets of New York in force once again. This time, instead of protesting the symbiotic relationship between big banks and politics, they are organizing relief efforts in the hardest-hit areas of the city in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

In the immediate aftermath of the super storm, Occupy Wall Street activists began coordinating aid to those in need in conjunction with climate activist group 350.org and recovers.org – a site that offers tools for organizing disaster relief within affected communities. This effort, dubbed “Occupy Sandy,” combines the organizational power, established communication network, and autonomous agility of the Occupy movement to provide direct relief where it is needed the most. Occupy Sandy not only connects those who are able to donate supplies or volunteer their time with those looking for aid, but also fills in the gaps in services that organizations with non-profit status are not able to provide. For example, one recent Facebook post shows a photo of shopping carts full of perishable food that is unusable by Red Hook Initiative due to sanitation codes and the community center’s 501c3 status. The caption recommends picking the food up to redistribute “DIY style,” thus circumventing a frustrating technicality.

Remarkably, the Occupy Sandy effort is not limited to the hardcore Occupy activists who camped in Zuccotti Park and were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. The immediacy of the situation at hand and the speed at which Occupy networks were able to mobilize has drawn new recruits into a movement that had recently been losing steam.

Jeremiah Birnbaum, of Astoria, describes himself as apolitical and lives in a collective house with several activists, including some involved with Occupy Wall Street, but is not personally involved with the movement. He joined up with Occupy Sandy as a way to offer immediate help to those in need, particularly in poor communities that are often overlooked. “We asked: Who is not being helped?” Birnbaum explained in a phone interview. “I could have gone to Red Cross and done two hours of training, or I could help people right now.” He is working to coordinate efforts on the ground, matching abilities and resources to meet needs within the community, especially for those without access to the internet or social networking sites.

Birnbaum further described the process of contacting the city or other relief organizations as rife with red tape. “The bureaucracy is insane,” he said. When residents were unable to get in touch with ConEd about getting power restored to a nearby housing project, they turned instead to the Recovers.org network. When delivering the first round of donations to the stricken building, Birnbaum was asked specifically for less clothing and more lighting so that residents could get around the pitch-dark building. He immediately sent a text message asking his partner, who was at home, to request donations of flashlights, batteries, and candles through the local website they’d set up, providing his home address as a drop-off point. By the time he arrived home 15 minutes later, nearly 100 flashlights had been delivered. “I was stunned,” he admitted. “People have been given the ability to help.”

That, ultimately, may be the power of Occupy Wall Street moving forward; Restoring power to the people with their ability to organize and mobilize in a way that empowers individuals to make change within their own communities. “People ask me, are you from the Red Cross?” Birnbaum says. “We tell them no, we’re your neighbors, and we’re here to help you.” This is where a leaderless, horizontal movement can shine. As Birnbaum puts it, “There’s been this organic network created, and it works. It’s time to get away from process to focus on taking action.” Whether or not he will participate in future protests remains to be seen, but working with Occupy Sandy has initiated him into the Occupy community. “It’s made me appreciate what Occupy has been doing behind the scenes for the past year.”

Resources available for coordinating relief efforts through Occupy Sandy include a Google doc volunteer sign-up sheet, a donations page, and recovers.org pages for the communities of Staten Island, Red Hook, Astoria, and the Lower East Side. You can follow @OccupySandy on Twitter or search related hashtags, such as #SandyAid and #SandyVolunteer. You can “Like” the Occupy Sandy Facebook page or even sign up for text alerts by texting “occupysandy” to 23559.

All these resources and more have been collected on an Occupy Sandy hub by InterOccupy.

Photos by Jenna Pope (@BatmanWI), Julia C. Reinhart (@juliacreinhart), and @an0nyc.

by Greg Palast

For Mitt Romney, it’s one scary Halloween. The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout.

At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney’s so-called “blind” trust.

The union chief says, “The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

“While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys’ gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.

The Romneys’ windfall was originally exposed in The Nation magazine – see “Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza” – after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.

The full story of Romney and his “vulture fund” partners is in the New York Times bestseller, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,” available from Truthout with a contribution by clicking here.

According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen, who advised on the complaint, Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust. An approved “blind” trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President. Other groups joining the UAW and CREW include Public Citizen, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Public Campaign, People for the American Way and The Social Equity Group.

President Obama’s approved trust, for example, contains only highly-diversified mutual funds on which presidential action can have little effect. By contrast, the auto bail-out provided a windfall of over 4,000% on one single Romney investment.

In 2009, Ann Romney partnered with her husband’s key donor, billionaire Paul Singer, who secretly bought a controlling interest in Delphi Auto, the former GM auto parts division. Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, threatened to cut off GM’s supply of steering columns unless GM and the government’s TARP auto bailout fund provided Delphi with huge payments. While the US treasury complained this was “extortion,” the hedge funds received, ultimately, $12.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

As a result, the shares Singer and Romney bought for just 67 cents are today worth over $30, a 4,000% gain. Singer’s hedge fund made a profit of $1.27 billion and the Romney’s tens of millions.

The UAW complaint calls for Romney to reveal exactly how much he made off Delphi – and continues to make. The Singer syndicate, once in control of Delphi, eliminated every single UAW job – 25,000 – and moved almost all auto parts production to Mexico and China where Delphi now employs 25,000 auto parts workers.

A version of this story originally appeared on Buzzflash. Forensic Economist Greg Palast’s investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television. His latest New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, contains a comic book by Ted Rall and chapters by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[..]

by Sandor Stern

Dear Republican Friends,

Regarding Your Hostility Towards President Obama…

I know you claim the hostility arises from his “failed four years in office” – but really? I grant you there wasn’t much publically aired hostility when he ran for the Democratic nomination. No one gave him much chance against Hilary Clinton; but once he won the nomination – boy did the knives come out.

He was accused of being foreign born and therefore ineligible to be president. His birth certificate from the state of Hawaii was deemed inadequate because it was a short form – the same form given out to every baby born in that state. His birth announcement published in the Honolulu newspaper on August 4, 1961 was decried as a hoax, a forgery, or (for some of your wing nuts) a conspiracy established at his birth. Despite the Christian religion he shared with his mother and grandparents, his marriage to a Christian woman and the church they both attended with their baptized daughters, he was branded a Muslim. Even his opponent, John McCain, could not stomach the lies and corrected an addled old woman at one of his rallies who called Obama a Muslim. And the internet was flooded with racist jokes. One that arrived on my computer I recall vividly: “Obama has chosen his vice president. He is Sylvester Stallone. From now on they will be addressed as Rambo and Sambo.”

This was the hostility accorded Barak Obama before he even won the presidency. Since then the questions about his birth and his religion have continued and grown louder as the election of 2012 loomed.

There were so-called learned men who postulated that his years living in Kenya and Indonesia from ages 4 to 10 left him with an anti-colonial outlook, which was not in keeping with a truly American view of the world. When President Obama addressed a joint session of congress on September 9, 2009, South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted, “You lie.” Congressional Republican Speaker, Jon Boehner, on August 31, 2011 became the first speaker in history to tell a sitting president that he would not be permitted to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress on the date specifically requested by the White House.

During the run up to the Republican presidential nomination, the hostility broke the sound barrier. On January 25th, 2012, Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer confronted the president on his arrival in her state with a well televised angry finger in his face. Can you imagine anyone doing that to any previous president? And can you imagine any previous president facing the following attacks?

Newt Gingrich referred to this president as “the most successful food stamp president in American history” and during a November 23rd Republican debate mentioned the President’s name seven times without ever referring to him as President Obama – and was joined in that omission by the other two candidates.

Kansas House Speaker, Mike O’Neil publically cited a Bible verse calling for President Obama to be killed, his wife to be widowed and his children to be orphaned. This is the same man who forwarded an e-mail to state house republicans referring to the First Lady as “Mrs. Yo Mamma.”

Marilyn Davenport, an elected member of the Orange County, California Republican Central Committee in April of 2011, forwarded her own e-mail that included a doctored photo of the President and his parents as monkeys.

Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn said during a radio interview that he didn’t “even want to have to be associated with.. (President Obama). It’s like touching a tar baby.”

Donald Trump renewed the birther fantasy with his high profile pronouncements about sending investigators to Hawaii to dig up the hidden evidence. When that didn’t pan out, he followed up with an offer to send a $5 million donation to a charity of the President’s choice if he would release his college records and his passport application; a heavy handed way of questioning his birth and his qualifications to attend college. Even Trump’s suggested list of charities promoted his racist bias – the president could choose “inner city children in Chicago” (read African-American) or AIDS research (let’s be reminded of his attitude towards gays).

Ann Coulter tweeted after the foreign policy debate that she approved of “Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard” and Sarah Palin weighed in with the racially demeaning phrase of “shuck and jive.”

And then there’s Romney’s campaign co-chair John Sununu, who told Piers Morgan in an interview on October 24th that Colin Powell’s endorsement of President Obama was motivated by racial kinship. This is the same Sununu who previously stated that the President needed to “learn how to be an American” and, following the President’s performance in the first debate, referred to him as “lazy.” If you think that his word is innocent, think of any Caucasian president being labeled with that word? The unspoken adjunct is “shiftless.”

If you believe all of this is simply loose cannons within your party, let me remind you that unlike McCain – who stood up against racism in 2008 – Romney has not disavowed either Trump or Sununu. So please, stop the charade of pretending that your hostility towards President Obama is policy based. This is not about policy; this is personal – and ugly. To quote Justice Welch – who presided over another ugly chapter in American history, the Army-McCarthy Hearings on June 9, 1954, which confronted Senator Joe McCarthy’s lies and deceit – Have you no sense of decency?

The question lingers…

Your inquisitive friend,

Sandy

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