The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 11 Issue 30…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…July 27, 2008

Intuit's Vibe

The House with Nobody in It

By Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track

I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black

I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute

And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.

I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;

That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.

I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;

For it wouldn't be so lonely, if it had a ghost or two.

This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass,

And somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.

It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied;

But what it needs the most of all is some people living inside.

If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid

I'd put a gang of men to work with brush and saw and spade.

I'd buy that place and fix it up the way it used to be

And I'd find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free.

Now, a new house standing empty, with staring window and door,

Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store.

But there's nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and lone

For the lack of something within it that it has never known.

But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,

That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,

A house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up his stumbling feet,

Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.

So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track

I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back,

Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart,

For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart.

Bit of History

Homeownership: An American Dream (1900-2000)

Owning one's home has long been considered a part of the "American Dream." Historically, home equity has represented the largest part of household net worth, which is defined as the value of assets minus debts. Other assets that make up household net worth include interest earning assets, checking accounts, stock and mutual fund shares, real estate, motor vehicles, value of business or profession and mortgages held by sellers.

In 1900, less than half of all US householders owned their homes. From 1900 to 1920, the homeownership rate slowly but steadily declined from 46.5 percent in 1900 to 45.9% in 1920. The 1920's economic boom saw a rise in the nation's homeownership rate to 47.8% by 1930. However, the economic bust of the Great Depression drove the national homeownership rate to 43.6 percent by 1940, the lowest level of the century.

The homeownership rate rose rapidly in the post-World War II economic boom. Over the course of two decades, thanks to a growing economy, favorable tax laws, a revived home building industry, and easier financing laws, the national homeownership rate exceeded 60 percent.

Not surprisingly, individual state trends in homeownership did not always closely mirror the national trends. Sparsely populated states with majority white populations tended to have higher homeownership rates than more densely populated states with large urban black populations. For instance, in 1900, North Dakota had a homeownership rate of 80 percent, the highest ever recorded by a state. While its homeownership rate fell to about 50 percent during the Great Depression, its homeownership rate increased rapidly to well over 60 percent in a single decade. Some of its neighbors showed a similar trend.

Many southern states with large black populations had very low homeownership rates with little change during the early decades of the 20^th century. However, many of these states experienced a tremendous boom after WWII, and experienced homeownership rates above the national average.

Closely associated with homeownership, the median net worth of US households stood at $40,000 in 1995. Median home equity, the largest part of the household net worth, was $50,000 that year. While the net worth of households with a white householder was $49,030, more than $9,000 above the national median, net worth for households with a black householder was $7,073. In general, according to the Commerce Department's Census Bureau, median net worth of householders increased with the age of the householder, rising from $7,428 for those under 35 to $92,399 for householders age 65 and older for 1995.

In 2000, roughly 66 percent of householders in the United States owned their own homes. White householders had the highest homeownership rate (71 percent), which was higher than the national rate. In contrast, the black householders rate was 46 percent. Blacks had the highest homeownership rates in the states of South Carolina (60.9) and Mississippi (60.7). (Source: US Census Bureau Housing Surveys at www.census.gov)

Welfare to Learned Helplessness

By John Burl Smith

Fighting desperately to stave off impeachment, Bill Clinton (1993) implemented Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. Essentially Clinton, "Ended welfare as we know it." Clinton's action recast the mould whites poured blacks into after 1968. Welfare, as we knew it, was a New Deal program created for whites to soften the Great Depression's impact. Jim Crow segregation denied blacks access to welfare until the 1950s.

Locked in American bond slavery (1619) for 146 years, following emancipation, blacks emerged mired in poverty (1865). Subjected to the whims of federal programs- i.e., Reconstruction, the Freedmen Bureau, etc- blacks were never allowed to develop wealth nor were they compensated for their years of bond slavery. By 1890, segregation forced blacks into a second class status of economic slavery, where they remained until minimal changes began after Brown v Board of Education (1954). This unbroken legacy of poverty plagued slave descendants. In order to survive racism, lynching and discrimination, they developed an urban ghetto society.

The current perceptions of neo-liberals, conservatives, academicians, politicians, and policymakers of urban blacks mirror those held of the poor during the Victorian era. For them, problems of the inner-city are caused by "individuals whose socially pathological behavior is magnified by the spatial concentration of poverty around them." "Concentrated poverty" is a metaphor used to avoid acknowledging the institutionalized racism whites employed to create these conditions. Policymakers blame poverty on slave descendants, who are the victims of segregation, discrimination, racism, and a hostile environment that they have been forced to endure.

Even though the root cause of 'concentrated poverty' is institutionalized racism, as well as urban planners and politicians that saved on land costs by building high density projects, these facts are ignored to absolve whites, in general, and the government, in particular, of all responsibility for creating and maintaining blacks in "concentrated poverty."

Stigmatizing public housing occupants with descriptions like "concentrated poverty" fostered allegations such as social pathology, which have been lodged against them. Apologists for the system postulate that "poverty is caused by blacks' pathological behavior, which spread like a "contagion" through urban ghettos. The economic and social situations into which so many disadvantaged blacks are born produce modes of adaptation and create behavior that reflect 'self-perpetuating pathology." Conversely, if the basis of this so-called black pathology is overcrowding or blacks concentrated in close proximity, then such pathology began aboard slave ships long before inner city ghettos.

A theoretical construct developed by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman called "learned helplessness," which is discussed in a series of articles I published in The DISH, T.H.I.N.C. (Teaching Humanity In New Consciousness): The Chrysalis of Evolution, and ARCHANGEL: A Hip Hop Vision Of Love and the Battle of Good Verses Evil, attributes such pathology to this phenomenon. Succinctly, "learned helplessness" results from perceived "uncontrollability." For instance, if a subject is exposed to uncontrollable stress, such as electric shock, their inability to escape that stress causes the subject to eventually accept their condition as inevitable. At that point, subjects cease doing anything to change their condition. Such an accepting subject can be trained to perform or behave in very uncharacteristic ways.

Consequently, if ghetto conditions in public housing can cause the level of pathology claimed to justify demolition, certainly the cramped conditions endured aboard slave ships and in slave pens created even greater pathology. The terror and stress that slave descendants suffered during the period of lynching and Jim Crow segregation (1876-1968) was far worst than that experienced in public housing, yet those same white academicians, politician and policymakers insist that slavery had no residual affect on blacks. Once slavery ended, they insist blacks were unaffected psychologically by their slave experience. Adapting to slavery, a psychologically induced state caused by the sense of "lack of control," their inability to terminate extreme stress, the pathology learned helplessness resulted.

Learned helplessness theorists believe, if stress is removed, the subject forms a hypothesis about what they did to end the stressful event (speak broken English), they will repeat that behavior the next time such stress occurs. In other words, what may seem bizarre or "self-perpetuating pathology" to an observer is learned behavior that worked for that individual. Slaves were terrorized without limits, forced to conform to the demands of whites, no matter how pathological their behavior seemed to them. Helpless to stop their terror, slaves learned and did what was demanded to stop the stress. Those behaviors were taught to their children and passed on from generation to generation. Blacks living in public housing are caught in the same double bind as slave descendants. They did what white society demands in order to stop the stress of homelessness, hunger and loss of resources.

Clinton's action, like the whims of slave masters, politicians and policymakers, changed the rules and used the behavior of public housing residents to justify the change. Learning what white society taught them made blacks pathological. That is learned helplessness! (Source: The End of Public Housing as We Know It: Public Housing Policy, Labor Regulation and the US City by Jeff R. Crump, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research)

News You Use

U.N. weighs in against demolishing public housing

By John Burl Smith

On February 28, 2008, a report by John Moreno Gonzales (AP) contained a ray of hope for New Orleans advocates who have clamored for the United Nations to weigh in on human rights violations associated with Hurricane Katrina recovery. Co-director of the public interest law firm Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, Monique Harden, who testified before the U.N. in Geneva felt, "This vindicates the work of public housing advocates." In their finding, a joint statement by U.N. experts Miloon Kothari, the U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator for housing, and Gay McDougall, an expert on minority issues, said, "Thousands of black families would continue to suffer displacement and homelessness if the demolition of 4,500 public housing units is not halted. The spiraling costs of private housing and rental units, and in particular the demolition of public housing, puts these communities in further distress, increasing poverty and homelessness. We therefore call on the Federal Government (US) and state and local authorities to immediately halt the demolitions of public housing in New Orleans."

Back in New Orleans Harden said, "Recovery must mean the end of displacement for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. What we have instead is recovery that demolishes affordable housing." The UN urged U.S. and local government leaders to further include current and former residents in discussions that would help them return home. The expert comments did not carry the weight of an official U.N. resolution, but it came a day before a larger U.N. racism panel planned to discuss Katrina recovery efforts and public housing in New Orleans. Although their statement did not carry legal or regulatory power, it does add weight to international efforts aimed at halting the demolition of public housing in the US.

Most see the tearing down of public housing in urban areas as a deliberate effort to displace blacks from the inner-city, free up valuable real estate and bring whites back into cities to increase the political clout of whites. Establishing white enclaves will consolidate and underpin their economic control with political domination. This is a national pattern with the aim of dislodging blacks from local government and returning to defacto segregation indicative of public schools. This is a repeat of what happened to blacks in the 1890s, following Reconstruction.

Jeff R. Crump, associate professor in Housing Studies, University of Minnesota, has published several brilliant articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In his articles, he argues that "US public housing policy, as codified by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (QHWRA), is helping to reconfigure the racial and class structure of many inner cities. By promoting the demolition of public housing projects and replacement with mixed-income housing developments, public housing policy is producing a gentrified inner-city designed to attract middle and upper-class people back to the inner city. The goals of public housing policy are also broadly consonant with those of welfare reform wherein the 'workfare system' helps to bolster and produce the emergence of contingent low-wage urban labor markets."

The UN position on the demolition of public housing dovetails Crump's in that their concerns are similar. This reporter believes the US is in the midst of a class and race war where the government has weighed in on the side of the wealthy power elite. Its policies are designed to create a society of super-rich with a class of marginal poor made up of former upper middle class that lost jobs and homes in the housing bubble as a buffer against the very poor. This scenario is based on the Contract with America and the Project for A New American Century. Essentially, control of energy, food, communications and natural resources are weapons. The linchpin in this strategy is the control of all large urban centers.

This is Adolf Hitler's scheme on steroids and fast forwarded eighty years. Prisons are the new concentration camps (code word concentrated poverty). Managing information through the media is also essential. George W. Bush is only the beginning of extending government power over citizens. He was the set up man, like John the Baptist for Jesus Christ. Non-conspiracy theorists see all this as far-fetched. Although Crump made none of the claims expressed in this article, his work shows how quickly and easily public policy and the machinery of government can be used against the very people it is supposed to protect and serve, while serving the interests of those whose aim is to victimize the people. Those who want to be informed can read Jeff Crump's work at www.blackwellpublishing.com, and for questions, email jrcrump@che.umn.edu.

Venue for an Artist

The Right to a Job, Food & Water, and Housing

By Dave Welsh

Nowadays, a lot of the things many people took for granted are suddenly no longer there. Like their job, their steady income, their home and enough food to keep body and soul together.

So the question becomes: Are these basic human rights, which the society is obligated to provide? Or is it a matter of "I've got mine, buddy. What's wrong with you?"

The right to a job...What if the way the economy is structured means there will always be a lot of unemployed people, as has always been the case since the dawn of capitalism 200-some years ago? What if the recent high-tech revolution creates a larger and larger pool of people without any job or realistic hope of finding one? Are we doomed to see more and more of our young people hanging around in the wasteland with no job and nothing to do?

Obviously, the big business owners and the government they control don't give a rat's ass about there not being enough jobs to go around - or they would have long since done something about it! The truth is, they need to have a pool of unemployed to keep wages down [and profits up]!

And yet - as we watch our children growing up, isn't every one of them entitled to a useful role and place in society, and a way to support themselves and their families? Of course they are! Do they have a right to a job and education back home, so they don't wind up in prison, so they don't have to join the military to kill and be killed in a war for oil halfway around the world? Of course they have that right!

So we need to find a way to reorganize society to make sure this happens. We could start by cutting the work week to 30 hours (with no cut in pay). Hire more people. Organize public works construction like the WPA in the 1930s. Put people to work. Pass laws to require union wages and conditions in industry and agriculture, which will put money in people's hands.

Clearly, a "quick fix" will not solve as intractable a problem as unemployment. But, this is not rocket science either. A job should be a right for everyone who wants one. Give everyone a job, and together we can build this country back up again.

The right to housing is a human right. Yet the nation's homeless population is large and increasing. Thousands of units of public housing are being demolished, and millions may lose their homes to foreclosure and eviction at a time when workers need the jobs at prevailing wages that building adequate housing for the people would provide.

* 4,500 units of habitable or easily renovated public housing are being demolished or threatened with demolition in New Orleans; just as many public housing units in other cities have been demolished, leaving many residents without a home.

* For the last hundred years, greedy real estate interests and others have moved in on long-established black communities, forcing people out [documented in the new historical film, Banished]. And this process, whether you call it urban renewal, `gentrification' or just plain people removal, is still going on today, as residents of New Orleans, San Francisco and many other cities can attest.

* A large number of Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, many victimized by predatory banks and mortgage companies. The growing economic crisis has caused more evictions of renters, and utility shutoffs for those unable to pay their gas and electric bills.

We need a moratorium (freeze) on home foreclosures, utility shut-offs, evictions and public housing demolitions. These housing demolitions should not be allowed until they have first been replaced with affordable units in the community -- one-for-one replacement at comparable rents.

The trade union movement needs to work with housing advocates in a joint effort to bring about these reforms, and establish the principle and practice that housing is a right for every man, woman and child living in the United States.

About Me: Dave Welsh is a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, a local body of the AFL-CIO. The Council, a nonprofit organization whose "mission is to improve the lives of workers, their families and our community -- to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to the nation," met on June 9, 2008 and adopted a resolution calling for a Moratorium on Foreclosures, Utility Shutoffs, Evictions, and Public Housing Demolitions. Welsh's essay can be read in its entirety at www.dissidentvoice.org. Learn more about the SFLC at www.sflaborcouncil.org/.

Disgruntled wants to know: After September 11, 2000, George W. Bush asked patriotic Americans to spend, spend, spend, rather than make sacrifices and save as Americans have traditionally done in times of national crises and war. Like drunken sailors, this is what they did, primarily on credit, after exhausting their home equity. The Bush administration, through its sheer lack of regulation, and the Federal Reserve's historically long period of low interest rates facilitated the binge. Fed chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged homeowners to use their primary residences like ATM's; many consolidated debt, turning unsecured credit card balances into secured debt, just as Congress made it more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy. Others made home improvements, bought bigger houses and/or other stuff, such as cars and boats. Unscrupulous persons in the real estate and financial services industries aided an historic rise in home prices to grease the home equity ATM money machine. On Tuesday, in a moment of candor, when he thought the microphones and cameras were turned off, Bush declared, "Wall Street got drunk...The question is, how long will it (take to) sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?" As a "former" drunk, Bush certainly recognizes the condition. The real question is, can he provide the tough love, i.e., regulation, needed to sober up financial markets, or will he and the Fed continue to act as bartenders serving cocktails of bailouts and deregulation?

Disgruntled says: These are strange times. According to opinion polls, US citizens are very unhappy with their government. Disapproval of the executive and legislative branches is at all-time highs. Under these circumstances, one would think voters would turn out on election day in record numbers to express their dissatisfaction by booting the incumbents out of office. Imagine my surprise on July 15. The low voter turnout must have set its own historically low record for voter apathy. Some of this apathy is quite understandable, given the 2000 and 2004 debacles that put George W. Bush in the White House, as well as the nation's historic record of voter discrimination. All of that said, and believe me I do not discount any of it, I vote because I believe it lends one credibility when complaining about the nuts running this government. Certainly, one can still complain without voting; voicing one's opinion is part of our right to free speech. However, if you are doing nothing to make things better, complaining is just blowing hot air. In that case, as long as you are just complaining, not voting or plotting to overthrow the government, politicians do not care.

Disgruntled feels: Squeezed! Caught between a rock and hard times, Americans are beginning to whine. The nation's economy is in decline, even though there has been no 'official' declaration of an economic recession. While the upper echelon of US society still lives large, those in the middle and on the bottom are suffering big time. The US job market is in decline, real wages are falling, while prices for basic necessities are rising. Home prices, which rose precipitously from 2000 to 2005, nearly doubling, are declining rapidly, erasing home equity, thanks to the bursting housing bubble. Those squeezed the hardest by these economic conditions are the elderly and those on fixed incomes.

Mailbox: E-Mail, Faxes and Telephone Calls

Email www.truthdig.com ...The Death of Reaganomics...By E.J. Dionne...The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades. Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing. You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism." The old script is in rewrite....This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

Email www.sunjournal.com..Senate OKs housing bailout...By Robert Schroeder...The Senate cleared a massive housing bill on Saturday designed to prop up the struggling U.S. housing market and put in place a U.S. backstop for giant mortgage-buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Senate lawmakers approved the bill, which contains billions of dollars in loan guarantees, a tax break for first-time home buyers and many other provisions, by a vote of 72-13. The bill now will go to President Bush, who has indicated he will sign it despite objections about a provision directing $4 billion in emergency aid to local communities to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed homes. The measure, approved during a weekend session in the Senate, allows homeowners who cannot afford their monthly payments to refinance into government-backed loans. The bill also offers temporary financial help to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bill won approval in the House on Wednesday by a vote of 272-152, overcoming Republican objections to extending an unlimited line of credit to the two government-sponsored mortgage-finance titans. The bill gained momentum as worries about the health of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spread.

Email www.marketwatch.com...$376 Billion in Chinese Agency Bond Holdings Subject to Taxpayer ...As politicians call for taxpayer bailouts and a government takeover of troubled mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, FreedomWorks would like to point out that a bailout is a transfer of possibly hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars to sophisticated investors and governments overseas. The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency bonds, according to the U.S. Treasury's most recent "Report on Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities."