in this emailing on today's Democracy Now . -Ed
From: Sid Shniad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/12/un-investigator-us-neglect-homeless
UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless
UN special rapporteur says wealthy US ignoring deepening homeless crisis
while pumping billions into bank rescues
Chris McGreal in Los Angeles
The Guardian: 12 November 2009
A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US
by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring
billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as
"invisible" a deepening homeless crisis.
Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing,
who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful
that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting
its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.
"The housing crisis is invisible for many in the US," she said. "I learned
through this visit that real affordable housing and poverty is something
that hasn't been dealt with as an issue. Even if we talk about the financial
crisis and government stepping in in order to promote economic recovery,
there is no such help for the homeless."
She added: "I think those who are suffering the most in this whole situation
are the very poor, the low-income population. The burden is
disproportionately on them and it's of course disproportionately on
African-Americans, on Latinos and immigrant communities, and on Native
Americans."
Rolnik toured Chicago, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Wilkes-Barre, a
Pennsylvania town where this year the first four sheriff sales - public
auctions of seized property - in the county included 598 foreclosed
properties. She also visited a Native American reservation.
The US government does not tally the numbers but interested organisations
say that more than 3 million people were homeless at some point over the
past year. The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is
families with children, often single parents. On any given night in Los
Angeles, about 17,000 parents and children are homeless. Most will be found
a place in a shelter but many single men and women are forced to sleep on
the streets.
Los Angeles, which is described as the homeless capital of America, has
endured an 18-fold increase in housing foreclosures. Evictions from owned
and rented homes have risen about tenfold, with 62,400 people forced out
last year in Los Angeles county.
Welfare payments are not enough to meet the rent, let alone food and other
necessities. A single person on welfare living in Los Angeles receives $221
(£133) a month - an amount that hasn't changed in a decade. The rent for one
room is typically nearly double that.
Rolnik said that while she saw difficult conditions in all the places she
visited, the worst was on the Native American reservation of Pine Ridge in
South Dakota.
"You see total hopelessness, despair, very bad conditions. Nothing I have
seen in other cities compared to the physical condition of the housing at
Pine Ridge. Nothing compared to the overcrowding. They're not visible,
they're isolated, they're far away. They're just lost," she said.
Rolnik says that one of the greatest matters of shame is that the US has the
resources to provide decent housing for everyone.
"In the US, it's feasible to provide adequate housing for all. You have a
lot of money, a lot of dollars available. You have a lot of expertise. This
is a perfect setting to really embrace housing as a human right," she said.
Rolnik has given a verbal report to the US state department, which has a
month to respond to her observations. She will submit a final written report
to the UN human rights council early next year.
***
Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected
President?
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: November 18, 2009
What's up with Barack Obama? The candidate for change once promised to take
on the powerful banking interests but is now doing their bidding. Finally, a
leading Democrat, in this case Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd,
has a good idea for monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but
destroyed the American economy, and the Obama administration condemns it.
Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is
controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a
new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed's abject failure to
properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry
got drunk on greed. As Dodd's spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: "The Federal
Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms." But
White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from
the Fed would cause financial industry "nervousness." Isn't that the whole
point of government regulation-to make the bandits look over their shoulders
before they launch their next destructive scam?
Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely
insists that the Fed "is the best agency equipped for the task of
supervising the largest, most complex firms," despite the mountain of
evidence to the contrary. There is some irony in the fact that the largest
of those complex firms got to be "too big to fail" because of the radical
deregulatory legislation that Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation
as the Treasury Department's general counsel in the Clinton administration.
Wolin is now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in
the five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the
disaster began to unfold.
Why is Barack Obama allowing these retreads from the Clinton era who went on
to great riches on Wall Street to set economic policy for his
administration? The fatal hallmark of this president's financial policy is
that it is being designed by the very people whose previous legislative
efforts created the mess that enriched them while impoverishing the nation,
and they now want more of the same.
In the Clinton years, Wolin was general counsel to then-Treasury Secretary
Lawrence Summers, the key architect of the radical deregulation that caused
the recent banking collapse. Summers went off to work for hedge funds and
banks that paid him $15 million in 2008 while he was advising Obama.
Meanwhile, Wolin became general counsel for Hartford Insurance Corp., which
had to be bailed out by the taxpayers because it took advantage of the
radical deregulation that he helped write into law.
Wolin, Geithner and Summers were all protégés of Robert Rubin, who, as
Clinton's treasury secretary, was the grand author of the strategy of
freeing Wall Street firms from their Depression-era constraints. It was
Wolin who, at Rubin's behest, became a key force in drafting the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended the barrier between investment and
commercial banks and insurance companies, thus permitting the new financial
behemoths to become too big to fail. Two stunning examples of such giants
that had to be rescued with public funds are Citigroup bank, where Rubin
went to "earn" $120 million after leaving the Clinton White House, and the
Hartford Insurance Co., where Wolin landed after he left Treasury.
Both Citigroup and Hartford would not have gotten into trouble were it not
for the enabling legislation that the three Clinton officials pushed through
while they were in power. But even with that law, had Geithner been on the
case protecting the public interest while head of the New York Fed, much of
the damage could have been avoided.
Thanks to the legislation that Wolin helped write, the limits preventing
mergers between insurance companies and banks imposed during Franklin
Roosevelt's presidency was reversed. Hartford got into banking, and as The
Washington Times observed in a scathing editorial, "Hartford . rushed to buy
regulated savings and loans just so they could call themselves banks and
qualify for government TARP funds." Wolin collected his millions while the
taxpayers were obliged to cover Hartford's losses.
It is depressing for a columnist who had great hopes for Obama to be forced
by the facts to credit editors at the right-wing Washington Times for
getting it right when they opined: "Revolving doors between industry and the
administration and fat-cat political contributors getting bailed out at
taxpayer expense sound like business as usual. This certainly isn't change
we can believe in." Please, Mr. President, say it ain't so.
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