As The Public Gets Distracted With Other Descriptions, Biden Is About To Pass The Worst Kind of Infrastructure Bill- One That Privatizes Our Public Assets

We are not even hearing about it, but something really awful is about to happen: It looks like we are about to pass the worst kind of “infrastructure bill,” one that will be privatizing public assets.  It’s being set up so nobody is supposed to notice.

If you really don’t pay attention to anything, maybe the only thing you’ll notice that they are describing the bill as a “Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal”– “Bipartisan” sounds sort cooperative and friendly, like something everybody should agree on as good.

If you think you are paying attention they might have successfully distracted you by highlighting other asserted flaws in the bill, flaws that may, or may not, be taken care of to some extent before the bill is passed; the flaw that the bill lacks measures to address climate change; flaws that it doesn’t meet social and racial justice standards by, for example, failing to spend on neglected public housing.

The New York Times coverage of the bill, including virtually no policy analysis, ruminated about its potential passage mostly as a political jockeying and horse race story, and referred to how the spending being planned was not addressing:

“human infrastructure”: education, child care, paid leave and tax credits to fight poverty, among other initiatives.

(See: Biden Kicks Off Sales Tour to Salvage Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal- An event in rural Wisconsin was meant to show liberals that the agreement was sufficiently ambitious — while assuring moderates that the president remained committed to the deal.  By Jim Tankersley, June 29, 2021.)

Democracy Now opened up its Tuesday, June 29, 2021 coverage as if the major part of the story would be how would be linked to how western states are battling record-breaking heat waves, (Portland hitting “116 degrees Fahrenheit Monday, making it one of the hottest places in the world”).  Starting into the story, we heard that:

Members of the Sunrise Movement called on Biden and congressional Democrats to pass an infrastructure bill that includes major investments in green energy, including a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps.

The Democracy Now story also pushed to the fore public housing that is being allowed to deteriorate.  (See: Rep. Jamaal Bowman: We Need Climate & Racial Justice Addressed in Broader Infrastructure Package, June 29, 2021.)

But then, as David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, was being interviewed as part of that Democracy Now story, he did an important pivot that had not been Teed up at the beginning of the segment and maybe wasn’t planned for.  He brought up that privatizing public assets was distressingly a “key piece” of the bill.

Here’s how it went in Dayen’s exchange with Democracy Now cohost Juan González:

DAVID DAYEN: . . .  But what’s the key piece of the bipartisan bill, to me, in addition to the lack of climate measures and, as you correctly point out, the fact that nature, from Seattle to Miami, where sea level rise may have been a large contributor to the collapse of the condo building, is just screaming for a change in priorities in America because of the climate crisis and a need to upgrade our infrastructure to reflect this new reality — but the other thing that’s in that bipartisan bill is privatization. So, it’s really the selling off of infrastructure to private companies, and really the substitution of public tax collection, where we pay for these common assets that we all use and share, to private tax collection, where you sell the infrastructure assets to a private company, whether for toll roads or privatized water systems, privatized parking meters, or what have you, and that private company gets to effectively tax the public. And inevitably, that tax goes up, because they have to build in their layer of profit. So, I think that’s something that progressives like Representative Bowman need to focus on, because it’s a very dangerous part of the bipartisan bill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, David Dayen, are those concerns sufficient for many progressives to say, “No, let’s kill this thing altogether”? Because, clearly, the move to privatize public assets has been part of the neoliberal agenda now for about four decades.

DAVID DAYEN: It has been. And that’s why it’s incumbent to take a stand at this point. I mean, you have a representative on; you can ask him if that’s sufficient or not. But it is a serious issue. I mean, we have examples of this, as you say, Juan, all over the country — water systems that charge exorbitant rates, parking meters in places like Chicago that have gone up 800% in their rates over a number of years, and every time the street is shut down for a street fair, the private company gets to recoup lost revenue from that day. It’s not just the gouging of the people who use the infrastructure; it’s the loss of democratic control. So, a private company is in charge and says when the street will be shut down or not, and the private company is in charge of when a certain toll road is open or not. So, that’s, I think, at the core of the issue with privatization, which, as you correctly point out, was part of this neoliberal project. But we’re in a new era, and I would hope that there would be very strong pushback against it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about that, Congressman Bowman, in terms of, in Chicago, for instance, a private parking meter company, whenever the city wants to shut down a street for a parade, it has to reimburse the private parking meter company for its lost revenues? . . .

It seems we are not supposed to be paying attention to these very important privatization provisions.  Read the New York Times coverage, scan it as hard as you can, you’ll find no mention of these important privatization provisions.  They are just not there. . .

. . . And oddly, the next day, Democracy Now did a follow-up on the infrastructure deal proposals interviewing Congressmember Nikema Williams of Georgia, and in that follow up totally neglected to have any mention or discussion about the privatization provisions.  Democracy Now host Amy Goodman set up the very limited discussion going right back to making it seem that the only flaw in the bill to focus on is its deficiency with respect to climate change provisions:

AMY GOODMAN: . . .It [the bill] does not include funding for major programs championed by progressives, including investments in green energy jobs and funds to combat the climate crisis, as we are experiencing the worst heat ever in this country, not to mention Canada, as well. Portland broke every record, one of the hottest places on the planet right now. That’s Portland, Oregon, just to name one place. In a moment, we’re going to talk about what happened in Florida with the catastrophic collapse and its connection, possibly, to the climate crisis. But what about this, the demand that the — linking the bipartisan infrastructure plan with the much larger one that Bernie Sanders and others are crafting?

In part, the horse race and political jockeying story being told (the Times story is such a prime exhibit in this regard) is another version of the corporate Democrats always winding up inexplicably incompetent to win anything they say they stand for when faced with the mysteriously always effective thwarting maneuvers from the corporate Republicans (who are nominally the corporate Democrats “opposition”).  It is yet one more example of Biden scaling back to seek far less than the very meager things he promised when he ran for office. . . forget about the public option, forget about minimum wage and now this infrastructure spending will be far less than what Biden talked about when he sought office.
                                            
Other than this lack coverage of the privatization aspects of the “bipartisan” infrastructure deal, the coverage has been about how inadequate the funds now being made available are versus how dire the need is to spend on our roads, bridges, water projects, replacing our lead water pipes, and other major projects, along with how great it would be to deploy reliable high-speed broadband internet in all our rural areas to reach “every American home” (NY Times).  This is the kind of narrative that regularly precedes and sets up an excuse for privatization and the sell off of public assets. . . `because he public just can’t pay for them'. .  `So the private sector has to take over to supply the funds while making a profit in doing so'. . . Blah, blah, blah.

Here is a link to the Citizens Defending Libraries page (including valuable information and further links) about the last forum we had on selling off public assets, Saturday, April 8, 2017:

Fourth Forum on Selling Off Public Assets, Presented by First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn's Weaving the Fabric of Diversity & Citizens Defending Libraries, April 8, 2017

What’s happening is very real.  This Biden infrastructure “deal” reflects continuity with what was underway in the Trump administration. Traveling with Trump to Saudi Arabia in 2016, NYPL library trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman brought back $20 billion from the Saudis for his Blackstone investment group as seed money for the selling off and privatizing of American public assets.  This is not just because Schwarzman has such good relationships with the likes of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (remember the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi- the illegal siege war and bombing of Yemen?); others like Goldman Sachs are busy raising funds for the same thing.

Thankfully, there are those who are being more forthright and honest than Democracy Now and the very deceptive New York Times.  Take this statement (‘Bipartisan’ Infrastructure Plan is a Privatization-Promoting Disaster– Wall Street takeover will cost ratepayers and must be rejected) released by Food & Water Watch Public Water for All Director Mary Grant:

“This White House-approved infrastructure deal is a disaster in the making. It promotes privatization and so-called ‘public-private partnerships’ instead of making public investments in publicly-owned infrastructure. Communities across the country have been ripped off by public-private schemes that enrich corporations and Wall Street investors and leave the rest of us to pick up the tab.

“Privatization is nothing more than an outrageously expensive way to borrow funds, with the ultimate bill paid back by households and local businesses in the form of higher rates. The White House identifies privatization as a means to finance infrastructure investment is disappointing and outrageous. Communities need real support, not privatization scams.

“The most sensible infrastructure solution is to provide robust public funding for publicly-owned projects, which would discourage price-gouging by corporate interests, protect public control over these precious assets, and save everyone money. The most comprehensive funding solution on the table is the WATER Act (HR1352, S916), which would provide $35 billion a year to fully fund the state revolving funds and other programs at the level that is needed.

“This package does not provide adequate funding to rebuild and repair our country’s infrastructure, nor does it do nearly enough to combat the climate crisis. Lawmakers can and must press for a better deal.”

Privatization of History: Scary Information About What Is Happening At Our National Archives and Records Administration

"Erasing" history or "privatizing" it?  Churchill, a man whose flaws you may be unfamiliar with said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”-- And he did.

This one hits home for us at Citizens Defending Libraries.  At Citizens Defending Libraries we have paid much attention to how the shutting down, selling and deliberate underfunding of libraries relates to information control, information elimination, and censorship.

On February 6th, Democracy Now had a story about how millions of documents are being expunged from the National Archives.  This was right after the National Archives delivered an altered version of history concerning the 2017 Women’s March by doctoring a photograph of the March that the Archives used as a main feature for a new exhibit, The doctoring removed criticisms of President Trump.  See:  Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies.

Our National Archives is a form library intended to be a repository for the protection of our country’s history, as well as a form of watchdog for its protection.  Let’s note again: It’s a form of library.  Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, interviewed for the Democracy Now story about the expungements said that:

a lot of what’s happening at the National Archives is happening because they are being starved of resources.  They have a smaller budget now than they had back in 2008. That budget has been cut every year for the last three years.

That sounds exactly like our New York City libraries.  And we will remind you that there is no excuse for starving our New York City libraries of resources the way we are being starved, because libraries are an almost infinitesimal portion of our city budget, especially in terms of the benefits they deliver.

Mr. Connelly was on Democracy Now, having written a recent piece for The New York Times on the Archive expungements headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”

While the hook that was used for both the Democracy Now interview and Mr. Connelly’s New York Times op-ed was the destruction of information about the recent and ongoing atrocities being committed by ICE under Trump, the violations of “immigrant rights” involved, and how ICE may be “destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care,” Mr. Connally ventured further in his concerns.  He expressed his worries about our government’s “long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture,” and he noted how our country has “destroyed all of the records of the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [he didn’t get to finish his sentence].”  He noted that the “Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.”

The Democracy Now headline for its segment with Mr. Connelly refers to “Erasing History,” but is this characterization directly on target?  Isn’t this instead, a likely “privatization” of history?

In his New York Times op-ed Mr. Connelly mentions how now when things go into the National Archives, “Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.”

We are currently in an age when there is unprecedented private storage of data.  Everything is saved.  Data storage is insanely cheap, and keeps getting cheaper.  Much of that data storage is done by companies like Amazon, private companies that have strong ties to the CIA and the military industrial complex.

With private data collection running rampant for every conceivable purpose, is it reasonable to think that any anything that ever exists in digital form, even if that digital existence is brief, is ever truly expunged, that it truly ever vanishes?  Is it reasonable to believe that just because we starve our libraries and public national archive, that the information they made available, however briefly, especially if it was made available digitally, will not continue to exist in private hands?  Probably not.

When information exists digitally, it is easy to suck it out on into private databases a wholesale basis. . .   It is instructive to remember that, before his premature and extremely disheartening death, Aaron Swartz, the young activist  who was, among other things, a fan of libraries and an advocate for democratic empowerment through publicly available information (plus an open internet with net neutrality), was legally persecuted by our government for sucking out digital information on a wholesale basis to do exactly the opposite: He downloaded 4.8 million academic journal articles from a from a private database with the probable intent of making them more publicly accessible.  A number of years before, Swartz downloaded and made more freely available to the public 2.7 million federal court documents (essentially the law) from a federal database, documents which were technically already public, but were somehow not actually readily accessible to the public unless they paid to go through private channels, except through private channels.  Prosecuted for his download of the academic journal articles, Swartz faced a potential 90 years in prison and his father accused the government of hounding him and bringing about his death.
         
It is therefore important to understand that what we are talking about is the privatization of history and information, not its erasure.

The control of history and its narratives has been going on for a long time with those who are powerful thinking a lot about it.  Winston Churchill famously said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  Our more liberal friends from the United Kingdom, who are better and more knowledgeably acquainted with Churchill, tell us they have very mixed feelings about “Winnie.”  Their feelings toward him are probably less favorable than ours, as we on this side of the pond, have likely been subjected to more unadulterated myth-making propaganda about the man.  There is much that was simply appalling about Churchill, but the fact that Churchill did, indeed, actually write a lot of the history about himself counteracts much of that.

Interviewed on On The Media, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee explained that after World War II, Churchill:

had complete access to all United Kingdom documents and an entire team of researchers and writers who helped him actually write six volumes or so of his World War II memoirs. And these volumes put Churchill at the center of the war, whereas historians have filled out some of the detail, which is that it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.

(See: Churchill's Forgotten, Ruthless Past, March 16, 2018)

Mukerjee also notes that “when his political career was in shards after the First World War, he wrote a history then, as well,” and that he wrote several histories, including “something called The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Putting the resources of the British government at Churchill’s disposal to write is one way of letting history be written by those that command the reins of power. . . But pulling back on our public resources to put all of our history in the hands of private corporate monopolies that do not have the best interests of the public assuredly at heart is probably an even more serious surrender of the custodianship of truth and memory.  Global warming anyone?  How about perpetual wars?

. .  Privatizing history is probably far worse than just trying to erase it.

Our last thought on this: You may have already observed for yourself that, whether its studying to understand history or just trying to follow the news, the most vital key to comprehension is most certainly a careful focus on what the powerful don’t want you to know.

PS: (added February 29, 2020)– On February 21, On The Media caught up to run a segment, “The Vanishing National Archives," about  Matthew Connelly, his  New York Times op-ed and the expungements from the National Archives.

It mostly tracked the story above:

by the end of this year, they're [the archive is] going to be able to start destroying records from the first year of the Trump administration when it first began to crack down on undocumented immigration.

* *

[On the chopping block] . .  everything from aviation safety to the takeover of American firms by foreign nationals. All of those records are slated for destruction in the Department of Interior, records related to protection of drinking water, enforcement of laws on endangered species, the management of the mismanagement of native lands, native assets, all that stuff's gonna get deleted, too.

However, it ends using a nice quote from Churchill’s counterpart in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt:

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people.” So to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

New Book “Home Wreckers” Identifies NYPL Trustee (And 42nd Street Library Namesake) Stephen A. Schwarzman As Key Culprit (Along With His Friends and Neighbors) In The Huge Theft That’s Responsible For Depleting Wealth of Other Americans

NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, a principal subject in Aaron Glantz's new book, "Homewreckers," is featured prominently on its cover and scrutinized within the pages inside.

It’s time to write, yet again, about why NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman has a terrible reputation that sinks lower and lower with everything you ever find out about him. 

We just got finished writing about Mr. Schwarzman in connection with his friendship and praise for the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).  Crown Prince MBS is the Saudi leader who has enmeshed our country along with his in the war crimes and siege warfare against Yemen and he is the one everyone is looking at in connection with the dismemberment murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  See:  Stopped!! NYPL's Plan To Turn Over Its 42nd Street Central Reference Library Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom For Event Honoring The Infamous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Good Friend of Stephen Schwarzman?)

We were writing then because of the plans the NYPL had to turn over its Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom space in the famed 42nd Street Central Reference Library for Prince MBS to have a reputation laundering event where Prince MBS would teach young people how to manage their reputations.  It seems like everything these days is about reputation laundering for reputation management.  See: As The Brooklyn Public Library Holds Gala At The Barclays Arena Honoring Nets And Barclay’s Arena, Citizens Defending Libraries Is There With A Message: End Faux Philanthropy; Take Less And Don’t Sell Our libraries! and A Flourish of Stories About So-Called Philanthropy Being Used As A Guise For Diminishing The Public Commons– That Includes Libraries.

Yes, in its great unfettered wisdom, the NYPL, its trustees and senior management, was going to allow the Crown Prince to launder his reputation in the grand 42nd Street Library that, already for reputation laundering purposes, is now officially and ostentatiously called the “Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.”

In that article about MBS and Schwarzman we also passed along information about Stephen A. Schwarzman hobnobbing happily with Gislaine Maxwell, now famous and in the news for the stories about how she was the key and apparently foremost helper, Jeffrey Epstein’s number one elf, in running his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail ring. . . and we passed along information about how Mr. Schwarzman and his businesses factor prominently in the burning up and deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.

As usual with Mr. Schwarzman, if you hang around a little while, there will be more information arriving that, if it is at all possible, drags your opinion of him down even further.

Now there is a new book out featuring its outstanding villains conspicuously on its cover.  Yes, Stephen Schwarzman is one of the main ones the book tells us stories about.  The book is Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Shady Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, by Aaron Glantz.  Glantz has won a Peabody award for investigative journalism and was a recent finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on modern-day redlining.

Glantz’s book which has, on its cover, members of what Glantz describes as “President Donald Trump’s inner circle” has, in addition to Schwarzman and Trump, Trump Cabinet members Steven Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary of the United States, and Wilbur Ross the current United States Secretary of Commerce.  Helping make Schwarzman more officially a member of that Trump inner circle is that, as you can pick up from the caption to one of the photo illustrations in the book’s interior, Trump made Schwarzman chair of his strategic and policy forum of corporate advisors and “titans”– You see Trump sitting next to Schwarzman at one of its meetings. (CDL video of them together here.)

Glantz’s book is about the unfettered mechanics of an enormous transfer of wealth that robbed a substantial portion of Americans of the share of national wealth they once traditionally held, enriching a very few at the very top and very specifically the men on the cover of the book as the prime examples.

Glantz is smart to stand back and unfold his story in big picture terms, laying out the two main aspects it divides into.  First, the astonishing transfer of wealth that occurred, removing almost all the wealth and financial security from a broad base of Americans, and secondly, how unfair that transfer to a small elite group of insiders was, accomplished by financial manipulations which government aligned itself to assist, and sometimes even subsidized to make the seizures riskless for those seizing the wealth, and which oft times descended into unchallenged illegalities.  Schwarzman was a leader and one of the few key players in these events as Glantz tells the story.

Talking about his book recently on Democracy Now, Glantz speaks of how so “much of Americans’ wealth is in their homes,” because we as Americans have very few other ways to save.  Thus it is of enormous consequence, as he points out that “eight million Americans lost their homes in the Great Recession” with financial groups like Schwarzman’s acquiring those homes through foreclosures.  Now, points out Glantz, “we live now in a society where the wealth gap between the richest one-tenth of 1% and the other 90% is bigger than it’s been in a hundred years.”  And with that shift of wealth along with power comes other things: Although Glanz didn’t note it, the very wealthiest are now paying taxes at a lower overall rate than the middle class.  Schwarzman is an advocate of taxing the poor more.

The Democracy Now interview with Glantz is at: Part 1 (part of DN daily broadcast): Homewreckers: How Wall Street, Banks & Trump’s Inner Circle Used the 2008 Housing Crash to Get Rich, October 15, 2019, and Part 2 (DN Web Exclusive): “The Federal Government Actually Paid Him”: How Steve Mnuchin Profited from the Housing Bust, October 15, 2019.
           
More specifically Glantz observes:

    . . . the richest 0.1 of 1% of the American people have the same amount of wealth as the other 90%. And that is because, in America, 80% of most middle-class families’ wealth goes to only five things: food, housing, shelter, transportation, healthcare. All those other things, besides housing, just disappear as soon as you spend your money. Housing is the only way that most Americans have to save. The average American family has $4,000 in the bank. So, either you put your money in equity in your house, or you pay it to your landlord,

Glanz then asks “who profited” off this transfer of wealth through foreclosures on these homes.  Glanz spotlights Invitation Homes, founded by Schwarzman and his Blackstone group, as one of the main profiteers, and observes that Schwarzman’s company now owns 80,000 homes all across the country.  In 2013, on Charlie Rose just a few years after the great recession began, Schwarzman was able to brag that his was the “largest real estate investor in the world” and that:

We started actually buying individual houses from Foreclosure about a year and a quarter ago. We're now the largest owner of houses in the United States.

Indeed, unsurprisingly, Glantz’s book confirms that the “biggest buyer of foreclosed homes was” Schwarzman’s “Blackstone Group.”  On that Charlie Rose broadcast, Schwarzman told Rose that he had absolute confidence in the future of the housing market in the United States in light of the real estate market turnaround following the Great Recession’s downturn, which enabled that wholesale acquisition of foreclosed homes by him and his company, and that “in fact it's turned out to be so even faster than we wanted it to.”  Presumably, he could only have been meaning that had the downturn continued longer he would have been able to buy up still more foreclosed homes to profit even more.  See: Noticing New York: On Charlie Rose NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman Confirms Suspicions: His $100 Million To The Library Was Linked To NYPL’s Real Estate Plans, June 22, 2013.

When Americans lose the wealth of their home investments, they lose more: They are at the mercy of the decisions of landlords to increase rents or to neglect to make habitable the premises they then need to rent.  Glantz notes of Invitation Homes that because it’s a publicly traded company you can “very clearly their rent increases” and “the relatively small amount of money they spend on maintenance.”

Something else has happened, a shift of wealth on another level, with all these foreclosures.  Glantz writes:

The Obama administration's bulk sales gave rise to a class of landlord that has never been seen before.  At the beginning if 2012, national Real Estate Investor magazine reported, not a single landlord owned as many as a thousand single-family homes.  But just two years later, industry analysts were tracking more than a dozen vulture companies that had swooped in after the housing bust to buy thousands—removing then from individual ownership and concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaire investors.

More explicitly, his book covers how, until this sea change, the landlord industry had been mostly an industry run by moms and pops, dominated by “small investors doing it locally across the country.”  In other words, those renting to tenants once comprised an interstitial layer of  a somewhat more wealthy group of people with closer ties to the community.   Their absence from the local landscape leads to other consequences; writes Glantz: “the corporate landlords were far more likely to file eviction notices than mom-and-pops.”  In fact, the way in which the Blackstone and Invitation Home owners have supplanted the mom and pop landlords means that landlords who once made personal and judgement based decisions about whether to evict families and how to accommodate hardships when families are pulling themselves through a financial crisis have been replaced by a whole new eviction industry running based on numerical formulae. . . .

. . . Worse, that new eviction industry is now pursuing practices that are apparently designed to make money out of the cycle of fines and desperation that launching threatened and actual evictions entail, with, for instance, some owners who “see the late fees they impose prior to eviction as extra income,” given that tenants can wind up paying “22 percent more every year in housing costs because of the added fines and fees.”  That is not to mention that just raising the rent extraordinarily can be a de facto eviction, and the fact the cost of low income housing, rising faster than inflation, is also rising even faster than expensive apartments.

The late-paying renter, with already limited options, is less able to move because they don’t want an eviction notice trailing them around, and is this forced to continue paying nearly unaffordable rent.  They are:

thus transformed into a perpetual debtor. Never able to catch up, her power to demand basic services or repairs, to complain about anything at all, dwindles from little to nothing.

This was covered in (and quotes above come from) the recent multi-part “On The Media” series about the alarming current state of eviction in the United States, The Scarlet E (especially Part III of the series)* : See: The Scarlet E, Part I: Why?, June 7, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part II: 40 Acres, June 14, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part III: Tenants and Landlords, June 21, 2019, and The Scarlet E, Part IV: Solutions, June 28, 2019.

(* This On The Media series done by co-host Brooke Gladstone, is an example of the excellence of the work On The Media can often produce, and used to do so more regularly, but it makes for a confusing problem, because On The Media recently has also been churning out some truly appalling propaganda pieces, particularly when it involves reporting on narratives concerning information from the intelligence communities and rationales for more perpetual war.  Typically, it's been co-host Bob Garfield who has become the prime mouthpiece for these suspect pieces.  Whereas, On The Media used to encourage a meta-awareness of media and often used to teach media literacy by interrogating narratives offered by other sectors of the media, Garfield now, more and more, seems to be stenographically transmitting talking points from the intelligence communities and military industrial complex.  It’s been so bad that Garfield even had to broadcast a mea culpa in one follow-up segment- May 24, 2019, his apology though wasn’t as maxima culpa as it should have been.  Very interestingly, Garfield’s mea culpa segment stands out exceptionally on the On The Media site as one for which there has been no transcript provided, making it less likely to Google- Garfield's more important apology is thus harder to find than the original apologized for segment for which there is a transcript.)

The Scarlet E series explains how, as the Blackstones of the industry Walmartize property ownership, the increased “social distance” with landlords no longer personally talking with or intimately interrelating with tenants means there are no personal or locally tailored solutions to problems or avoiding cycles of despair.

The Scarlet E also notes (Part II) that tale that the data tells: “One of a plague that could have been contained had it not been purposefully designed to diminish the wealth and power of specific populations–black and brown ones.”

During the Democracy Now interview of author Aaron Glantz, Juan González brought up “the disproportionate impact that this loss of equity in all these homes had, especially on the African-American and Latino communities, which were even more dependent on home equity for what little wealth they had or net wealth they had.”  In fact, the following week in a Democracy Now interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor at Princeton University about her new book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership,” it was noted that:

Recent census data reveals the homeownership rate for African Americans has fallen to its lowest level since before the civil rights movement. In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to just 40%, the lowest level since 1950.

Glanz responded to González noting that:

What we see is that banks, like Steve Mnuchin’s bank, concentrated their foreclosures in communities of color. And then, when they started making loans again when the economy improved, they didn’t make loans to those communities. [virtually none– Glantz gives numbers.]

And now Steve Mnuchin, as the treasury secretary, is in charge of regulating every American bank.

The book depicts how, throughout the transfer of homeownership wealth and equity resulting from the Great Recession, the government wasn’t on the side of the resident homeowners; it was on the side of the big investors like Schwarzman.  In the Democracy Now interview Juan González note, “Julián Castro, now a presidential candidate, was at HUD supposedly in charge of the efforts to assist homeowners, and that’s come under heavy criticism, what the Obama administration did to help these homeowners.”
                       
Big picture, some may remember– everyone ought to remember–  that at the beginning of the Great Recession there was even a question about whether a firm like Goldman Sachs would go bankrupt given the risks it had taken along with similar financial institutions that were bad bets. The bad bets and inappropriate risk taking on the part of Wall Street firms were what triggered the enormous economic downturn that negatively affected everyone else in the economy. Other firms, Lehman and Bear Stearns did collapse, and if firms like Goldman had been allowed to fail it could, properly handled, have led to a generally desirable break up the monopolies in the industry that are not good for democracy (see Tim Wu’s work).

Instead, with Goldman advisors sitting in the top positions in government guiding most of the decisions, government saved Goldman and the rest the firms like it, coming to Wall Street’s rescue.  Government did not concentrate on rescuing the resident homeowners who had been negatively affected by Wall Street’s bad decisions.  It was a question of how and where the money to “rescue” the economy was pumped into the economy.  It went to the financial sector and was used to fund the overall transfer of homeownership wealth.

In 2008, there was fear of a “deflationary recession” as had occurred during the Great Depression. In essence, that’s a market recognition that values of homes were now inflated.  A recognition that homes generally were not worth what had been presumed when banks made loans on them would normally mean that both the homeowners and the bank that lent them money would be forced together and at the same time to cope with the fact that they had both made bad more or less, the same, mostly shared bad decisions about the market.  If the home is worth less than previously, there aren’t alternative buyers on the horizon and the bank’s best outcome is to write down the amount of the loan and allow the resident homeowner to pay off a lower mortgage amount or pay a reduced rate of interest.  In that case, the wealth reflected by the homes doesn’t get transferred elsewhere.

There are ways to avoid “deflationary recession” and keep the resident homeowners in place. That’s if the choice is to bail out homeowners (rather than Wall Street), and Glantz told Democracy Now that there were many “very senior people” inside the Obama administration who pushed for those kinds of programs as an alternative response, but he says that advice was consistently ignored.  Glantz says:

all these people came forward, and they said, “We don’t need to bail out the banks. We can have a program like Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s to bail out the people.” And then learning that that New Deal program actually made money for the government as it helped millions — it helped a million Americans stay in their homes, created the 30-year fixed mortgage, and then how, even when foreclosures happened, this government-run bank sold them off one at a time to individual families instead of in bulk to speculators . .  there were like very senior people in the room who were making this argument the whole time, who were just ignored every step of the way.

Instead, the threat of deflation was battled by pumping up the market back up by streaming money into the hands of the banks.  With pumped in funds, the financial sector, sidestepping the need to take necessary loses and it gained the upper hand to force transfers.

In the Scarlet E series it is noted that what made things significantly worse for the prospect of resident owners continuing to own their own homes was the way the banks, who had previously been requiring little equity be paid before the Great Recession, changed the borrowing rules as the federal “rescue” money flowed to Wall Street.  The changed rules favored big investors:

 . .  banks went from stupid to stupid . .  they [started giving out loans to no one]. You had to put 25, 30 percent down. So then the question is who has the opportunity to take advantage of this market. The answer I think is larger landlords or private equity; people that have capital. . .  that property gets consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. And so then the house -- the most intimate of spaces the most sacred, protected of spaces -- the house becomes a pure commodity and it becomes something that's driven completely by a market logic.

Under the terms by which some of the federal money was dispensed, there were, in theory, some rules at least, to benefit the beleaguered homeowners.  They were supposed to be followed by the banks getting the federal dollars being pumped in.  Glanz, however informs us about how those rules were not, in fact, followed.

Part of Glantz’s book involves tracking the stories of actual individual homeowner families affected by the crisis.  One of the happier through lines of these stories in his book is about Sandy Jolley, albeit, she is one of those lost her home to foreclosure.  After losing her home, Ms. Jolley won an $89 million whistleblower settlement against Steve Mnuchin’s bank. An attorney who took her case had her meet with the  Justice Department, the FBI, and the HUD inspector general when she contacted him to present “evidence of a massive fraud.”  Of that multi-million dollar settlement, Ms. Jolley got $1.6 million for herself.  It took ten years.  By that time, Steve Mnuchin had profitably sold his bank and was the Treasury Secretary.  Also, Glantz points out that while Mnuchin’s bank had to pay the $89 million whistleblower settlement, it had received over $1 billion in federal subsidies in connection with its foreclosure portfolio.

In his book Glantz describes the sweet deal “loss-share” agreement subsidies that his “homewreckers” got from the government; Mnuchin for OneWest Bank, John Otting for US Bank, Wilbur Ross and Stephen Schwarzman for BankUnited–  The banks got to keep all the money they made on foreclosures or anything else, but if they “lost money foreclosing on homeowners, the government would pay for it,” to the tune of billions of dollars. By the way, note how this lays the pavement on the raceway to speed up home foreclosures all the more.

In Glantz’s Democracy Now interview, there was a natural focus on candidates now running in the 2020 presidential campaign.  In addition, to noting, as mentioned above, that Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro was at HUD when HUD and the federal government was failing so miserably to address the needs of those who owned their own homes, Glantz gave prominent mention in the interview to the fact that a number of the other Democratic candidates in the field have plans “to tackle the housing challenges of ordinary Americans, many who are still struggling after the devastating 2008 housing market collapse.”  Specifically listed as having proposals are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg.  Joe Biden was mentioned as apparently having no plan.  Julián Castro got no mention as having a plan.  Glantz also made specific mention that “Kamala Harris says she wants to put $100 billion towards promoting African-American homeownership.”  And he noted “black homeownership rate in this country is below the level that it was at when segregation and discrimination was legal.”

That made it sound like Kamala Harris could be depended upon to be part of a solution.  But, as needs to warned, Democracy Now’s often excellent news coverage tends to give you about 85% of the news.  It’s been said that Steve Mnuchin would probably not be Treasury Secretary today if he had been prosecuted for his bank’s mortgage fraud in California back when it was happening.  (And much the same applies to Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary.)  And prosecuting Mnuchin and his bank is something it has been noted, Kamala Harris, who was Attorney General of the state of California at the time didn’t do.

Although it went unmentioned in the Democracy Now interview, Glantz’s book deals (pages 86 to 88) with how Mnuchin’s bank OneWest falsified and backdated documents and evaded other required procedures in order to accelerate the foreclosure mill operations maximally- it would also have disqualified the bank from receiving more federal foreclosure subsidies.  Kamal Harris disregarded the “strong recommendations of her staff” and did not sue Mnuchin’s bank.

Something else you didn’t hear on Democracy Now that you would have heard if you were picking up your news from Jimmy Dore’s Radio Show (one of the shows on WBAI radio, currently subject to a destructive dismantlement attack on the Pacifica Public Radio Network)— Steve Mnuchin has since that time been a donor to Kamala Harris’ campaigning.  In other words, if you get a lot of your news from Democracy Now, you need to work to supplement what you hear there by informing yourself from other sources as well.

Citizens Defending Libraries has included the following in flyers it has distributed:

It has been noted that if Steve Mnuchin had been vigorously prosecuted at the local level for his business’s mortgage fraud, misrepresentations, backdating and falsification of documents to rev up the pace of his OneWest foreclosure mill, he wouldn’t be Treasury Secretary, appointed by Donald Trump today- Similarly, had NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman investigated the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library plunder with Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman involved on the selling side and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as principal financial beneficiary, those two Trump henchmen might not be in significant positions of power today.  The whole political landscape at the national level could be different, not to mention having healthier local politics.

Two of the co-founders of Citizens Defending Libraries spoke to Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now host who created the Democracy Now program (incubated out of WBIA radio her in NYC), on November 12, 2015 at the Brooklyn For Peace fund raiser where Ms. Goodman was honored and they discussed with her why Democracy Now should cover these matters and the sell off and shrinkage of New York City libraries.  We sent follow up materials to the Democracy Now producers about what that coverage ought to consist of.  Democracy Now never followed up and never covered this other story other story they could have covered involving Steve Schwarzman before Trump was elected and Schwarzman appointed the head of Trump’s economic policy council.

Not only did the unprosecuted Mnuchin become Treasury Secretary, he was able to sell his OneWest bank at a nice profit.  Glantz makes a point in his book about how small the club of elites is.  The club is so small that Mnuchin did no have to go very far at all to sell his bank, he sold it to his neighbor John Thain owning another apartment in the 740 Park Avenue where they both live.  Glantz makes a point about how many of the characters in his book, corporate raider Ronald Perlman, Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman chief John Thain, and Steve Schwarzman all reside at 740 Park Avenue.  Nowhere in Glantz's book does he mention that the address is also famous as David Koch’s address or that the conglomeration of billionaires at 740 Park Avenue was the subject of a documentary about escalating wealth and income inequality that Alex Gibney made, “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream.”

Schwarzman’s apartment at 740 Park Avenue was formerly owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  Small world, he bought it from another wealthy NYPL trustee.  It’s twenty thousand square feet, has thirty-five rooms, thirteen bathrooms.  Schwarzman doesn’t have to worry about going out to the public library, he has his own “pine-paneled library” in the apartment.  The apartment is just one of Schwarzman’s homes. Amy Goodman’s reaction on Democracy Now:

So, when you want to sell banks or whatever, you just go trick-or-treating in your own apartment building.

In his book, Glanz describes the lavish birthday parties Schwarzman has given himself, both his sixtieth birthday party in 2007 (where the wealthy attending came dressed as European nobility of the past and “Among the most popular costumes was Marie Antionette"- Rod Stewart was paid something around $1 million to perform and Patti Labelle sang as well) and his seventieth birthday (Gwen Stefani sang there).  The seventieth was quite as lavish as the sixtieth, live camels, trapeze artists, fireworks, etc., but Glantz notes that while the 2007 birthday's lavishness “sparked condemnation” even from conservative sources, by 2017 with Trump in office, this kind of excess was taken largely in stride, going mostly unnoticed and unremarked upon.

Glanz’s book says that “Schwarzman sought to rehabilitate his image” after his “controversial [sixtieth] birthday party” by transferring $100 million to the New York Public Library, which is when Schwarzman’s name was put on New York's  42nd Street Astor, Tilden, and Lenox Central Reference Library (the one with the lions).  Glanz apparently didn’t do enough research on Schwarzman to realize that this $100 million transfer was not merely for reputation laundering purposes, it was also intended to jump start New York library real estate deals, including the first one, the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library sale that benefitted Jared Kushner.                               

Schwarzman is thoroughly covered in Glantz’s book, which is 330 pages before the acknowledgments start.  Schwarzman gets mentioned some 53 there and his Blackstone gets mentioned some 41 times in all.

Blackstone, acting quickly. has a defense web page site up with Invitation Homes attacking the book:  Correcting the Record on Blackstone and Invitation Homes- Correcting the numerous falsehoods and mischaracterizations in Aaron Glantz's recent book that references Invitation Homes and Blackstone.  Nevertheless, when you look at that web site, it s not clear what are asserted to be the "numerous falsehoods," what would make them "numerous," or what the corrections are that the site means to offer.

The New York Times has just reported that NYPL trustee Stephen Schwarzman, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Jared Kushner are all going to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman upcoming economic event despite the infamy.  Despite the dismemberment killing.  Despite Yemen.  It’s just business- as usual.

Notes the Times article:

Since then, many executives have pledged to continue their partnerships with Saudi Arabia, which range from joint investments in entities like Blackstone’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund. . .

The Schwarzman Blackstone multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund deal is Saudi seed money to be used to privatize American infrastructure.

Privatization, whether it it turning libraries into real estate deals or selling American infrastructure, is a symptom of wealth inequality.   It means that accumulated wealth, running out of other things in which to invest its capital, needs to start buying up what was previously the public commons as one of the few things still left to acquire and collect rent on. It also reflects how the increasing imbalance of power enfeebles the public’s ability to fend off these encroaching advances.  Lastly, with the shift of resources to the wealthy and the powerful, there is less and less public money to invest in the public’s resources to maintain them healthily and robustly to benefit all of society. 

The parallels of such privatization to the shift of wealth described here and by Glantz with respect to homeownership are obvious.

With Scathing “Perpetual War Letter” Email William Arkin Self-exiles Himself From NBC (And the Rest of Corporate Mainstream) Thus Adding Himself To Our List Of Journalists Similarly Absent Or Banished Because of Their Views

Just a few weeks ago, we added Marc Lamont Hill, fired from CNN for expressing views sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, to our:

List of Journalists Fired or Self-exiled From Mainstream Media Outlets Because They Expressed or Wanted to Express Views (Like Being Critical of U.S. Wars) Unacceptable to the Outlets They Were Working For.

We have also recently been busy updating our list of importantly catalytic books that have been suppressed:

Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed.

Now with his dramatic publication of what has been termed his “Perpetual War Letter” email, journalist William M. Arkin has exiled himself from NBC and the rest of the mainstream, corporately-owned media, at least for now with his 2,228-word farewell “blistering critique” of what he calls “perpetual war” and the “creeping fascism of homeland security.”

Arkin’s letter, a fascinating read, is a lot to absorb and it helps to go beyond the letter itself in figuring out exactly what his departure means and just how incompatible with corporate mainstream media the things he is saying now make him.   Listening to his interview on Democracy Now is particularly valuable in this regard.  On Democracy Now Arkin was clear his critique “applies to all of the mainstream networks,” CNN, Fox, etc, not just NBC.  And Arkin said he wanted to “step back” and “think about how we can end this era of perpetual war and how we can build some real security, both in the United States and abroad.”  See: Longtime Reporter Leaves NBC Saying Media Is “Trump Circus” That Encourages Perpetual War, January 09, 2019.

That Arkin is a critic of “perpetual war” and the “creeping fascism of homeland security” seems to be one of the key, agreed upon takes to characterize his departure (media columnist Brian Stelter works that pronouncement in as paragraph seven of what he wrote for CNN), however Democracy Now’s blunt summary that Arkin was accusing the national media itself of “warmongering” is probably fair and on target, certainly worth thinking about.

Perpetual War and Warmongering

In his letter Arkin says he’s “proud to say that” he “was one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq and remember fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board” and he says:

I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.  

On Democracy Now Arkin pointed out that in the last year the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

Arkin wrote in his letter that he realized how “out of step” he was with his employer’s mainstream media reflexive support for war and conflict because of the way the network responded to Trump’s various “bumbling intuitions” toward possibly sometimes taking the U.S. in more peaceful directions, saying of Trump and the NBC response:

Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula?  Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War?

Arkin likewise seems to feel for (his words) another president:

 poor Obama who couldn’t close Guantanamo or reduce nuclear weapons . . . because it was just so difficult.

Arkin’s letter says that, after Trump got elected, everything:

got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush. . .  I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.

On Democracy Now, however, Arkin dated the cessation of responsible mainstream media coverage of this country’s war activities even earlier saying that something happened post-9/11 where the mainstream media’s coverage of war has been taken over by talking heads who are “former government officials,” and “retired generals,” whose voices replaced the points of view civilian experts on war like university professors who have been banished from the airwaves so that there is “shallower and shallower” coverage, “particularly in an area like national security” so that:

We’ve just become so shallow that we’re not really able even to see the truth, which is that we’re at war right now in nine countries around the world where we’re bombing, and we hardly report any of it on a day-to-day basis.
   
So, to me, the crisis is that we condone perpetual war by virtue of our lack of reporting and investigation, and then, second, we fill the airwaves or we fill the newspapers with stories about the immediate and don’t give an adequate amount of space to deeper investigations or what I would say would be net assessment investigations of what really is going on.

He told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman:

the real crisis is that when we have a panel discussion on television, in the mainstream press, and even in the mainstream newspapers, we don’t populate that panel with people who are in opposition. We have a single war party in the United States, and it’s the only one that is given voice. And so, really, the crisis is not so much that there are experienced government officials speaking out; the problem is that there aren’t critics who are sitting next to them saying that “You’re full of it.” And so, to me, we need to balance that.

Worse, he said “because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump”:

what we see on TV now is former Obama administration officials masquerading as analysts who are nonpartisan, when in fact they are partisan. And indeed we see fewer retired generals and fewer retired admirals, who sometimes are useful in terms of explaining the profession of arms and the conduct of military operations, in favor of these political figures who have a partisan view.

Arkin refers to us as being in “hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump.”

In his letter, Arkin said it was “clear that NBC (like the rest of the news media) could no longer keep up with the world.”  (Or at least, NBC and the rest apparently aren’t keeping up with the world.)   He went on to say about the “leaders and generals”:

To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one country in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.

Although Arkin, finding it “disheartening that” the failures of “the generals and national security leaders” go unreported, is clearly calling for their military exploits to be examined skeptically and much more deeply by the press, who knows whether examination of the expensive ineffectuality that embroils us in perpetual wars would lead to the conclusion that such ineffectuality is wholly just incompetence or might even involve certain aspects of intentionality.  In figuring that out, it is relevant that Arkin says that, faced with how “perpetual war has become accepted as a given in our lives,” we need to “better understand” what is actually driving “terrorists” to fight, and notes how American “airpower” is the future and “the enabler and the tool of war today.”

Arkin’s letter speaks despairingly of how the NBC and other media coverage descends to a base “political horse race” narrative (sometimes as if the casualties of war are only those who suffer political defeats): “Rumsfeld vs. the Generals, as Wolfowitz vs. Shinseki, as the CIA vs. Cheney, as the bad torturers vs. the more refined, about numbers of troops and number of deaths.”

Creeping Fascism

While the above pretty much covers what Arkin expressed about “perpetual war,” there are also his not unrelated warnings offered about the “creeping fascism of homeland security.”

In his letter, Arkin listed Trump’s “attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI” among Trump's “bumbling intuitions” that are of likely merit, which Arkin says he was “alarmed” to see NBC “mechanically argue” against.  In his letter Arkin says he’d “argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”

On Democracy Now he referred to as the “crazy collateral damage of Donald Trump” that:

there are a lot of liberals in America who believe that the CIA and the FBI is going to somehow save the country from Donald Trump. Well, I’m sorry, I’m not a particular fan of either the CIA or the FBI. And the FBI, in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI. And there’s no real evidence that the FBI is either—is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it’s pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers, that they’re the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there’s just no evidence that that’s the case.

At one point the Democracy Now discussion steered into the subject of the money being spent on the intelligence and surveillance industry and the huge percentage of the American population that owes its livelihood directly to the military and the surveillance industry.  In his letter, Arkin mentions his having written “about the increasing power of the national security community,” and how he produced “long before Trump and `deep state’ became an expression . .  .one ginormous investigation – Top Secret America – for the Washington Post” (which he did working with Dana Priest-- it was also made into a PBS “Frontline” report) about the huge growth of resources being channeled into secret surveillance and intelligence.

“Ginormous” is also a good adjective for our nation's military spending, and especially the amount of money and resources going into surveillance and intelligence operations that we know little about and don't know the spending amounts associated with.

That military spending drives more military spending through a cycle of lobbying and drives the actual use of weapons (our arsenals of bombs dropped need to be replaced) is itself an important story and key insight.  What makes the spending on the part of the industry devoted to surveillance and the intelligence perhaps the most alarming part of this brew is the secrecy that prevents those numbers from being known and that prevents accountability as trillions of dollar slosh around unaccounted for.  In fact, government accounting standards have just been changed to make it acceptable to lie about how money is being spent for black ops.  You may be told that money is being spent for something that doesn't disturb you when it is really being spent on something else.  (For recent stories related to this see: Counterspin- ‘The Pentagon Has Steadfastly Stonewalled Against Making Its Budget Auditable’CounterSpin interview with Dave Lindorff on Pentagon budget fraud, Janine Jackson, December 14, 2018, Project Censored Show- Dave Lindorff Explores the Pentagon’s Financial Mysteries, December 11, 2018, and The Nation: Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed- How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit, by Dave Lindorff, November 27, 2018.)
  
In his letter Arkin also notes that he wrote “a nasty book – American Coup – about the creeping fascism of homeland security.”

It should be noted that Arkin’s background was originally in Army intelligence.

On Democracy Now Arkin said that we’ve “shifted from the dominance of the military-industrial complex, if you will, to a much more insidious and much more difficult-to-diagnose information complex. . .” so that:

most people would be surprised to learn, for instance, that Amazon is one of the largest defense contractors, that they’re building the cloud and they’re building the data centers which support the intelligence community and support the military. And there are other civilian companies, that we associate with being civilians, who are also terrific beneficiaries of the military’s largesse.

(People wouldn’t be so surprised about that if they were reading what we are making available about the book industry-destroying Amazon– now coming engorged with subsidies to Queens–  at Citizens Defending Libraries.)

Arkin spoke about the increasingly insidious invisibility of it all, how “the national security state has the ability to do what they want to be doing autonomously, with very little intervention on the part of civil society,” because it’s “become more invisible as a result of the style of American warfare” that is now conducted with drones, airpower, space and cyber.

The “creeping fascism of homeland security”?  Arkin on Democracy Now said we may have been told “Homeland Security” was about “counterterrorism,” but:

    . .  we’ve seen they’re creeping into cybersecurity. We’ve seen them creeping into election security. We’ve seen ICE and TSA become the second and third largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. And so, now homeland security sort of has become a domestic intelligence agency with really an unclear remit, really with broad powers that we don’t fully understand.

Arkin says “`Homeland security’ sounds a little bit brown-shirty to me.”

Arkin’s recent departure from NBC and mainstream media hasn’t lasted long enough for it to have yet stood the test of time.  Has he nevertheless said enough to qualify himself now as a legitimate exile from mainstream media who, like so many other journalists on our list, can’t return to jobs in mainstream media after expressing views that are problematic for that corporate conglomerate industry?  Most often the views of those exiled journalists are problematic in that they, like Arkin, are critical of the wars the United States wages.

Is it possible Arkin could ever return to mainstream media?  Arkin refers to his departure only as taking “a break.”  (And, as noted before, he also referred to it as taking “a step back.”)  Moreover he expressed much praise for co-workers at NBC and said he was “proud of the work I’ve done with my team and know that there’s more to do.”  In his letter Arkin refers to himself as “a difficult guy” and gives NBC credit for tolerating him “through my various incarnations.”  Arkin’s announcement of his leaving coincides with his announcement that he is working on several books, both fiction and nonfiction, one of which sounds like he wants to release it soon.  Is this good publicity as well as a good time for a convenient break intended to be just temporary?

Arkin, ends up saying about his consulting role that: “There’s a saying about consultants, that organizations hire them to hear exactly what they want to hear.”  Although he says this wasn’t the case with him at NBC, it’s not clear that mainstream media is going to want to hear any more from him after what he has now said.

So, even though Arkin’s departure has not yet withstood the test of time, given the strength of his  statements and how eloquently those statements express things that accord with what's been said by other exiled journalists on our list, we think he should, indeed, be added to our list of exiled journalists.  Plus the unlikelihood that mainstream media will take Mr. Arkin back is so extreme that it seems almost guaranteed Mr. Arkin won't be rehired.

As Striking L.A. Teachers Push Back, Analysis That Profit-Seeking Billionaires Are Desperate To Privatize In Order To Lower Expectations And Prove Government Doesn't Work (cf: Fights For Green New Deal and Universal Healthcare)

On Deomcracy Now's report on the Los Angeles teachers strike against privatization: Cecily Myart-Cruz and Eric Blanc

We could write about the teachers strike in Los Angeles with respect to one very direct relationship to defending libraries: They are demanding more librarians, along with their other demands (for smaller class sizes, higher pay, the regulation of charter schools and more nurses, and counselors).  But the more important connection to make is how the teachers fight against privatization is part of a bigger overall fight against privatization of all our institutions, including places like schools and libraries where we go to develop our minds, educate ourselves, and learn about democracy and how to understand power.

It is sobering, how closely the attacks on the Los Angeles public schools involve tactics parallel to those used against New York City public libraries as those launching those attacks attempt to lower the expectations of what the public can expect from government and the benefits that can flow to the public through the public commons.

The Democracy Now coverage of the strike this week is very good: “Public Education Is Not Your Plaything”: L.A. Teachers Strike Against Privatization & Underfunding, January 15, 2019.

In the words of Eric Blanc, a reporter covering the strike for The Guardian and Jacobin: “the question of privatization here in Los Angeles has been put to the fore” as 20,000 people marched through downtown Los Angeles protesting the privatization of Los Angeles public schools.  In The Nation Blanc wrote: “Pro-charter billionaires like Eli Broad and Reed Hastings spent an unprecedented $9.7 million in the spring of 2017 to ensure the election of a pro-privatization majority [to] the school board.”

This resulted in new superintendent, Austin Beutner, taking charge of the system, “who was imposed by billionaires who bought the 2017 elections” and who:

has a plan to downsize the district to push students into charter schools. . .

So, what we see by Beutner is fundamentally a push to really dismantle the institution that he’s nominally supposed to be leading.

Does this sound familiar to ears of library defenders here in New York City?  The following will also sound familiar.  Beutner maintains:

that there’s a financial crisis, that he would love to meet the demands of teachers. But we know that there’s actually a $1.86 billion reserve. And so what’s at stake is, he doesn’t want to use that money to improve the schools, because if he were to do that, it would undermine his mission to basically dismantle and privatize L.A. public schools.

Substantial reserve funds that those running the system won't access when they want to privatize the system's assets?  Yes familiar.

This assessment of strike leader and National Education Association vice president at United Teachers Los Angeles Cecily Myart-Cruz will add still more to what library defenders will find familiar: That there is (as with the policies pushed by Betsy DeVos Trump's U.S. Secretary of Education who is deeply involved in pushing the charter schools she is connected to) a:

systematic underfunding of public education, we’re talking about a privatization model that has swept the country

Of all the things said during the discussion, the analysis of Mr. Blanc’s below is what struck us as the most wise and most critical to think about:

I think the most important thing to keep in mind there is that public education is like the last bastion of the public sector in the United States. They’ve taken away most of everything else we had, and put it into private hands. And so, really, what you’re seeing is working people really concentrating around public education as the last right that we have for all people in this country. And so, at the same time, big business wants to dismantle this, because they know that if they can lower people’s expectations . . that they don’t deserve anything, then it’s going to be much harder to fight for other gains that we need, such as Medicare for all or a Green New Deal. So, really, what we’re seeing is: Is this going to be a country that uses its vast wealth to fund human needs, or is it going to be using this wealth to fund, you know, really big billionaires?

We previously covered in detail the assessment that the success of libraries, by their example are a threat to the privatizers here: Libraries As A Threat To The “Perspective” That Virtually Everything Should Be Dictated And Run By The Forces of Market Capitalism.

That’s right, if the public can be convinced that government can’t do anything successfully, it means there are a lot of things we can never “expect” to get, like medicare for all, or a solutions for our climate chaos crisis and global warming.  (See: If the Government Shutdown Wasn’t About Obamacare (And It Isn’t), Then It Was About?. . . Ready To Be Hot Under The Collar?)

Latest Non-reporting of National News?– Deaths in Puerto Rico

What does the number 4,645 on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruzhat mean? You'd be unlikely to guess the magnitude of its importance given the lack of reporting in the media and misinformation in these New York Times headlines.

This seems like the latest non-reporting of the news: an update on the (intentional?) mishandling of the crisis in Puerto Rico that has gone largely unreported.  On Wednesday, May 30th the national media should have covering a new report from researchers at Harvard, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, calculating that the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is probably at least 4,645, and perhaps as many as 5,740, at least 70 times higher than official governmental count of just 64. . . .  A death toll of 4,645 would make Hurricane Maria the second-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, behind only the Galveston Texas Hurricane in 1900.
                               
. . . What was the media devoting huge time to covering while leaving this national disaster news essentially unreported?: The firing of Roseanne Barr!

Low-balling in the headline in the Times print edition when lower in the web edition- see below.

Meanwhile you have to wonder about some of the reporting on the number of deaths that actually did get published, for instance, The New York Times: While Democracy Now reported that the calculation was that there were at least 4,645 deaths, and perhaps as many as 5,740, the Times print edition headline inaccurately characterized the study with a low-balling “Hurricane’s Death Toll In Puerto Rico May Top 4,600, New Study Says.”  The Times web version of the story low-balled it still further: “Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria Death Toll Could Exceed 4,000, New Study Estimates.” . . .

. . . Obviously, “4,600" is 1,140 less than the 5,740 estimate number that the Times didn’t even mention in its article, and “4,000" is 1,740 less.

The Times reporting also removes context from the photo that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tweeted of herself wearing a hat with the number 4,645.

This is an example why we are holding "Where Do You get Your News" forums, the next, our second, this Friday Evening June 1st.  Come join in the discussion.