“Maybe we’re forgetting what it felt like to be afraid,” Pat Lynch said, two months before the murders of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. The awful killings shouldn’t derail the movement against police brutality, but it should remind us that police can be afraid, too.
One of the many tragic aspects of this story with so much tragedy is that this crisis could derail De Blasio, who seemed to hold the power to unite the city across race and class lines, to close the fissures that opened in the 1960s and persisted through the Giuliani years. With his African American wife and biracial kids, he represented New York’s future – and New Yorkers of every race, religion and income group voted for him. Sure, he had a record in politics, but it was at least partly the power of his family story that lifted him into office.Walmart profits from forcing employees to pay for new work uniforms.Walmart heirs get billions in tax subsidies.
An Americans for Tax Fairness’ report released this year found that the Waltons, Walmart’s heirs, received nearly $8 billion in tax breaks in 2013. That’s right—while millions of working- and middle-class Americans pay taxes each year, the richest family in the world avoided them. $6.2 billion of Walmart’s $8 billion in tax breaks were federal taxpayer subsidies because its employees wages are so low. Employees are forced to rely on government healthcare, food stamps and other taxpayer-funded programs. In a more recent report, Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart has $21.4 billion in untaxed profits offshore and is lobbying Congress to further decrease corporate tax rates.
Walmart workers were outraged in August when they learned they would be forced to buy new work uniforms to adhere to the corporation’s updated dress code policy. The low-wage workers spoke out, explaining that they couldn’t afford to purchase the new clothes. The corporation’s HR executive cheerfully suggested employees buy the new uniforms at, you guessed it, Walmart. Making Change at Walmart found that Walmart could make $51-$78 million in sales from the dress code change by calculating the price of three outfit sets multiplied by its one million workers. They added that the Walton family, Walmart’s heirs, could buy one million employees three uniform sets with just six days of their Walmart dividends.
African Americans, LGBT people, Jews and Asians passed up the chance to vote for one of “their own” to back De Blasio. White New Yorkers backed the progressive 52-43 over Republican Joe Lhota. Which seemed like progress at the time – but given that De Blasio won 73 percent of the city, it was a fragile kind of support. De Blasio lost only one group of voters – those who said crime was their top concern. That’s Pat Lynch’s constituency, and it’s growing today.
In that context, Lynch’s remarkable secret comments about using “extreme discretion” and following “stupid rules” which are “made by them to hurt you” also sounds like a threat – a strategy to make New Yorkers remember “what it felt like to be afraid,” before it got too “good on the streets.”
Before the killings of Ramos and Liu, I took comfort in a mid-December Siena poll, which found that New Yorkers believed, by a 2-1 margin, that the officer who choked Garner to death ought to have been indicted. They also supported giving the state attorney general the authority to investigate and prosecute cases where unarmed civilians are killed by police, 58-33. (Whites agreed with both, though by much smaller margins than African Americans.)The way that last part repeats, year after year, can make it seem like homelessness is an entrenched, unchanging part of our society. But data from recent years shows the nature of the problem is shifting dramatically before our eyes.
According to HUD, the number of people on the streets and in shelters on a single night in January has fallen for the past four years straight. Even more remarkably, the category that HUD terms chronic homelessness — people with mental or physical disabilities living without a home for extended periods, or repeatedly — has dropped 30 percent since 2007, even as the nation went through a severe recession.
But there’s also another story about homelessness in America, told by a report from the National Center for Family Homelessness, that shows a record number of children are now homeless. That’s based on data from the Department of Education, which measures homelessness quite differently from HUD. Instead of just surveying streets and shelters, the DOE includes anyone who’s living doubled-up, couch-surfing with friends or extended family. Because of that, the scale of the problem depends on which source you’re looking at — almost 1.3 million homeless students by the DOE’s count, compared with HUD’s point-in-time estimate of 578,424 homeless people of all ages.
Still, the way the two sets of numbers are trending reflects something kind of mind-boggling: As a nation, we may be on our way to solving the problem of homelessness for the toughest people to serve. Yet, at the same time, homelessness is on the rise among a separate group of people, with problems that seem, on the surface, much simpler.So now Osama bin Bama’s making kissy with the Castro brothers, the Cuban Communists. You see him surrendering to the Communists? He’d love to turn us Communist; he already has.
“Maybe we’re forgetting what it felt like to be afraid,” Pat Lynch said, two months before the murders of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. The awful killings shouldn’t derail the movement against police brutality, but it should remind us that police can be afraid, too.
One of the many tragic aspects of this story with so much tragedy is that this crisis could derail De Blasio, who seemed to hold the power to unite the city across race and class lines, to close the fissures that opened in the 1960s and persisted through the Giuliani years. With his African American wife and biracial kids, he represented New York’s future – and New Yorkers of every race, religion and income group voted for him. Sure, he had a record in politics, but it was at least partly the power of his family story that lifted him into office.Walmart profits from forcing employees to pay for new work uniforms.Walmart heirs get billions in tax subsidies.
An Americans for Tax Fairness’ report released this year found that the Waltons, Walmart’s heirs, received nearly $8 billion in tax breaks in 2013. That’s right—while millions of working- and middle-class Americans pay taxes each year, the richest family in the world avoided them. $6.2 billion of Walmart’s $8 billion in tax breaks were federal taxpayer subsidies because its employees wages are so low. Employees are forced to rely on government healthcare, food stamps and other taxpayer-funded programs. In a more recent report, Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart has $21.4 billion in untaxed profits offshore and is lobbying Congress to further decrease corporate tax rates.
Walmart workers were outraged in August when they learned they would be forced to buy new work uniforms to adhere to the corporation’s updated dress code policy. The low-wage workers spoke out, explaining that they couldn’t afford to purchase the new clothes. The corporation’s HR executive cheerfully suggested employees buy the new uniforms at, you guessed it, Walmart. Making Change at Walmart found that Walmart could make $51-$78 million in sales from the dress code change by calculating the price of three outfit sets multiplied by its one million workers. They added that the Walton family, Walmart’s heirs, could buy one million employees three uniform sets with just six days of their Walmart dividends.
African Americans, LGBT people, Jews and Asians passed up the chance to vote for one of “their own” to back De Blasio. White New Yorkers backed the progressive 52-43 over Republican Joe Lhota. Which seemed like progress at the time – but given that De Blasio won 73 percent of the city, it was a fragile kind of support. De Blasio lost only one group of voters – those who said crime was their top concern. That’s Pat Lynch’s constituency, and it’s growing today.
In that context, Lynch’s remarkable secret comments about using “extreme discretion” and following “stupid rules” which are “made by them to hurt you” also sounds like a threat – a strategy to make New Yorkers remember “what it felt like to be afraid,” before it got too “good on the streets.”
Before the killings of Ramos and Liu, I took comfort in a mid-December Siena poll, which found that New Yorkers believed, by a 2-1 margin, that the officer who choked Garner to death ought to have been indicted. They also supported giving the state attorney general the authority to investigate and prosecute cases where unarmed civilians are killed by police, 58-33. (Whites agreed with both, though by much smaller margins than African Americans.)The way that last part repeats, year after year, can make it seem like homelessness is an entrenched, unchanging part of our society. But data from recent years shows the nature of the problem is shifting dramatically before our eyes.
According to HUD, the number of people on the streets and in shelters on a single night in January has fallen for the past four years straight. Even more remarkably, the category that HUD terms chronic homelessness — people with mental or physical disabilities living without a home for extended periods, or repeatedly — has dropped 30 percent since 2007, even as the nation went through a severe recession.
But there’s also another story about homelessness in America, told by a report from the National Center for Family Homelessness, that shows a record number of children are now homeless. That’s based on data from the Department of Education, which measures homelessness quite differently from HUD. Instead of just surveying streets and shelters, the DOE includes anyone who’s living doubled-up, couch-surfing with friends or extended family. Because of that, the scale of the problem depends on which source you’re looking at — almost 1.3 million homeless students by the DOE’s count, compared with HUD’s point-in-time estimate of 578,424 homeless people of all ages.
Still, the way the two sets of numbers are trending reflects something kind of mind-boggling: As a nation, we may be on our way to solving the problem of homelessness for the toughest people to serve. Yet, at the same time, homelessness is on the rise among a separate group of people, with problems that seem, on the surface, much simpler.So now Osama bin Bama’s making kissy with the Castro brothers, the Cuban Communists. You see him surrendering to the Communists? He’d love to turn us Communist; he already has.
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