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How did America become a land of economic extremes, with entrenched, grinding poverty for those struggling at the bottom even as most poor adults who are not seniors are working?

Desmonds greatest contribution is changing the lens from individual behavior the hoary focus of so many books about poverty to asking and answering the larger question, Who benefits from practices that keep people poor? Poverty, he argues, results from three quintessentially American habits: exploitation of the poor; subsidization of the rich; and the intentional segregation of the affluent and the poor such that opportunity is hoarded and social mobility is rare.

Desmond acknowledges the role of anti-Black racism in perfecting Americans antipathy to spending for public benefits. Other books engage directly with the dog-whistling politics that dissuade working and middle class people from voting their economic interests. Desmond focuses more on making transparent the systems that fabricate scarcity and offers solutions.

He paints a clear picture of the morally fraught systems we all participate in. Well-paid professionals like me benefit as consumers from the poverty wages paid to others in an economy where Uber is a verb and surveilled and squeezed gig workers respond to and deliver our every need. Our stock investments swell as companies cut or outsource jobs, stagnate wages and oppose unions. We get free checking; the poor get usurious fees from banks and payday lenders. Meanwhile, zoning codes that allow only single-family homes create artificial housing scarcity that enhances our property values while foisting high costs and homelessness on others. Segregation encourages private opulence and public squalor, Desmond argues, as affluent people withdraw from public institutions and society systemically disinvests in the public goods ordinary people need.

Desmond also shows how the federal government, through the tax code, greatly subsidizes the affluent. In 2021, the U.S. spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks, forgoing revenue that otherwise would have been paid in taxes, much of it going to very rich people. For example, each year the U.S. loses more than $1 trillion in unpaid taxes because of the tax avoidance strategies of multinational corporations and wealthy families.

What to do about this system of American-designed poverty? Desmond offers a bold proposal. He argues that we could bring nearly every family in America above the official poverty line without adding to the deficit simply by collecting unpaid federal income taxes from the top one percent of households from closing loopholes to going after tax cheats. That would amount to an estimated $175 billion annually; those resources would then be allocated to expand broadly popular programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, that directly alleviate poverty. He also advocates for structural reforms that reverse the practices that deny poor people choices in housing, banking and employment.

If it is utterly easy as Desmond claims to find plenty of money to abolish poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes, then why dont we do it? He notes that in 2019 other western democracies like France and Germany raised as much as 38 percent of their GDP in tax revenues and invested broadly in public goods while U.S. total revenues were at 25 percent and the U.S. lavished government benefits on affluent families and refused to prosecute tax dodgers.

After laying out his analysis, Desmond urges readers to become poverty abolitionists, to spread an ethic that shuns companies that exploit workers and supports government policies that rebalance the social contract toward alleviating poverty rather than helping elites grow their wealth. Importantly, he is not arguing for redistribution per se. He is arguing that if the rich pay their taxes and the government stops over-subsidizing them and instead invests in the general welfare with aid to the poor, poverty can be eliminated, without adding to the deficit.

It remains to be seen whether an ethic of poverty abolition can take hold or overcome the rigging of electoral politics, particularly by Republican-dominated legislatures that constrain majority will through voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering. But Desmonds surprising insights and proposals offer much needed new thinking.

This brings me back to the role of racial division and the necessity of transcending it if America is to dismantle extreme systemic inequality in which people of all colors suffer.

Desmond notes that white families with accountants benefit most from government largesse. They have the strongest antigovernment sentiments and vote more often than those who both need and appreciate the role of government. And race-coded rationalizations justify hostility to government benefits a false, debunked propaganda that public benefits create welfare dependency being first among them.

Herein lies the rub. Decades of anti-Black racial coding, including Ronald Reagans stoking of the welfare queen stereotype, helped perfect anti-tax and anti-government attitudes and consolidate Republican power, especially in the South. Just as the forces that perpetuate poverty are structural, so are the politics that undergird it.

(Oddly, Desmond doesnt mention political culture-warring against the IRS which underfunded and undermined the agency, itself something of a tax cut for the rich, even as the IRS audited poor wage earners at five times the rate of everyone else. Hopefully, the Inflation Reduction Act will reverse these trends with its $80 billion increase in IRS funding over the next decade.)

Desmond finds hope for a transcending scenario in polls showing that most Americans believe the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor; that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes; and that there should be a $15 federal minimum wage. Invoking abolition as a mantra for the transformation that needs to occur aptly describes his ambition, though advocates for racial equity or reparation for the legacy of slavery, redlining and other forms of racial oppression may wince at his call for universal strategies for all races. The deep irony is that anti-Black policy and rhetoric were central to the creation of savage systems of inequality that harm everyone, and anti-Black processes continue to sustain segregation. But direct efforts to repair the economic and social damage to Black people inevitably produces backlash or is weaponized by the political right to woo voters, as was done with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Desmond admits that Black people have been disproportionately harmed, especially from historic and contemporary redlining and discrimination in housing. But he suggests that the universal reforms he recommends would disproportionately benefit Blacks while broadening political coalitions to end poverty.

This is an important debate. For my part, I have called for the abolition of Americas residential caste system and argued in support of policies that promote racial equity and repair for historically defunded Black neighborhoods and the citizens who have most suffered predation and disinvestment by government and private institutions. And I applaud local governments that are doing this work. But in wrestling with the conundrum of how to repair the damage of anti-Black racism, I have also been greatly influenced by the late stage thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and contemporary Black civil rights visionaries. They pursued a fusion politics that Desmond also admires.

In the final months of his life, Dr. King envisioned a national Poor Peoples Campaign that intentionally built a multiracial coalition to demand an economic bill of rights. In the 2010s, Reverend William Barber II successfully led the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and recently revived a Poor Peoples Campaign that brings conservative poor whites into the movement for economic fairness. The North Carolina movement paid off in 2023 expansions to Medicaid in the state, for example. They are a sign of hope in a nation riven by division, racism and hate. I see traction for a bold politics that joins the aspirations of all economically oppressed people, similar to the exciting rhetoric and moral claims of the new-South Justins who are building multiracial power in Tennessee by speaking to a rainbow of humans seeking freedom from gun violence and oppression of all kinds. The alternative is more of the same, a nation divided, with systems that elevate the wealthy and crush others.

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Opinion | America's Poverty Is Built by Design - POLITICO

Some have hypothesized that the rise in homicide rates is specifically a result of the June 2020 protests, Chalfin and MacDonald wrote, but theories about the role of the protests must contend with several challenges. Violence typically climbs during the summer, and in 2020, that happened to correspond not only with the protests but also with an end to the most intensive Covid lockdowns in many cities making it hard to pin blame on any one cause without more examination.

In a 2020 article, Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The Minneapolis Effect and the Decline in Proactive Policing, Paul G. Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, saw a clear relationship between the protests, the police reaction to them and the rising homicide rate:

Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories, namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement.

Cassell wrote that his thesis is that the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a Minneapolis effect, similar to the earlier Ferguson effect. If this thesis is correct, he continued, It is reasonable to estimate that, as a result of depolicing during June and July 2020, approximately 710 additional victims were murdered and more than 2,800 victims were shot.

Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides, made a detailed argument for a strong link between the protests, depolicing and the increase in homicides in an August 2022 essay, Murder and the Legacy of the Police Killing of George Floyd: What is beyond debate is that homicides increased dramatically in 2020. Murders surged nearly 30 percent, the largest one-year increase on record.

When weekly homicides are studied, he continued, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

a very clear pattern emerges. Although social and economic disruption caused by Covid began in early 2020, it wasnt until the week ending May 30 that weekly homicides topped 500 for the first time in many years. Although unemployment caused by Covid surged in April, there was little if any increase in murders at that time. Homicide began the historic hike exactly in the week when George Floyd was murdered.

There may have been several contributing factors to the surge in U.S. homicides, Hargrove concluded, but George Floyds murder was the very specific spark that lit the fuse to an extraordinary increase in fatal violence. He added, Law enforcement is learning from this experience. Police officers must be trained to avoid unnecessary deaths like George Floyds, acting as guardians of society and not as anticrime warriors.

Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who writes about policing and crime, provided a nuanced response to this issue by email:

There are plausible reasons to think that the movement to change the way police carry out their work in Black communities and to end police violence against Black Americans has created real changes with tangible consequences. In cities where the police have been asked, for decades, to dominate public spaces by force and then are required to change the way they do their job whether by public protest, local mobilization, public opinion or court order there is often a destabilization of the local social order that can result in multiple shifts.

In this changed environment, Sharkey continued, Police may no longer get involved in incidents where they have discretion, residents may no longer provide information to police or go along with the way things used to work, and guns may start to circulate more widely.

But, Sharkey stressed,

This doesnt mean that Black Lives Matter protests cause police killings to fall and other forms of violence to rise. It means that when cities rely primarily on the police to deal with violence and all of the other challenges that come with extreme inequality and then the role or practices of the police begin to shift, there are often clear impacts on police killings and other forms of violence. The key challenge is how to develop a new model that confronts violence without the costs that come with aggressive or violent policing and mass incarceration. That is the challenge that every city should be grappling with.

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Opinion | America Has Become Both More and Less Dangerous Since Black Lives Matter - The New York Times

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Left-wing activists are jealous of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery, a leading historian has said in a bizarre speech at the National Conservatism conference in London.

David Starkey claimed that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy white culture and do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.

He said: The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, theres jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.

The historians comments brought swift condemnation, with Daniel Sugarman, public affairs director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, tweeting that they were pathetic attempts to drive a wedge between communities that will not work.

Dr Starkey, an expert on Tudor history, has previously been criticised for comments on slavery and the Black Lives Matter movement, including during coverage of the coronation on GB News when he was accused of racism for claiming that Rishi Sunak was not fully grounded in our culture.

He later denied his comments were racist, saying he was referring to the prime minister being a typical international liberal with no interest in British values.

I fear, indeed I loathe, the unforgiving, inhumane impatience of utopian perfectionists, whether they are Maoists or agents of Islamic State or progressive twittering social justice warriors.

Nigel Biggar, professor emeritus, Oxford University

In his speech to the National Conservatism conference on Wednesday, Dr Starkey renewed his criticism of Black Lives Matter, denying that the movement cared about black lives at all.

To applause from the audience, he said: Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.

They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.

The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.

He added: The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Downing Street said Mr Sunak did not agree with the remarks but said the attendance of ministers Michael Gove and Suella Braverman was a matter for them.

He wouldnt agree with those comments but with regard to the specific ministerial attendance, that would be a matter for them, a No 10 spokesman said.

During the conferences morning session, the audience also heard from Nigel Biggar, a professor emeritus of theology at the University of Oxford, who argued that the British Empire had a mixed moral record and denied there was any reason to pay reparations to former colonies.

He said: As a Christian, Burkean conservative I dont expect perfection in any human affairs. Those who rule, just like those who are ruled, are creatures and sinners, finite and flawed.

Even as I recognise the duty to repent and improve, I expect even the noblest of human efforts to be marred by limited power, moral obtuseness and culpable failure.

And so I fear, indeed I loathe, the unforgiving, inhumane impatience of utopian perfectionists, whether they are Maoists or agents of Islamic State or progressive twittering social justice warriors.

He added: Much of what our forebears achieved was extraordinary. We need to remember it, we need to admire it, we need to conserve it, and we need to build on it.

Prof Biggar also criticised Scottish nationalism as based on a false Braveheart version of history.

He said: When too many Scots, in my view, align themselves with Scottish independence they do it, most of them, not because theyve analysed policies.

They do it in large part because they inhabit imaginatively a vision of the past that is false, a Braveheart past that excites unjustified nationalist indignation and resentment against the English and against Britain today.

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David Starkey in bizarre claim that left-wing wants to replace Holocaust with BLM - The Independent

A MEMORABLE scene in season one of HBOs hit series The White Lotus shows Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) asking her date how he got involved with the BLM, and why he decided to devote his life to activism. Greg Hunt (Jon Gries) is bewildered. Tanya, like many Americans, assumes that the initials stand for Black Lives Matter, an anti-racism group. Black Lives Matter? Im not involved in that, he replies. Now it is Tanyas turn for bewilderment. Finally, Greg reveals that he works for a distinctly different BLM: Americas Bureau of Land Management.

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The Bureau of Land Management (the BLM from here on) is not one of Americas better-known federal agencies. It is just one of 11 bureaus within the Department of the Interior, and is responsible for managing 10% of Americas lands, or more than 245m acres, mostly in the western states. It issues permits for development on the countrys public lands. For a long time, that meant approving oil and gas drilling.

But under President Joe Biden, it increasingly means granting permits for renewable-energy projects. The Biden administration aims to approve at least 25 gigawatts of solar, wind or geothermal energy on federal lands by 2025, and so the BLM finds itself at the very centre of Americas clean-energy transition. But the bureau will struggle to thrive in the limelight. When asked about the state of the BLM, current and former staffers describe an underfunded agency tormented by an increasingly difficult mission and hobbled by staffing shortages.

In 1976 Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA. The agency was tasked with balancing extraction, recreation and conservation, in perpetuity. Land-use conflicts are multiplying as the agency tries to deploy renewables, protect critical habitat, respect tribal sovereignty and manage a boom in outdoor recreation all at the same time. Ive been in a lot of angry public meetings, says Linda Price, the BLMs field manager in Salmon, Idaho. They dont get any more angry than when theres renewable energy involved.

Idaho is a case in point. The proposed Lava Ridge Wind Project in the states Magic Valley, near a Japanese prison camp from the second world war, has united greens, history preservationists, tribes, local officials, ranchers and farmers in opposition. Not only are locals sceptical of these specific turbines; some reject the idea that renewables belong on public lands at all.

The BLM is used to getting beaten up at public meetings. But the listening tours needed to solicit local input and dispel disinformation take time. That is something America does not have in abundance if it wants to decarbonise fast enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Last month, for example, the BLM approved the construction of a high-voltage transmission line from Wyomings High Plains to southern Nevada. The project was first proposed in 2007, but was delayed by a legal battle over whether the line could traverse ranchlands that were also protected habitat for the ever-imperilled sage grouse.

The bureaus broad mission also makes it vulnerable to big political swings. The Trump administration, for example, prioritised fossil-fuel development over other land uses. The last administration didnt want you to even think about conservation, says Mary Jo Rugwell, who retired as the BLMs Wyoming boss in 2019. Its hard for employees to make that pivot all the time, she adds wearily.

The second reason the BLM is struggling is because the agency was crippled by President Donald Trumps efforts to drain the swamp. In 2019 Mr Trump announced that the agencys headquarters would move from Washington, DC, to Grand Junction, Colorado, ostensibly so the BLMs bureaucrats would be closer to the lands they managed. More than 300 jobs were reassigned to western field offices. Just 41 people moved and only three ended up in Grand Junction. The rest quit or retired.

Baby-boomer retirements and a national labour shortage arent helping things. Tracy Stone-Manning, the agencys director under Mr Biden, argues that too few people, and the loss of expertise that accompanied the headquarters move, explain the BLMs inefficiency, not an over-onerous permit process. When your correspondent asked which projects had suffered for lack of bodies, Ms Stone-Manning was not picky. Id point to 120 projects that are waiting in line, theyre literally sitting on desks, she said. Its hard to say to a company See you in two years.

It is not hard to find specific examples of pain caused by the labour crunch. Agents working on the Lava Ridge wind-farm proposal say the controversial project is sucking up all their time and resources. They want to hire more people to focus entirely on renewables. Farther north in Salmon, Ms Price is trying to prioritise. If you doubled my staff, we would not run out of things to do, she says.

The BLM is dreaming of a bigger budget, too, and has asked Congress for more funding to hire nearly 500 employees. Its headquarters is moving back to the Beltway. But some of the bureaus far-flung agents think the agencys redemption will happen in the valleys and the mountains of the West, rather than in Washington. The number and diversity of conflicts is growing, says Ms Price. On the ground, in the little immediate field offices, we try to work through them one by one.

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter, which examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.

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Congress should fund the BLM (no, not that one) - The Economist

DefAllegedly Leaked Law Enforcement Information to Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio

WASHINGTON A District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Lieutenant was arrested today on an indictment charging that he obstructed an investigation into the December 12, 2020 destruction of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) Banner and made false and misleading statements to federal law enforcement about having done so, including that he leaked to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of The Proud Boys, the fact thatlaw enforcement had an arrest warrant for him related to that offense.

Shane Lamond, 47, of Stafford, Va., was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements. Lamond will be arraigned today before the Honorable Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves and Special Agent in Charge Wayne A. Jacobs of the FBI Washington Field Offices Criminal and Cyber Division.

According to the indictment, Lamond worked as the supervisor of the Intelligence Branch of MPDs Homeland Security Bureau. Beginning in July 2019 and continuing to at least January 2021, Lamond and Tarrio were in regular contact regarding Proud Boys planned activities in the District of Columbia.The indictment alleges that, as early as at least July 2020, Lamond began using Telegram to provide information to Tarrio about law enforcement activity relating to Proud Boys activities in Washington, D.C.

For instance, the indictment alleges that beginning on December 18, 2020, Lamond gave Tarrio confidential law enforcement information into the investigation of the December 12, 2020 burning of a banner that read #BLACKLIVESMATTER. As set forth in the indictment, Tarrio would then pass this information along to other Proud Boys members and take action based on the sensitive information. On or about January 4, 2021, following the issuance of an arrest warrant for Tarrio in connection with the burning of the BLM banner, while Tarrio was on a flight from Miami, Florida to Arlington, Virginia, Lamond, using Telegram, sent Tarrio a notification that a warrant had been signed for his arrest in the District of Columbia. After arriving in Arlington, Virginia and driving in to the District of Columbia, Tarrio was arrested on the warrant and subsequently pleaded guilty to one count of destruction of property in connection with the burning of the banner.

As the indictment alleges, on June 2, 2021, during an interview with federal law enforcement, Lamond made false and misleading statements regarding his communications and contacts with Tarrio. These false and misleading statements related to: (1) the methods by whichLamond and Tarrio would communicate; (2) whether Lamond had provided Tarrio with sensitive law enforcement information; (3) whether Lamond had notified Tarrio about the status of the MPD investigation into the banner burning; (4) whether Lamond notified Tarrio about his pending arrest warrant; and (5) the content and extent of Lamonds discussion with Tarrio prior to and after January 6.

The obstruction of justice charge carries a statutory maximum of 30 years in prison. Each charge for making a false statement carries a statutory maximum of 5 years in prison. The maximum statutory sentence for federal offenses is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes. The sentencing will be determined by the court based on the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

This case is being jointly investigatedby the FBIs Washington Field Office and the United States Attorney's Office Criminal Investigations Unit. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Rothstein, of the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia.

An indictment is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

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MPD Lieutenant Charged with Obstruction of Justice and False ... - Department of Justice