MI GOP Foreclosing Foreclosed Voters

In what appears to be a typically cynical swing-state vote-blocking tactic, the Michigan GOP is using lists of people who lost their homes in foreclosures to deny access to polls (since the listed addresses are no longer legal residences). The presumption, it appears, is that those hit by the foreclosure crisis are more likely to vote Democratic. Gross.

This just happened to me...

I sat down to blog about this strange conversation I just had, and realized it could make a good article. It just so happens that it also fulfills a class assignment, due Friday. Two birds!

Returning from dropping off my laundry this morning, I was harangued, for the first time, as an agent of the gentrification of historically-black Brooklyn.

It just so happened that at that very moment I was thinking about my childhood nanny, an immigrant from Barbados named Rosemary. I had seen her a week earlier, the day of the West Indian parade, which was also the day I moved into my Crown Heights apartment. I've always struggled with the fact of my privilege, most notably through my relationship with Rosemary. That I spent time with her the very first day of my new life—for years, while I wrote about police interactions with the mentally ill for a public policy research firm, I lived on a quiet street in Park Slope; it was perhaps the single-least diverse block in Brooklyn—had a symbolism and poignance which did not escape me.

"Now why you want to live in a black neighborhood?" asked a man, around 40, who was leaning against the brownstone wall in front of the house next door to where I rent a room from an elderly Jamaican family. The man wore a green guerilla cap, slightly askance. His face was matted in short silver stubble, and his eyes, bloodshot, had a manic look. He was drunk. Based on the time of day and where he stood, I guessed he had just been turned out of the shelter in the Atlantic Armory two blocks away.

I paused. I wanted to be thoughtful. But the man didn't wait. "Because if I was me in a white neighborhood, you know I wouldn't be there like that."

I had a response formed, but regrettably I took his bait.

"Now why do you say that?" I asked.

Immediately I felt foolish. I thought about what I was wearing: gray running shorts from my alma mater, Wesleyan University, and a green Teach For America t-shirt. (A friend of mine likes to drunkenly award "Liberal Arts Student of the Year" awards when someone goes on about "institutional racism" or Evo Morales or Talk of the Town pieces. I no doubt would have won an honorable mention for best-dressed.)

"Come on now, you know why." Realizing my mistake, I eagerly nodded ascent. He continued: "You know now, if I was in Bay Ridge or something like that..."

I thought, 'Thank God he didn't mention Park Slope,' but decided to go another direciton.

"I live here because the people here are friendly, and because it's a nice place to live."

If he was caught off-guard, he didn't show it. "Well thank you for saying that," he said. "Now not everyone…" he started, then trailed off. He then mumbled some thoughts about the police, which I didn't understand, and the shelter, which indeed had kicked him out.

Perhaps sensing that he was losing me, he abruptly cut himself off, straightened up, and looked me in the eyes. "Well, you have a nice day," he said, and staggered away.

I turned the other way, smirked, and hurried up stairs to write about it.

Talk about mission creep

The NYC Teaching Fellows program either has a serious problem vetting its applicants, or supporting them once they're selected:

A Harlem teaching fellow who vanished nearly two weeks ago may have gone into hiding because she was afraid to return to the troubled school where she was assigned, sources told The Post.

Berg: Times, Don't Do It!

Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger calls for the New York Times to reconsider its plan to eliminate the stand-alone Metro section.

This is a city with eight million residents, after all. Given that I see fewer and fewer people on subways reading the Times, surely it harms company profits when you lose local circulation wars to far inferior publications, which provide more coverage to the type of local news that city residents crave to read.

Berg mentions the Times' often excellent reporting on the City Room blog - where the paper runs most of its local political and social coverage - but argues that this is little more than relegating the local beat to where fewer people will read it, and abdicating coverage to the tabloids.

Read Berg's letter here.

Stop hating on guvment

Research shows that the economy grows in times of higher tax rates and government expenditures, contrary to popular (mostly Republican) opinion.

Rather than harm the economy, the evidence shows that government spending, when done well, contributes critically to economic growth. Americans rely on the government for the free primary and high schools that educate the workforce. The government subsidizes college education and has built the immense transportation infrastructure that moves goods across the country and gets people to work. Federal, state, and local government have been essential to the nation's health, building clean-water systems and developing vaccines that have eliminated or minimized diseases like diphtheria, tuberculosis, and polio. The government can waste money, too. But the national rhetoric about the economy needs to stop focusing on how to shrink the government, and start focusing on how best to use it.

The story of our times

The proliferation of subprime lending--creditors targeting those with bad or no credit, with the intent (or at least willingness) of having the consumer default--is far broader than the housing market. We see it everywhere: payday loans, cash checking institutions, credit card companies, car dealerships, health care, to name a few. There are dozens of such places within a 5 block radius of where I live in Crown Heights.

Bill Moyers reports on two illustrative cases that capture the times we live in: JR Byrider, a subprime national car dealership (with a heavy credit line from Bank of America), and a billing agency that gets contracts from nonprofit hospitals and charges nearly 6% interest for those without health insurance. It's a great short piece (27 minutes) that summarizes the reporting of a Business Week investigator who broke the story. (The Moyers' piece is also fascinating as a window into good investigative reporting -- e.g., how Business Week got the dirt.)

Key points:

• The debt of those earning less than $30K a year (25% of the US) increased 250% from 1984 to 2004. This means the "poverty business" has proliferated like never before.
• Companies are using complex crediting software to develop "opportunity pricing" schemes-- looking at a consumer's credit vulnerabilities to develop optimally exploitive pricing schemes. They're using technology to tighten the screws.
  
• The poverty business is franchising and mainstreaming (as we know from the trend towards securitizing subprime mortgages on Wall St.). The product is the loan, not the car or house. In other words, the creditor is not only ok with the consumer's default (money is still made with high interest and resale potential), but designs loans explicitly with this in mind. I'm reminded of the recent Times' cover story on the mechanics of subprime mortgage financing -- a good process piece on how money is made lending to the poor.
  
• State regs. are behind the ball on this, and -- surprise surprise-- the poverty business has an organized, cohesive, and powerful lobby.

This is real scary stuff, and we all need to get smart on it.

Punishment over rehabilitation

A good overview of the American prison crisis--high rates of incarceration, bizarre and extreme sentences, and poor re-entry trends (e.g., high recidivism rates)--that ran as the front-piece to Mother Jones's series on crime and punishment in America.

Here's what it boils down to:

We've become a two-tier society in which millions of ostensibly free people are prohibited from enjoying the rights and privileges accorded to everyone else—and we continue to be defined by our desire for punishment and revenge, rather than by our belief in the power of redemption.