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Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says

Emily Benfer began her career representing homeless families in Washington, D.C.

Her first case involved a family that had been evicted after complaining to their landlord about the holes in their roof. One of the times she met with the family, one of the children, a 4-year-old girl, asked her: “Are you really going to help us?” Benfer struggled with how to answer.

“I’d met them too late,” she said. “I couldn’t stop the eviction. They had already been sleeping on the subway, and in other people’s homes. And you could see the effects it was taking on them.”

Today, Benfer is a leading expert on evictions. She is the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Throughout the public health crisis, Benfer has been investigating how states are dealing with evictions and sharing what she finds in a public database. 

CNBC spoke with Benfer about the coming eviction crisis and what can be done to turn it around. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Cop Arrested After Manhunt Launched for an Attack He Faked On Himself

Over the weekend, citizens of Virginia and the rest of the country were shocked as headlines across the internet reported that a Fauquier County Sheriff’s Deputy was found unconscious on the roadside after being attacked by people driving a black SUV. The blue line supporters came out in full force driving home the narrative that there is a war on cops. However, after police began investigating the incident, they quickly found out that no attack ever happened.

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What Is The Real Purpose Of The Lockdowns?

If given the choice between maintaining a toxic world of fear, pollution and violence controlled by the State or a society of prosperity and compassion based on freedom and individual rights, there is little doubt that the majority of Americans would want the old paradigm of synthetic events to take a hike; except that choice has been distorted under the guise of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has mislabeled the most deadly virus in history.

The coronavirus crisis arrived in a flash with little time to analyze exactly WTF was going on. Americans struggled to process what is real, trustworthy and authentic as the unraveling of deep political decay revealed a behind-the-scenes subterranean power struggle that has surfaced with the intent on disintegration of American Society.

While the country is fast approaching an existential crisis on steroids, millions experienced an inner knowing that some indefinable thing was not right with recognition that the early explanations were hogwash while others, addicted to mainstream/social media who still believed in the illusion of democracy, were on board with the litany of spin from the medical and political establishment.

While the Lockdown could have been a wake up call for humanity to change its consciousness with a paradigm shift – whether it be a spiritual awakening, a political realignment or re-evaluating one’s own personal health choices, since, after all, humanity was locked in a major health crisis. And most importantly, it was an opportunity to acknowledge that the planet itself is ailing from abuse and neglect with CV as a metaphor urging a personal reconnection with Nature.

In early 2020, Neil Ferguson of the UK’s Imperial College used a scare tactic to predict that 80% of Americans would be infected and that there would be 2.2 million American deaths – neither of which materialized. Yet Ferguson’s extremism accomplished its intended purpose in establishing the basis for draconian Lockdown requirements. Ferguson later retracted his earlier prediction down to 20,000 fatalities.

With current infection fatality rate at 0.20%, Lockdowns have been devoid of science and are based on arbitrary, contradictory and inconsistent requirements.

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Customs to Expand License Plate Reading Program Nationwide

The Customs and Border Protection agency has been collecting vehicle information at the border using license plate readers for years. Now, the agency will begin incorporating third-party license plate reader data collected from local governments, law enforcement and the private sector and maintained by a commercial vendor.

A privacy impact assessment published July 7 outlines the agency’s plan to incorporate datasets maintained by third-party vendors as part of its investigations. The latest update is the first since December 2017, when CBP authorized the use of license plate readers for data collection.

“To meet its vast mission requirements, CBP relies on a variety of law enforcement tools and techniques for law enforcement and border security,” the PIA states. “One such tool is license plate reader (LPR) technology, which consists of high-speed cameras and related equipment mounted on vehicles or in fixed locations that automatically and without direct human control locate, focus on, and photograph license plates and vehicles that come into range of the device.”

Each data collection—or “read”—gathers the vehicle’s license plate number; an image of the vehicle, including make and model; where it is registered; the location and owner of the camera; and any associated location information, including GPS coordinates. “LPR technology may also capture—within the image—the environment surrounding a vehicle, which may include drivers and passengers,” the impact assessment notes.

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How a McDonald’s Stirring Spoon Became a Target in the War on Drugs

The McDonald’s stirring spoon was a fixture of the popular fast food chain in the 1970s — a long, plastic utensil with a small scoop on one end and the signature golden arches on the other. It was a simple tool, designed to stir cream and sugar into coffee and nothing more. But that wasn’t all it was used for.

Indeed, the innocent stirring spoon, colloquially called the McSpoon, soon became an unlikely scapegoat in the War on Drugs.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared the drug epidemic public enemy number one, kicking off the “war on drugs” that’s still being waged today. Despite the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and efforts to shut down the Colombian drug trade, drug use only spiked in subsequent years. Cocaine use, in particular, was at its peak in those years, with a whopping 11 percent of the adult population using it.

To help curb the problem, anti-drug folks created a big push against the sale and use of drug paraphernalia — pipes, rolling papers, coke spoons and the like — leading to the DEA’s Model Drug Paraphernalia Act in 1979.

The law, adopted by almost every state government, contained a vague definition of paraphernalia that could include just about everything. A silly straw and a plastic sandwich bag could be paraphernalia under the right circumstances.

Angry about the proposed law, one member of the Paraphernalia Trade Association (PTA, representing smoke shop vendors) mocked the law’s vague wording with, that’s right, a McDonald’s stirring spoon.

“This,” he said, “is the best cocaine spoon in town and it’s free with every cup of coffee at McDonalds.”

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