Tag: poverty

Los Angeles Spends $44,000 Per ‘Temporary’ Tent For Homeless Village

Los Angeles is reportedly spending $44,000 for each individual tent in a temporary tent village for homeless people in East Hollywood, The Messenger reports.

All told, it cost about $4 million to put up fencing, bathrooms, and staffing facilities for the village. Catering services and 24-7 staffing cost an additional $3 million per year, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Despite the high costs, the site is only temporary. It’s located on a parking lot that will eventually be turned into public housing. But because it will take years for construction to commence on that project, the city decided to fill the space with tents in the meantime.

San Francisco-based nonprofit Urban Alchemy maintains the encampment. Launched in 2018 with a small grant, the group hires mostly former prisoners because they have the “ability to read people in unpredictable situations.”

According to several lawsuits, however, some of those employees have engaged in abusive behavior.

After expanding to Portland and Austin, the group brought in $51 million in 2021.

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Homeless Program in Washington State Has Burned Through $143 Million to House Less Than 1,000 People

Washington State has been trying to deal with their homeless problem, but they haven’t had much success.

A program designed to close down tent communities and get homeless people into housing has already spent $143 million dollars to house less than a thousand people. That’s a horrible ratio.

And now they want more cash, because they think this program has been so effective.

FOX News reports:

Blue state’s $143 million homeless program got less than a thousand people housed. Now governor wants more

An initiative to remove homeless camps from roadways needs more money to continue next year, according to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, after burning through $143 million in a little over a year.

“You can’t do this with zero dollars,” Inslee, a Democrat, told KOMO News. “We’ll need the legislature in January to step up to increase funding so we can continue the progress we’re making.”

Inslee’s statewide Rights-of-Way Safety Initiative began in June 2022 with the goal of removing homeless camps from state property near roads and offering housing to the people living in the camps.

On Friday, Inslee toured a tiny home village in Olympia funded by the initiative that will soon provide shelter to 50 people who previously lived in an encampment along I-5, KOMO reported. The governor said during the tour that the safety initiative is out of money and, come January, camps will remain on state lands if the legislature does not allocate more funds.

“We’re very proud of the work state agencies have done in our right of way initiative working alongside local officials and service providers,” a spokesperson for the governor told Fox News in an email. “We will take as much funding as we can get to continue this work.”

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The Child Poverty Rate In The United States Has More Than Doubled

If you take an honest look at the numbers, the obvious conclusion is that the U.S. economy is rapidly going in the wrong direction.  Delinquency rates are soaring, sales of previously owned homes have declined by more than 32 percent over the past two years, inflation is starting to rise at a frightening pace again, large companies all over America are laying off workers, and we just witnessed the largest decline in real median household income in more than a decade.  Sadly, it is often the most vulnerable members of our society that get hit the hardest when economic times get rough.  According to the Census Bureau, the child poverty rate in the United States more than doubled from 2021 to 2022…

The U.S. poverty rate according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was 12.4% in 2022, a rise of 4.6 percentage points from 2021. The poverty rate for children more than doubled year over year, from 5.2% to 12.4% — a record increase.

There is no way to spin that number to make it look good.

So why did this happen?

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Warnock’s Church Resumes Evictions From Low-Income Apartment Building as It Enriches the Senator

With Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) safe and secure in the Senate for the next six years, the church where he collects a salary as a part-time pastor is back to evicting residents of the low-income apartment building it owns—a subject that became a flashpoint in Warnock’s 2022 reelection campaign.

Since the Democrat won reelection in December, Fulton County court records show, the apartment building owned by Ebenezer Baptist Church has moved to evict six residents. The building, Columbia MLK Tower, has received over $15 million in federal and state funding to shelter the “chronically homeless,” but has nonetheless taken four residents to court this year for falling behind on rent by less than two months. Law enforcement officials forcibly ejected another resident from the pest-infected building in July.

Warnock denied during the 2022 campaign that the church was evicting residents, telling Georgia voters that the Free Beacon reports were “vicious and venomous” attempts to “sully Ebenezer Baptist Church” and the “church of Jesus Christ.”

Ebenezer pays Warnock a six-figure salary for his part-time pastoral services at levels that exceed the outside income allowance for senators. Warnock has leveraged several accounting loopholes to rake in sums far beyond that $30,000 limit. The church paid the senator $120,000 in 2021, for example, $89,000 of which was a tax-free “parsonage allowance” that he used to pay for his $1 million Atlanta home. And though Warnock made $155,000 from his church in 2022, the senator claimed $125,000 of that salary as “deferred compensation” for services he rendered before he was sworn into office in January 2021, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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Cash-Strapped Consumers Resort To “Dumpster Dining” To Save On Grocery Bill

Despite the Biden administration’s cheerleading that “Bidenomics” is the economic savior of the middle class — most Americans will disagree there has been an economic revival amid the worst inflation storm in a generation that has sent negative real-wage growth negative for more than two years, forcing consumers to deplete personal savings and rack up record amounts of credit-card debt in a high-interest rate environment.

We have shown many households are in rough financial shape. Dollar Tree executives confirmed weeks ago that mid/low-tier consumers are trading down from other more expensive retailers to their stores for groceries. This means Walmart has become too expensive for some consumers.

Even before we noted “Consumers Trade Down From Walmart, Dollar Tree Becomes Supermarket For The Working Poor,” we found a trend on TikTok that showed an increasing number of Americans in March were resorting to dollar stores for groceries to save money. We tilted that note “Dollar Tree Dinners”: TikToker Goes Viral After Showing People How To Cook For $35 A Week.

Last week, we were the first to point out that Google searches for “pawn shop near me” just erupted to record highs, indicating that consumers are in rough shape.

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 Building the Global Police State

During our investigation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the disingenuous use of language to sell SDGs to an unsuspecting public has emerged as a common theme.

The United Nations (UN) claims the purpose of SDG16 is to:

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

If we accept the supposition that “sustainable development” is global development that meets the needs of the world’s poor, then a reasonable person is unlikely to disagree with this stated objective.

But helping the poor is not the purpose of SDG16.

The real purpose of SDG16 is threefold: (1) empower a global governance regime, (2) exploit threats, both real and imagined, to advance regime objectives; and (3) force an unwarranted, unwelcome, centrally controlled global system of digital identity (digital ID) upon humanity.

We find the UN’s digital ID objective tucked away in its SDG Target 16.9:

By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.

While SDG16 doesn’t allude specifically to “digital” ID, that is what it means.

As we shall see, the SDG16 target indicators don’t reveal the truth, either. For example, the only “indicator” to measure SDG16.9 progress (16.9.1) is:

[The] proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age.

You might therefore think the task of “providing legal identity” would primarily fall to said “civil authorities.” That is not the case.

Within the UN system, all governments (whether local, county, provincial, state, federal) are “stakeholder partners” in a global network comprised of a wide-ranging gamut of public and private organisations. Many of these are explicitly backed by or housed at the UN, and all of them are pushing digital ID as the key mechanism to achieve SDG16.

This aspect of SDG16 will be more fully explored in Part 2.

There is a term that this worldwide amalgam of organisations often uses to describe itself: it is a global public-private partnership—G3P, for short.

The G3P is toiling tirelessly to create the conditions necessary to justify the imposition of both global governance “with teeth” and its prerequisite digital ID system. In doing so, the G3P is inverting the nature of our rights. It manufactures and exploits crises in order to claim legitimacy for its offered “solutions.”

The G3P comprises virtually all of the world’s intergovernmental organisations, governments, global corporations, major philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups. Collectively, these form the “stakeholders” implementing sustainable development, including SDG16.

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Don’t Bring Back Public Housing

One of the biggest frustrations about getting old is hearing younger people propose ideas that were debunked decades ago—and then getting “eyes glazed over” looks from them after explaining that we’ve already been there and done that. Proposers of such ideas rarely change their minds after I say, “Dude, I was there and remember—and it was a disaster.”

The latest “old is new again” proposal is for the government to just build housing—as in public officials buying the land, choosing the design, finding a developer, and then serving as landlord. The impetus is the nation’s affordable-housing crisis. Advocates have changed the terminology. They are proposing that “we” build “social housing” rather than “public housing projects,” but it’s the same blighted idea.

“Public housing is ready to make a comeback,” wrote Daniel Denvir and Yonah Freemark in left-leaning Slate. They say current efforts to up-zone property (allowing developers to build higher-density projects with fewer regulations) yield only modest results. They rehash the debate on the Left—between YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yarders) and those who claim that new building promotes gentrification.

“But this debate is often impoverished,” they add. “As policymakers continue to confront this crisis, it is time for them to reconsider an obvious but long-taboo solution: building new public housing.” Of course, this time the government will do it better than the last time by—get this—avoiding income restrictions and opening the units to all comers.

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Plutocracy Uses Technology to Clobber the Poor

Technology wielded by oligarchic government is a nightmare. From killer police dog robots to facial recognition in public housing, it’s not just the poor who are targets, it’s everybody. But the poor and the left get smacked with it the worst. It’s open season on antifa, a season inaugurated by killer Kyle Rittenhouse shooting two Black Lives Matter protestors to death, getting off scott free and becoming the darling of far-right celebrities. As for how technology crushes the poor, just take the case of 33-year-old Tania Acabou, who found herself a victim of constant surveillance in her public housing project.

Cameras bought through the department of Housing and Urban Development have been installed in public housing, supposedly to fight crime. Instead, the poor domiciled there find themselves under continuous watch. “It got to the point where it was like harassment,” Acabou told the Washington Post after being evicted from her New Bedford, Massachusetts project due to this surveillance. The Post reported May 16 that Acabou received “an eviction notice in 2021 after the housing authority…used cameras to investigate her over several months…The housing authority believed her ex was living at the house without contributing rent [he was babysitting their kids]…violating a policy that restricts overnight visitors to 21 nights per year.”

In a Steubenville, Ohio project, the Post added, “One man was filmed spitting in a hallway. A woman was recorded removing a cart from a communal laundry room. Footage in both cases was presented to a judge to help evict the residents in court.” So if you’re poor, you live under a security microscope with the excuse that it fights crime, when really it just fights you. One woman, threatened with eviction “for lending her key fob to an unauthorized guest,” explained that her declining vision necessitated a friend bringing her groceries. She was allowed to stay.

HUD used federal crime fighting grants to buy the cameras. But as anyone with a brain can deduce, this surveillance is aimed at public housing residents, not criminals. Or maybe, as far as HUD’s concerned, the residents are the criminals…While several states have limited police use of facial recognition, as the Post notes, because it produces false matches, HUD does not appear to have caught on. “In rural Scott County, Va., cameras equipped with facial recognition scan everyone who walks past them, looking for people barred from public housing,” according to the Post. “In New Bedford, Mass., software is used to search hours of recordings to find any movement near the doorways of residents suspected of violating overnight guest rules.” So if you reside in public housing or visit someone there, you are treated as a potential lawbreaker.

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Facial Recognition Shows Up in Public Housing, Small Cities

The race to make biometric surveillance commonplace is only getting faster, with systems going up in public housing and municipalities far from city crime.

With the growth comes a mission that residents worldwide have often been told is off the table, that of the all-seeing, always analyzing sentinel that never stops recording what happens in the community.

The issue is again in the news, this time following a lengthy article in The Washington Post reporting on facial recognition systems being used in United States public housing.

Also, Context, a Thomson Reuters Foundation analytical publication, has shown how surveillance vendors are selling smaller cities on big-city facial recognition systems – and how residents are being cajoled into linking their own cameras to police networks.

Post reporters said they found six public housing centers whose boards have purchased surveillance cameras and computer servers. Some of those on the list also use biometric surveillance algorithms.

They were the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing, Omaha Housing, Scott County (Virginia) Redevelopment & Housing, Jefferson County (Ohio) Housing and Grand Rapids (Michigan) Housing agencies.

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