Poverty

Subterms

    Latest story

    175 Shares28 Views

    Portlanders mock Trump for calling their city ‘war-ravaged’. But they’re clear-eyed about its problems

    by

    When Donald Trump said he was sending the national guard to Portland, Oregon, to protect immigration officers, local residents immediately responded with characteristic sarcasm. Mocking the president’s portrayal of a city in decline, social media was awash with videos of children in parks, busy farmers’ markets and September’s falling leaves overlaid with satirical text: “war ravaged”.When the US secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) building where protesters had been gathering for weeks, she found a small crowd of demonstrators wearing inflatable animal costumes, not a city overrun by antifascist militants. The reality on the ground did not deter Trump from painting the city as unlivable.“I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” Trump said in an 8 October White House meeting. “You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows. Most of the retailers have left.”Oregon’s largest city boasts a wealth of beauty, nestled between two rivers and surrounded by mountains. It isn’t “bombed out”, as Trump said, and officials in recent weeks have worked hard to convince Trump the city is not a dystopia, saying years of public messaging about Portland’s challenges are outdated.“Portland is vibrant and thriving,” said a 28 September letter co-signed by 200 Oregon business leaders, elected officials and organizations. “Just like with public safety, we recognize that there is more work to do and we continue to forge public-private partnerships every day to make our city better.”But Trump’s narrative did not appear suddenly. Portland is, in fact, struggling with a dire affordability crisis, with persistently high rates of homelessness, and too many people living on the streets with mental health and addiction needs.Economic leaders in the city have argued for years that those problems, combined with high taxes and racial justice protests, have slowed the city’s economic recovery from a deep pandemic hole.Progressive critics have said that a period of economic boom followed by Covid left the city’s social safety net in disrepair, and their arguments have increasingly resonated with voters in recent years.View image in fullscreenPortland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, a moderate, won election in 2024 in a landslide. But the election also brought four members of the democratic socialists of America (DSA) and an even, progressive-moderate split to the city council.Campaigns promising to address root causes of social issues are resonating with voters across the nation, including in New York, where Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls for the mayoral race.Sameer Kanal, a DSA-affiliated councilor, said that, like in cities across the country, there is a new, relentless focus on affordability.“How can we make sure that the rent is low enough, not make sure that the people that are richest in the city are benefiting the most?” Kanal said.Cost of livingIn the mid-2010s, national media celebrated Portland’s quirks, bringing an influx of new residents and business opportunities. It also meant housing costs soared and homelessness increased year after year. Average rent in Portland increased by 30% from 2012 to 2015, and the average home sale price grew by nearly 50% from 2011 to 2016. In 2025, Portland’s average fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment, as defined by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, was $1,997, up from $905 in 2011.No single neighborhood’s average rent is affordable to Portlanders making under $31,000 annually. And despite home sale prices decreasing by 7% citywide from 2020 to 2024, high mortgage rates and a low stock of houses for sale leave even median-income Portlanders with few options to buy.To keep up with demand, Portland’s housing bureau estimates the city needs to build at least 63,000 units affordable for low- and moderate-incomes in the next 20 years.Mitch Green, an economist and professor elected to Portland’s city council this year, said the “Portlandia era” of the 2010s brought significant revenue to the city, but did not create the sufficient affordable housing necessary to meet the needs of the entire population, particularly low-income residents.“People can, in some sense, adapt a little bit to changes in rent,” Green said. “But when it changes quickly, what you’ll see is, people will fall through the cracks.”View image in fullscreenA 2019 project to bring a luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel and residences symbolized both the market’s optimism for Portland and its troubles after the economic downturn following Covid, people like Green argue.The $600m project displaced a block of food carts enjoyed by locals. The city’s tax incentives obligated the project to build affordable housing units or contribute $8m toward an affordable-housing program. When high rents and the arrival of Covid hollowed out downtown Portland in 2020, shuttering the central city after its upswing, the project like many others of its kind struggled. Only 8% of the 132 luxury condos sold, and the city may never see the money or the affordable housing after the construction lender foreclosed on the building earlier this summer.Temporary solutionsThe lack of affordable housing has been a key driver in a persistent homelessness emergency. As of July, more than 16,000 people are unhoused in Multnomah county, which encompasses Portland. Roughly half are unsheltered, and the vast majority live in Portland.There are twice as many unsheltered Portlanders as there are shelter units. With affordable housing in short supply, unhoused residents are left surviving in the shadows, under constant threat of fines, jail time or sweeps.The mayor has responded with a dual strategy: clearing encampments, while building out temporary shelter units.Like in many counties across the US west, encampment sweeps have become more frequent and aggressive in recent years. It’s a strategy the mayor says he wants to scale up.“The city of Portland anticipates returning to enforcement of existing public space regulations on safety, sanitation and livability in the coming days,” Wilson said. “Every community member, both housed and unhoused, deserves a safe community.”Meanwhile, the mayor’s office has added 800 beds since January toward his goal to add 1,500 by 1 December.The approach is not without its critics. A Street Roots and ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that the increase in sweeps in Multnomah county contributed to a fourfold increase in homeless deaths over a four-year period. And progressive leaders, backed by a throng of local organizers, have argued the city should focus on building permanent housing rather than temporary shelter.Multnomah county has spent $500m on housing in 2024, with half spent on temporary shelters and navigation services. That approach is expensive and ineffective, according to Green.“It’s good to open up some shelters so people have a place to hang their head at night, and they don’t have to be stuck out in the winter or the summer experiencing the conditions,” Green said. “But it’s not a solution for homelessness. The solution for homelessness is housing.”Green and other local leaders recently visited Vienna to learn how social housing might better address Portland’s needs. The European city spends $500m on its entire social housing program, including all homelessness spending. It is rare for a person to live on the streets.Meanwhile, the outlook is grim for Oregonians at risk of losing housing. Amid billions in federal cuts to social programs and tax breaks in Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, the state’s Democratic supermajority legislature cut $100m in eviction-protection funds this year, instead allocating $205m toward a statewide temporary homeless shelter program.That’s a heavy loss, according to Becky Straus, managing attorney at the non-profit Oregon Law Center, which provides pro bono legal assistance for low-income Oregonians.“We can’t cut our way out of the housing crisis,” Straus said. “Without eviction prevention, more people will end up on the streets and shelters won’t be able to keep up.”Through August, nearly 8,000 evictions were filed in Multnomah county alone this year, with 90% for nonpayment of rent.Drug decriminalizationAs the city grappled with a sharp increase in homelessness, it also faced the visible impacts of a drug crisis that rose nationally since as early as 2013, following decades of disinvestment in services at the state level. In 2021, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize drugs and allocate hundreds of millions in marijuana tax revenues to build treatment programs across the state. The measure was an attempt to address a persistent addiction crisis, one that appeared more visible with storefront windows boarded up and social services at a minimum post-pandemic. Rather than incarcerating low-level drug offenders, the state would invest in building up its support infrastructure.The decriminalization measure – passed after the city saw 100 consecutive days of racial justice protests – was meant to reduce interactions with the criminal justice system and confront racial disparities in policing, particularly for low-level offenses, and create a public health framework for addiction. A now-deleted Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) 2020 survey showed Oregon among states with the least access to substance use and mental health treatment.But the headwinds the policy faced were fierce. After voters passed the ballot measure, it took more than 15 months for the state’s health authority to send funds to new statewide support networks – the other side of the decriminalization coin. That meant people were not arrested for possession or consumption of drugs, even in public spaces. Still, few options existed for a person seeking recovery services for substance use disorders.In time, multiple studies showed that the effects of Covid-19, rising housing costs and the arrival of fentanyl coalesced in early 2021, leading to the public’s distorted perception that drug decriminalization was responsible for homelessness, crime and high downtown vacancy rates.Despite appearances, deaths from fentanyl followed an identical trajectory in all 50 states after the drug saturated each market, regardless of each state’s criminal penalties.“Portland was not an outlier,” said former Multnomah county district attorney Mike Schmidt.Still, the Oregon legislature ended the state’s decriminalization efforts under public pressure in September 2024, while maintaining funding for new treatment centers.Portland police have arrested 400 people for drug offenses since then, with 72% being charged with misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance. Meanwhile, funding has helped thousands of people access harm reduction, peer support and substance use treatment services through new networks the decriminalization measure created.Olivia Katbi, co-chair of the democratic socialists of America Portland chapter, said she still believes “Portland is the best city in the country”, despite its challenges. “And, Portland as a city has problems in the way that every large American city has problems.”This article is co-published with Street Roots, an investigative weekly street newspaper More

    More stories

    • 175 Shares143 Views

      in US Politics

      LA 2028 Olympics: fears of mass displacement and homeless sweeps as Trump threat looms

      by

      In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the city deployed 30 police officers on horseback to rid downtown of unhoused people and, in the words of a captain, “sanitize the area”.Some people were arrested and transported to detox centers. Others were forced from public view while their possessions were trashed.Now, as the city prepares to host the games once more in 2028, civil rights advocates are fearful history will repeat itself, and authorities will again banish unhoused communities in ways that could exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis.Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, has vowed not to bus unhoused people out of the city and repeat the tactics of 1984, telling the Los Angeles Times her strategy will “always be housing people first”. But the scale of the problem in LA is larger than it was four decades ago, and the Trump administration’s forceful stance on homelessness could increase pressures on Bass and the unhoused population.LA county is home to an estimated 72,000 unhoused people, including 24,900 people in shelters and 47,400 people living outside in tents, makeshift structures and vehicles. In the last two years, Bass and county leaders have reported some progress in moving people indoors, which they attributed to their strategy of targeting people in encampments with shelter options and resources.But the dramatic shortage of affordable housing in the region will make it difficult to get tens of thousands of people stably housed in less than three years and stop new encampments from rising up.Meanwhile, Trump, who appointed himself White House Olympics taskforce chair, has made it clear he wants to see encampments disappear from American cities, signing an executive order in July to push local governments to clear encampments and making it a point of focus during the federal crackdown in Washington DC.Combined with a supreme court ruling allowing governments to fine and jail unhoused people when no shelter is available, Trump’s ongoing deployment of troops to Democratic cities, significant support from California residents for tougher policies towards the unhoused, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s push for aggressive sweeps, experts fear the Olympics could force out many of LA’s poorest residents.“The pressures are going to come from the White House, from the state and from local government as we get closer to the Olympics,” said Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group that advocates for unhoused people and is based in Skid Row, a downtown area with a high concentration of homelessness. “My fears come from being an Angeleno and seeing our communities attacked and displaced when major events come our way.”‘I remember the arrests’There is a long history of Olympics host cities trying to get rid of their most disenfranchised communities.In Moscow in 1980, organizers pledged to “cleanse” the city of “chronic alcoholics” and dumped people outside city limits. In Atlanta in 1996, officials arrested thousands of unhoused people under anti-loitering and related ordinances. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than 70,000 people were displaced. And last year in Paris, thousands of unhoused people, including asylum seekers, were bussed out.The 1984 LA games led to the increased militarization of the LA police department (LAPD) and an escalation of racist and aggressive policing that targeted Black and Latino youth, experts say.“I remember the pre-Olympics arrest of my older cousins,” said White, 56, who grew up within walking distance of the Coliseum, a stadium that served as an Olympics venue then and will be used for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. “Young Black and brown men were afraid to be in the streets, because they were sweeping people up under the pretext of addressing gang violence.”View image in fullscreenThe games helped LAPD acquire flashbang grenades, specialized armor, military-style equipment and an armored vehicle, which it used a year later to ram a home where small children were eating ice cream, Curbed LA reported. The Olympics-fueled law enforcement expansion also paved the way for LAPD’s notorious Operation Hammer, a crackdown that led to mass arrests of Black youth.In 2018, after LA won the 2028 bid, then-mayor Eric Garcetti said the games would present an opportunity to improve homelessness, which he said could be eliminated from the streets by the games.“Garcetti kept saying: ‘We’ll end homelessness in LA,’” said Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, a group founded in 2017 to oppose the Olympics in LA. “And we have been warning that the only way they can actually end homelessness is by disappearing people.”Increasing sweepsCalifornia, LA and LA 2028 officials have not released plans for a homelessness strategy.But on the streets, there are already fears that sweeps of people living outside are escalating due to the Olympics – and as LA prepares to also host the World Cup next year.In July, the city shut down a long-running encampment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando valley, north-west of downtown and visible from the 405, a major freeway. The site, which residents called the Compound, was across from the Sepulveda Basin where the Olympics is planning events. The sweep displaced roughly 75 people. The city said it offered 30 motel rooms to the group and other shelter options.Carla Orendorff, an organizer working with the residents, said she was aware of at least 10 displaced people now back on the streets, including several who had been kicked out of the motels, which have strict rules. Residents were dispersed to eight motels, and in one, staff ran out of food and people were left hungry, she said.Those still out on the street “are just forced further underground, in places that are harder to reach, which makes it incredibly dangerous for them”, Orendorff said.Giselle “Gelly” Harrell, a 41-year-old displaced Compound resident, said she lost her motel spot after she was gone for several days. She was temporarily staying in a hostel with help from a friend, but would soon be back in a tent, she said. Before the Compound, she was at another major encampment that was swept.View image in fullscreen“They’re strategically cleaning out the area for the Olympics,” Harrell said. “They’re destroying communities. It’s traumatizing … I wish all that money for the Olympics could go toward housing people … but they are not here to help us.”It was hard to imagine the Olympics taking place in an area where so many people were living outside and in cars, Orendorff added: “The city has all these plans, but our people don’t even have access to showers.”Bass denied that the Compound closure was Olympics-related, with the mayor telling reporters the site was a hazard. Officials had worked to shelter everyone and keep people together and would aim to transition residents into permanent housing, she said, while acknowledging some “might be in motels for long periods”. “I will not tolerate Angelenos living in dangerous, squalor conditions,” she added.The mayor’s office continued to defend the Van Nuys operation in an email last week, saying an outreach team had built relationships with encampment residents over several months and offered resources to all of them: “Coming indoors meant access to three meals a day, case management and additional supportive services.”Zach Seidl, Bass’s spokesperson, did not comment on the city’s Olympics strategy, but said in an email that since the mayor took office, street homelessness had decreased by 17.5% and placements into permanent housing had doubled: “She is laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy that includes preventing homelessness, urgently bringing Angelenos inside and cutting red tape to make building affordable housing in the city easier and more efficient.”Inside Safe, Bass’s program addressing encampments like the Compound, has brought thousands of people indoors and “fundamentally changed the way the city addresses homelessness by conducting extensive outreach, working with street medicine providers and offering other supportive case management services while they are in interim housing”, he continued. “This is why she ran for office and this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”The White House did not respond to inquiries about the Olympics, and a spokesperson for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), the lead public agency responsible for addressing homelessness in the region, declined to comment.‘Legal restraints are gone’Advocates’ concerns are partly fueled by a supreme court ruling last year that gave local authorities significantly more leeway to criminalize encampments.“The legal restraints are gone, to the extent they were meaningful, and there is broad policy-level agreement by liberals and conservatives that sweeps are an acceptable approach,” said John Raphling, associate director of Human Rights Watch, a non-profit.He authored a report last year on LA’s policing of unhoused people, which found that unhoused Angelenos were routinely subject to aggressive LAPD crackdowns, misdemeanor arrests and sweeps that destroy their belongings.Homelessness-related arrests and citations, such as anti-camping violations, increased 68% in LA in the six months after the supreme court ruling, a recent CalMatters analysis found. The crackdowns are happening even as LA has vowed to not rely on criminalization and has promised a more restrained approach than other California cities.View image in fullscreenSheehan said he was concerned LAPD would work with federal authorities to target people during the Olympics, especially after officers aggressively attacked protesters and journalists during demonstrations against Trump’s immigration raids in June, in violation of the department’s own protocols.Newsom, meanwhile, has pushed California cities to ban encampments by adopting ordinances that make it a violation to camp in the same spot for three days, and advocates fear his presidential ambitions could lead him to continue to push punitive strategies as the Olympics approaches.“We’re already seeing a contest between Trump and Newsom as to who is going to appear tougher on homelessness, with tough being defined as how one responds to visible homelessness,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-wrote a report last year on the 2028 Olympics in LA and the unsheltered population. “There aren’t good signs from either of them. Newsom offers the promise of alternatives he doesn’t identify and Trump offers the promise of some equivalent to incarceration.”In a statement to the Guardian, Newsom said the state has a “strong, comprehensive strategy for fighting the national homelessness and housing crises” and was “outperforming the nation”. “I’ve emphasized that our approach is to humanize, not criminalize – encampment work is paired with shelter, services [and] behavioral health support,” he said, citing his Care court program, which is meant to compel people with severe psychosis into treatment.“Bottom line: encampments can’t be the status quo. We’re cleaning them up with compassion and urgency, while demanding accountability from every level of government. There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” the governor added.Tara Gallegos, Newsom’s spokesperson, said the governor’s approach was distinct from the president’s, writing in an email: “The Trump administration is haphazardly bulldozing and upending encampments without creating any sort of supportive strategy to go along with it. It is about fear, not support … California’s strategy pairs urgency with dignity and care, creating wrap-around services addressing the root causes of homelessness.”An LA 2028 spokesperson did not comment on homelessness, but said in an email: “We work closely with our local, state and federal partners on Games planning and operations, and remain committed to working collaboratively with all levels of government to support a successful Games experience.”Organizers and providers prepareHomelessness service providers and advocates said they hoped LA officials would pursue bold solutions that quickly get people housing and resources without the threat of criminalization.A key part of the region’s strategy during the early pandemic was getting people out of tents and into motels, but those programs are costly and not a good fit for all of LA’s unhoused residents; it can also be challenging to transition participants into permanent housing. Blasi noted that that approach would become even harder during the Olympics when hotels face an influx of tourists.Blasi advocated for direct cash payments to unhoused people, akin to the 2020 stimulus checks, which could help some unhoused people get off the streets at a faster and cheaper rate than the traditional process, he argued: “There are a lot of people who can solve their own homelessness if they just have a little bit more money.”Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said LA has seen success with rapid rehousing programs that offer people rental subsidies, and that he hopes those efforts can be scaled up: “We know how to move people back into housing and do it quickly. It’s just a matter of whether we can marshal the political will to bring the money to make that happen.”Funding cuts, including from Trump’s slashing of federal homelessness resources, will be a barrier.The Union Rescue Mission, a faith-based group that runs the largest private shelter in LA, has recently seen an influx of people needing services as other providers have faced cuts, said CEO Mark Hood. Hood, however, said he has had productive conversations with the Trump administration and remained optimistic the Olympics would provide an “opportunity to collaborate with our city, county, state and federal government in ways that we never have before”.He said he hoped the Olympics would lead to increased funding for providers, but was so far unaware of any specific plans.White, the longtime organizer, said he expected grassroots groups to come together to defend unhoused people, especially as mutual-aid networks have grown in response to Trump’s raids: “The kidnappings of immigrants and the attempted clearing of houseless people as we get closer to the Olympics gives us an opportunity to bring various communities together, and that’s when we can build the power necessary to push back.” More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      How Baltimore’s violent crime rate hit an all-time low: ‘This is not magic. It’s hard work’

      by

      The end of violence in Baltimore is a litany of stories that weren’t told in 90-second clips on the evening news, about shootings that didn’t happen.The untold stories sound different, said Sean Wees: “The guys had guns pointed at each other. We got in between.”One summer afternoon, two years ago, two men emerged from a corner store at Patapsco Avenue and Fifth Street, steps from Wees’s office at Safe Streets, in Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood.“They had a little face-off in the store,” Wees said. “Words were exchanged when they stepped out the store.”A woman in the neighborhood saw what was about to go down and banged on the door of Safe Streets, a longstanding city-run violence-prevention program and a fixture in Baltimore. Wees knows his community, and knew one of the men well – a guy with a high potential for violence. A shooter. The other guy was new, Wees said.The neighborhood was still reeling from a mass shooting that June. Safe Streets had de-escalated five fights at a Brooklyn Day block party, but weren’t on the scene when a gunfight started there late that night. Two people died, 28 were injured and Wees was on edge.He and his co-worker Corey Winfield rushed outside to find both men shouting at each other with guns drawn.View image in fullscreen“We stood in between,” Wees said. “Corey was talking to one, and I was talking to a guy that was from the community.” Wees and Winfield carefully talked them back from the cliff.“That’s why having that rapport and being very active in your community is real important with this work,” Wees said. “Because if you don’t have that rapport, you’re not going to get them to put away those guns, because you don’t know what this man is thinking. You don’t know if he had that respect for you, enough to not blow your brains out along with the next man.”Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.But this metropolitan renaissance is born of agony.Before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, there was Freddie Gray, rattled to death in the back of a Baltimore police department van.“We had, if you will, a head start with our uprising in 2015,” said Dr Lawrence Brown, a Baltimore historian and health equity researcher.View image in fullscreenGray’s death in April 2015 of spinal injuries set off an earthquake of protests against police brutality across the country, with none as consequential or long-lasting as those at the epicenter. Protests in Baltimore turned into riots.“Since 2015, there’s been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that equity needs to be a priority,” Brown said. The riots were as much about the conditions of poverty that led to Gray’s death – people losing their homes in foreclosure to water bills, for example – as they were about police brutality, Brown noted.But the heavy-handed response by cops to the protests and failures to hold police accountable for misconduct eviscerated the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore’s state attorney Marilyn Mosby laid murder charges on the officers involved, and Baltimore’s police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between police and politicians. And a series of scandals at city hall and the state attorney’s office – and the failure of Mosby’s charges to result in convictions – eviscerated the relationship between politicians and the public.Violence skyrocketed.Three months after Gray’s death, Baltimore’s homicide count set a 42-year record high. Baltimore’s mayor canned the police chief, then abandoned her re-election bid. In the previous year, 211 people had been killed in Baltimore, about 33.8 per 100,000 residents. That was high at the time relative to other large US cities, but reflected incremental improvement by Baltimore’s historical standards. After Freddie Gray’s death turned the city upside down, the count rose to 344 in 2015 – a 63% increase and a multi-decade high – bucking a long national trend of declining violent crime. The rate at which police made arrests in homicide cases cratered.View image in fullscreenThe gun trace taskforce (GTTF) scandal in 2017 exacerbated problems.Baltimore’s police culture revolved around statistics-driven measures of productivity, which Baltimore street cops often achieved by busting whoever happened to be convenient without concern about the quality of an arrest or the real criminality of a suspect, according to an internal report in the wake of the scandal.The GTTF had a reputation for aggressively pursuing arrests and putting up big numbers, insulating it from internal scrutiny. But a federal investigation revealed that the taskforce had long abandoned its mission to track down the source of illegal guns and had instead become a criminal gang prowling the street to rob drug dealers. Its officers planted guns and drugs on suspects and fabricated testimony to cover their tracks. More than a dozen police officers went to federal prison.Baltimore had tried more than one way to attack violent crime, from zero-tolerance “broken windows” policing to relying on neighborhood crime statistics to motivate police officers into making more arrests. Efforts to get guns off the street backfired spectacularly from political interference, incompetence and, with the GTTF, corruption.The scandal destroyed whatever public faith in Baltimore’s police department remained. By 2017, Baltimore’s homicide rate had risen to the highest of any large city in the US.“We had a police unit that was committing crimes. They were contributing to the crime,” Brown said. This history makes it hard to attribute the city’s current gains to police work, he added: “Who do I give credit to? Police are the lowest on my scales. It may be 5%. In some cases, at least with that gun trace taskforce, it’s negative.”Snake-bitten, adrift and in a state of profound civic despair, Baltimore’s leaders came to a fundamental consensus: reducing violence had to take priority over everything else. It was defining the city and was the only thing voters cared about.The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.View image in fullscreenTrust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”No one got killed in Baltimore last week. Also, the local paper’s reporters are quitting in droves. Surely, this is a coincidence.Summers bleed Baltimore. School is out. People congregate. Tempers flare. But between 27 July and 2 August, the homicide line of the Baltimore police department’s weekly crime report posted a shutout.Baltimore’s strategy revolves around focused deterrence. Take the kind of targeting advertisers use to put an ad up on your phone for mouthwash on a day you forgot to brush your teeth, and apply it to murder. Only, instead of an ad, someone at high risk for violence gets a case worker knocking on their door.“We’re talking about young people at elevated risk,” said Kurtis Palermo, who runs the youth violence-prevention non-profit Roca in Baltimore. “We’re not talking about the young person who says F-you to his teacher, or tells Mom, Dad, Grandma they don’t want to do XYZ. We’re talking about kids who literally have probably two tracks: jail and death.”Palermo knocks on doors while a cop is carrying the mayor’s letter. As often as not, he has to knock on a door a dozen times before he finds his charge.The process often begins after a shooting. Case workers at local hospitals treating gunshot victims will take note of a patient’s history and their friends and family. The data is combined with school records, police records, social services records and whatever else might be relevant; then the violence-prevention team will have a quick meeting. When they determine someone has enough risk factors, they intervene.View image in fullscreen“It could be anything from information that is gleaned on jail calls, video evidence, you know, whatever it is, and then the connections to other people,” said Terence Nash, chief of the group violence-reduction strategy (GVRS) in the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement.About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person’s risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city, Nash said. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster’s odds are about one in 71.There’s no single factor that is perfectly predictive, Nash said. But as connections accumulate with other people at risk for violence, a threshold is crossed. The process is epidemiological, treating violence like an infection to track.Two types of people are most vulnerable, Nash said: people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, “someone looked at somebody wrong, somebody bumped into somebody”; and older people in the drug game, “more around violence that has to do with their criminal enterprise, and so it’s much more calculated”.Critically, it’s not every young person with an Instagram beef, and not every Sandtown neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors create a reasonable, articulable – and legally defensible – basis for contact. The team looks at each person individually, and crafts an approach for each one, Nash said.“This is not magic. It’s hard work,” Nash said. “It takes attention to detail.”Jaylen was in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound when a life coach with Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) approached him. Jaylen had, he said, been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time. He wasn’t especially receptive at first to a life coach, of all things, he said.“I thought there was a catch,” the 20-year-old said. “I thought I’d have to pay them back in the future.”Jaylen couldn’t say much about his life or where he was: people might still want to hurt him. But it took a couple of months of outreach for the offer of help from Teshombae Harvell, Jaylen’s life coach, to look real. It took consistency.“It’s about the follow-up,” Harvell said. “Today they might say get the F out of here. Tomorrow, they could be wanting services, because something tragic happened where they need change.”When someone gets shot, Jaylen expects someone to retaliate, he said: “Back and forth, back and forth. It’s never-ending.”What Harvell offered – what no one had offered in a credible way before – was a plan for the future, and perhaps the realization that he had a future. Jaylen had thought about killing someone before, he said. He felt as if the prospect of surviving long enough to have a legit life wasn’t worth considering.Now he has a driver’s license and wants to become a plumber. Helping fix some of Baltimore’s stubborn oversupply of abandoned houses would be a living, and ironically would be paying back the city for its help.“The only way programs like YAP or GVRS are going to be successful is for people to buy in,” said Harvell. “They can’t be spectators on the outside, looking in, wondering if it’s going to be a success or a failure.”Brandon Scott’s approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.“There’s the carrot and stick,” said Ivan Bates. “We’re the stick.”Bates had a pretty good track record of getting drug dealers off the hook before winning election as Baltimore’s state’s attorney – what most places call the district attorney and chief prosecutor. Baltimore’s history of light prosecutions for handgun cases is a legacy of questionable policing practices – weakly supported cases landing in court – and a negative view of mass incarceration by prosecutors.“I was the one who was beating the brakes off the state,” Bates said. “Look, my law partner and I went 25, 26 straight jury trials against Baltimore city prosecutors representing some pretty rough people, you know. And when I come and say that the street – the criminal elements – do not respect that approach, I’m not saying it because I read in a book. I’m saying it because I lived it.”After defeating Mosby and assuming office in January 2023, Bates immediately reversed her policy of non-prosecution for low-level offenses like drug possession, prostitution and trespassing. He successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature to increase the penalty for illegal gun possession from three years to five years. And he started putting people in prison.View image in fullscreenIn Mosby’s last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates’s first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions.“Everybody has a plan. The mayor had his plan. The police department, they have their plan,” Bates said. “And when I came and I ran for office, I had my plan. The plans have to work together as one.”Bates is quick to attribute the city’s reduction in violence to a team effort. For example, without victim assistance – which is supported by a federal grant – prosecutions that would have fallen apart in previous years concluded in convictions because witnesses could be found to appear in court. Police now are actually focused on removing illegal guns from the street, he said.It also requires people to have an out. Without a path off the street, people on the edge in Baltimore will do what they must to survive, he said.He rejects the suggestion that his approach is a return to mass incarceration. Prosecution is not zero tolerance and it is not indifferent to a defendant’s conditions.“We have focused on violent repeat offenders, not the first-time kid,” Bates said. “Remember, 5,000-6,000 individuals are doing this type of behavior. So, we’re not here to go back to mass incarceration.”But he’s sensitive to how this approach plays out in five years.“My No 1 worry is, when individuals come home, we have to have something for them,” he said. “Did we actually prepare them to come home? … Look, I believe everybody pays a debt to society. We move on, and then we as a society put them in a place that they can win. And if we didn’t, then we’re going to see these numbers bounce back up.”Sean Wees from Safe Streets said stopping a shooting might come down to noticing that a kid on a street corner has holes in his shoes.“So we asked the little kid, are you hungry?” Wees said. “That could lead to a conversation where you find out this kid is not eating. But we have the resources, or if we don’t have them at that time, we find the resources to help this family out. And now that key individual, that target individual, is the father of that child … We fed his child now, we’ve started to build a rapport with this guy, because he’s going to be appreciative of the work that we just did. That’s how this works.”View image in fullscreenOne might think that the thing that prevents expanding the work is personnel. Very few people have the street credibility, the devotion and the nerve to be successful. But Wees said the constraint is actually money.“I love this work, because I’m always trying to save an individual life,” he said. “I’m good with this work. The time and the money don’t match right now, but guess what? I still do this work … You get more money, people will put in more time.”For the first time in forever, Charm City’s leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They’ve placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican “screw cities” general principles.Trump closed the White House office of gun violence prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence-intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the office of justice programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims’ services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.Scott blasted the cuts to the program’s partners as dangerous and reckless.“You’re talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,” he said. “The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.”The youth antiviolence organization Roca had three grants terminated, one in Baltimore with about $1m left unspent. The termination letter said the grant did not align with its priorities including “directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combating violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault”.As applied to Roca, the rationale is absurd. But they could see it coming, said Dwight Robson, a Roca executive.“Initially, it was a huge blow. We were estimating that we were going to serve roughly 60 fewer young people a year,” Robson said. After an outcry, funders outside the federal government, including the city itself, started to step in, who “made it clear that they don’t want to lose momentum” in Baltimore.Support in other places, like Boston, is fleeting, in part because they’ve done their job too well, Robson said: “Boston is the safest big city in America. And you know, the homicides and crime just aren’t on people’s radars to the degree that it is in Baltimore.”Roca has appealed the decision to cut their grant, and a coalition of non-profits is suing the Trump administration, arguing that the cuts were made unlawfully.The real threat posed by the cuts is continuity, said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement (Monse). The violence-intervention plan has worked in part because it has been consistent. People are so used to the presence of Monse staffers around crime scenes and in high-violence neighborhoods that some people have come to expect a knock on the door after a shooting.View image in fullscreenIf Monse’s partners start disappearing, and if they can’t back up promises of help made to victims – or shooters – then things may fall apart, she said.“We’ve got to make the investment in the service side of things,” Mavronis said. “We can’t just make empty promises to folks who we are telling we have the services for you to change your life.”Baltimore’s leaders, both in city hall and in the streets, have been putting their reputations and capital on the line, in some cases risking their lives.Budget cuts while they’re winning makes it look like they want Baltimore to lose. The exasperation is plain.“We have the lowest amount of violence that we’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m 41 years old,” Scott said. “If everyone says that they agree that this is the top issue, that we have to make sure that more people are not becoming a victim of these things, why change it? Why disrupt the apple cart, if the apple cart is producing the best results that we’ve seen in a generation?” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump cracks down on homelessness with executive order enabling local governments

      by

      The federal government is seeking to crack down on homelessness in the US, with Donald Trump issuing an executive order to push local governments to remove unhoused people from the streets.The order the US president signed on Thursday will seek the “reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that restrict local governments’ ability to respond to the crisis, and redirect funds to support rehabilitation and treatment. The order aims to “restore public order”, saying “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe”, according to the order.The action comes as the homelessness crisis in the US has significantly worsened in recent years driven by a widespread shortage of affordable housing. Last year, a single-day count, which is a rough estimate, recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness across the country, the highest figure ever documented.Cities and states have adopted an increasingly punitive approach to homelessness, seeking to push people out of parks and city streets, even when there is no shelter available. The supreme court ruled last year that cities can impose fines and even jail time for unhoused people for sleeping outside after local governments argued some protections for unhoused people prevented them from taking action to reduce homelessness.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told USA Today, which first reported on the executive order, that the president was “delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again” and end homelessness.“By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump Administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need,” she said.The president’s order comes after last year’s US supreme court ruling, which was one of the most consequential legal decisions on homelessness in decades in the US.That ruling held that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” to criminalize camping when there is no shelter available. The case originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city that was defending its efforts to prosecute people for sleeping in public.Unhoused people in the US have long faced crackdowns and sweeps, with policies and police practices that result in law enforcement harassment, tickets or jail time. But the ruling supercharged those kinds of aggressive responses, emboldening cities and states to punish encampment residents who have no other options for shelter.In a report last month, the American Civil Liberties Union found that cities across the US have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, the majority of which have passed. The crackdowns have taken place in Democratic- and Republican-run states alike.Advocates for unhoused people’s rights have long argued that criminalization only exacerbates the housing crisis, shuffling people in and out of jail or from one neighborhood to the next, as they lose their belongings and connections to providers, fall further into debt and wind up in increasingly unsafe conditions.During his campaign last year, Trump used dark rhetoric to talk about the humanitarian crisis, threatening to force people into “tent cities”, raising fears that some of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans could end up in remote locations in settings that resemble concentration camps. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      The Rev William Barber’s ‘moral movement’ confronts Trump’s America. Can it work?

      by

      On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber’s national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. “I am not afraid,” the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: “I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.” It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. “In every cell of your body,” he said, “do you believe that?”Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People’s campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration’s second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or what Barber has simply called “policy murder”, a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable.But Barber’s battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump’s America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn’t simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber’s view, Trump isn’t the disease – he’s the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. “Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,” he told me. “He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That’s where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.”View image in fullscreenIn a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. “Why sit we here until we die?” they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. “This is murder by policy,” he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. “We cannot stay here and die.”Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a “big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget”, and they wanted to take a moral stand.The room was intentionally diverse – it’s what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you’ve seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction.“When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,” Barber said, “that’s when the prophets have to rise.” For Barber, this is the prophet’s role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement’s actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today’s coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor?‘Silence is not an option’Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol Street NE and 1st Street SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: “Jesus was a poor man.” He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court.Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, members singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent.When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement’s rhetorical authority as well. “We gather here not in protest alone,” Barber said, “but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.” Barber reminded the crowd that the country’s wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. “There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,” he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they’re uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility.View image in fullscreenHe said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. “There has to be division before there can be healing,” he said. In Barber’s theology, peace doesn’t mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it’s complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber’s movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country’s underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace.‘What will you do with the breath you have left?’“They say they’re cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they’re saying is it’s wasteful to lift people, fraudulent to help them live and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,” he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I’d grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler.Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don’t quit, they said. “They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,” he said. “We ought to have the courage to fight while we’re living.”Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: “What will you do with the breath you have left?” The question hung in the air. He didn’t wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. “That was George Floyd’s cry. That was my brother’s cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That’s what I hear when I say that,” he told me. “The breath you have left – that’s what you’ve been given. That’s what you owe.”Breath is a gift and a responsibility. “We’re not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,” he said. “We’re not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We’re not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It’s time to live. It’s time to stand. It’s time to speak. To protest. To live justice.” The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question.Fusion organizingBarber has always insisted this movement isn’t built for the news cycle. “Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,” he told me. “They’re driven by whether it’s right. You don’t build fusion coalitions because it’s sexy, you build it because it’s necessary.”The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement’s leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn’t always enough. “Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,” Hendricks told me. “It becomes poetry without praxis.”But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn’t stopped the Poor People’s campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. “People say, where’s the movement?” Barber told me. “We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you’re just not paying attention.” Fusion organizing in 2025 isn’t theory – it’s practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber’s once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia’s voting rights drives to Los Angeles’s housing struggles.Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark’s, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released.To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber’s model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. “He has this style that’s like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He’s not just naming problems. He’s naming people, policies and outcomes,” Booker said. “It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.” And maybe that’s the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. “Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,” he said. “But that was always the case. The prophets didn’t expect to win. They expected to witness.”View image in fullscreenBarber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn’t automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. “A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,” he said. “If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.”Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn’t see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. “Young people are not leaving the faith because they don’t want justice,” he told me. “They’re leaving because we’ve too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.” So he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn’t just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It’s why he often refers to a sickness in the country’s body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. “He’s operating within the system,” Booker told me. “He’s not outside of it burning it down. He’s trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.”Barber’s strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren’t meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable.The campaign’s futureBarber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently, “I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing.” She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece.She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. “Oh, people like me?” he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator.View image in fullscreenThis is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because “people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.” As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll’s arrest in particular: “That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: ‘I’m ready.’ And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn’t matter, what does?”The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber’s voice remains central, but the campaign’s future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural.Barber’s protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He’s asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that’s not just a question. It’s a way to keep moving. “This country gets amnesia,” he told me. “We forget. That’s why prophetic work is not about a moment. It’s about building a memory that resists the lie.” Even though he’s become a brand, he’s trying to build a witness. “I don’t want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,” he said.“Prayer,” he likes to say, “is never the end of protest. It’s the beginning of a demand.” That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard.That’s the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      What’s in Trump’s major tax bill? Extended cuts, deportations and more

      by

      Senate Republicans on Tuesday passed Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill after spending all night voting on amendments. The bill, which the GOP has dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now returns to the House of Representatives, which passed their version last month, before a Friday deadline the president has imposed for the legislation to be on his desk.Here’s what’s in the Senate’s version of the bill:Extending big tax cutsAfter taking office in 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered taxes and increased the standard deduction for all taxpayers, but generally benefited high earners more than most. Those provisions are set to expire after this year, but the “big, beautiful bill” makes them permanent, while increasing the standard deduction by $1,000 for individuals, $1,500 for heads of households and $2,000 for married couples, albeit only through 2028.Cutting tax on tips or overtimeThe bill has an array of new tax write-offs – but only while Trump is president. Several of the new exemptions stem from promises Trump made while campaigning last year. Taxpayers will be able to write off income from tips and overtime, and interest made on loans to purchase cars assembled in the United States. People aged 65 and over are eligible for an additional deduction of $6,000, provided their adjusted gross income does not exceed $75,000 for single filers or $150,000 for couples. But all of these incentives expire at the end of 2028, right before Trump’s term as president ends.Money for mass deportations and a border wallAs part of Trump’s plan to remove undocumented immigrants from the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will receive $45bn for detention facilities, $14bn for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029. More than $50bn is allocated for the construction of new border fortifications, which will probably include a wall along the border with Mexico.Slashing Medicaid and food stampsRepublicans have attempted to cut down on the bill’s cost by slashing two major federal safety-net programs: Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries. Both are in for funding cuts, as well as new work requirements. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the Medicaid changes could cost as many as 10.6 million people their healthcare, and about eight million people, or one in five recipients, their Snap benefits.Cuts to green energyThe bill will phase out many tax incentives created by Congress during Joe Biden’s presidency meant to encourage consumers and businesses to use electric vehicles and other clean-energy technology. Credits for cleaner cars will end this year, as will subsidies for Americans seeking to upgrade their homes to cleaner or more energy-efficient appliances. While a draft of the bill targeted wind- and solar-energy projects with a new excise tax, senators voted to remove that at the last minute.State and local tax relief (Salt)One of the thorniest issues the bill addresses is how much relief to provide from state and local taxes (Salt), which many Americans must also pay in addition to their federal tax. Several House Republicans representing districts in Democratic-led states withheld their support from the bill until the Salt deductibility cap was raised from $10,000 to $40,000, but Senate Republicans made clear they would change that. The Senate’s version keeps the $40,000 cap, but only through 2028.Raising the debt ceilingThe bill will increase the US government’s authority to borrow, known as the debt limit, by $5tn. The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has predicted the government will hit the limit by August, at which point it could default on its debt and spark a financial crisis.More benefits for the rich than the poorWealthier taxpayers appear set to receive more benefits from this bill than poorer ones, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. Taxpayers in the lowest-income quintile will see a 2.5% decrease in their incomes, largely due to the Snap and Medicaid cuts, while the highest earners will see their incomes grow by 2.4%, the Budget Lab estimated. The impact could change based on which amendments the Senate adopts.A huge price tagDespite the GOP’s attempts to use the bill as a vehicle to rein in government spending, the bill would increase the deficit by $3.3tn through 2034, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Most of that price tag is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts. The heavy budgetary impact could complicate the bill’s chances of passing the House, where fiscal hardliners have demanded budget-deficit reductions. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump May Get His ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ but the G.O.P. Will Pay a Price

      by

      And so will many voters.There will be many short- and long-term consequences if Republicans succeed in passing President Trump’s signature policy bill, as they aim to do before the July 4 holiday, David Leonhardt, the director of the Times editorial board, tells the national politics writer Michelle Cottle in this episode of “The Opinions.”Trump May Get His ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ but the G.O.P. Will Pay a PriceAnd so will many voters.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle and I cover national politics for Times Opinion. So with the July 4 weekend looming, I thought we’d talk about a different kind of fireworks: that is, President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and as always, I hope the air quotes there are audible for everybody.But that bill looks like it is on track for passage. From Medicaid cuts to tax breaks for the rich, it is a lot. Thankfully with me to talk about this is David Leonhardt, the fearless director of the New York Times editorial board, who has some very pointed thoughts on the matter. So let’s just get to it. David, welcome.David Leonhardt: Thank you, Michelle. It’s great to be talking with you.Cottle: I’m so excited, but warning to all: We are recording on Monday midday and even as we speak, the Senate is brawling its way through to a final vote. So the situation is fluid and could change the details by the time you all hear this.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Officials Unveil Budget Cuts to Aid for Health, Housing and Research

      by

      The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Sebastião Salgado: A Life in Pictures

      by

      From the small town in the Brazilian countryside where he was born, Sebastião Salgado, the renowned photojournalist who died on Friday at 81, traveled the world many times over, documenting the plight of workers and chasing the grandeur, diversity and, ultimately, fragility of nature.In photographs — most often in richly contrasting black and white — Mr. Salgado brought viewers to famine-stricken refugee camps in Ethiopia, to a hive of toiling gold miners in Brazil, to firefighters battling burning oil fields in Kuwait, and to chinstrap penguins sliding down ice slopes in the Sandwich Islands.Mr. Salgado had a gift for bringing together, often in a single frame, the immediacy of individual human suffering and the enormity of the dire realities that he documented. His photographs, frequently displayed in museums and galleries, often show a figure standing against the horizon. Cloud-filled skies are reflected on the surface of a river in the Amazon rainforest. Rays of heavenly light pour down onto mountain landscapes in the tundra, signaling to the viewer that this place is divine.This is the world Mr. Salgado left us: beautiful, fragile, sacred. Here is a selection of his work.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryRefugees in the Korem camp in Ethiopia, 1984.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryThe Rwandan refugee camp in Benako, Tanzania, in 1994. Right, children inside the Kimumba camp in Goma, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryWorkers in a gold mine in the northern Brazilian state of Pará in 1986. Some of Mr. Salgado’s most famous images were of workers climbing from the bottom of the mine to the dumping ground at the top while carrying 30 kilos of soil on slick ladders.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryChurchgate Station in Mumbai, India, in 1995. Mr. Salgado published “Migrations” in 2000, a series documenting the mass migration of people forced to leave their homes by war or economic hardship.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryChemical sprays protect this firefighter against the flames from a burning oil well in Kuwait in April 1991. Mr. Saldado’s photo essay “The Kuwaiti Inferno” was published in The New York Times Magazine in June 1991.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryMembers of the Safety Boss Company of Canada worked to plug damaged oil wells, an effort to repair damage done by Iraqi troops.Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryMr. Salgado had been traveling for his epic ecological work “Genesis,” a series about the effects of human activities on the environment.Photographs by Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryMr. Salgado spent years traveling across the Amazon, capturing arresting images of vast rivers and rainforests while documenting the impact of development on natural landscapes and Indigenous communities.Photographs by Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images, via Contact Press Images/Peter Fetterman GalleryMembers of the Yanomami tribe from the community of Maturacá in 2014, looking out to the mountain vegetation on the flanks of Pico da Neblina, or Mist Peak. The Yanomami believe their most important spirits inhabit these mountains, which were long occupied by hundreds of gold diggers, until 1992, when the Brazilian Army expelled all of them. The tribe keeps watch over the region for potential intruders. A shaman, chanting and dancing, prepared the expedition up to the peak. More