Don’t build the wall, build affordable housing

Trump’s vanity wall is a solution in search of a problem.

Alexis Goldstein, who is a former Wall Street professional who now works on financial policy, has more. The only emergency is the one created by Trump and the Department of Homeland Security with their brutal repression and moves to deny migrants their legal right to seek asylum. Research shows that immigrants are actually an economic boon, so this manufactured crisis aimed at repressing asylum seekers literally costs American people all. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that the American people are facing an epic crisis in housing in the United States. Instead of building a wall, the US should build more public housing.

The Trump/McConnell shutdown puts the US’s major affordable housing programs — public housing, Section 8 vouchers and project-based rental assistance — at risk. Project-based rental assistance has been hit the hardest. Tens of thousands of low-income renters and families risk eviction because the shutdown has caused funding to lapse on 650 of these properties. The shutdown also hurts residents of public housing because broken boilers or leaking roofs may go unfixed, as housing authorities can’t access money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to make repairs. And arguably the most long-term vulnerable are renters with Section 8 vouchers, through which housing authorities pay a portion of tenants’ rent directly to private landlords. The vouchers are funded through February, but are at risk if the shutdown extends to March. Private landlords may decide that accepting Section 8 vouchers is a risk they no longer want to take, due to the threat of future government shutdowns.

Even before the shutdown, the country was already facing an affordable housing crisis. In New York City, there are more than 209,180 families on the waiting list for its 175,636 units of public housing. A 2018 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that average renter wages are not enough to afford modest rental apartments.

The problem has gotten so bad that even private companies like Microsoft devote money to new loans for affordable housing development. But rather than wait for Band-Aids from corporate actors, one could choose to invest in housing as a nation. However, Congress has created major barriers to addressing this crisis. A key example of this is the Faircloth Limit, which effectively bans any new public housing from being created. The attack on public housing began with Richard Nixon, who declared a moratorium on the construction of new housing by Housing and Urban Development in 1973. The Nixon era also brought the Section 8 program, which began the shift from the government constructing and administering housing to instead relying on the private market. But it was Bill Clinton who signed into law the Faircloth Limit, which legally caps the total number of public housing units that can exist at its 1999 level. The author of this provision was one-term Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-North Carolina), who tried and failed to ban unwed teen mothers from receiving any welfare assistance. Since then, the country has been losing 10,000 to 15,000 units of public housing annually, due to them falling into disrepair. In 2011, the Housing and Urban Development estimated the backlog of repairs in public housing to be $26 billion. It has undoubtedly grown by billions since, as Congress continues to starve public housing, but the Housing and Urban Development has not conducted a more recent study. Huge investment has been made for building these properties, but for years the administration has abdicated its responsibility to maintain and fix them. It is now time to push the boundaries of political possibility and start addressing the housing crisis by repealing draconian limits like the welfare-reform-era Faircloth Limit.

Meanwhile, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the second Obama-era economic stimulus, invalidated the Faircloth Limit for the purposes of the stimulus funds. Congress could also have Housing and Urban Development create new project-based contracts, a move it has not made in decades. These are buildings that Housing and Urban Development contracts with private or nonprofit developers to build and maintain. Rather than give them to any developer, HUD could insist they only contract with non-profits, and put additional restrictions or incentives on the properties, such as requiring that they are built in particularly tight housing markets. Congress could also add new Section 8 vouchers — something that has been done incrementally for certain populations, including homeless veterans, but could be done more broadly in an effort to address the housing crisis.

Why did public housing become so underfunded in the first place? Part of it is the larger neoliberal shift away from government building and maintaining housing, and toward government contracts being doled out to the private sector.

At the current juncture, the United States is failing abysmally to provide this: Only 1 in 5 families eligible for federal housing assistance is getting the help they need. Housing is an issue that touches everyone, and it shouldn’t be relegated to the bottom of the legislative agenda. With so many different ways to add affordable housing, the 116th Congress in the United States shouldn’t just abolish the draconian Faircloth Limit and address the longstanding and desperately needed repairs. It should truly invest in this most basic of rights: the right to a place to call home.

This is how American democracy ends

Bill Blum

President Donald Trump’s threat to deploy extraordinary powers to counter a fake crisis on the US’ southern boundary should spark a clarion call to reexamine, repeal and replace the National Emergencies Act (NEA), says Bill Blum, a former administrative law judge and death penalty defense attorney, in his article for commondreams, titled: “This is how American democracy ends”.

“If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it, go over it, go around it. But get to the other side of that wall,” Donald Trump had said way back in his 2004 commencement address, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York.

For the time being, President Trump has toned down his threat to declare a national emergency to pay for his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border. Addressing a White House roundtable Friday afternoon, Trump continued to insist that he has the “absolute right” to issue an emergency decree. But, he added, “I’m not going to do it so fast.”

While Trump’s announcement is welcome news to anyone concerned with human rights and rational immigration policy, it’s important to remember that our 45th commander in chief can’t be trusted. As long as the president’s lips move, there’s a good chance he’s lying.

Even if he wasn’t prevaricating on last Friday, he could change his mind in a moment, egged on by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh over the airwaves, and encouraged by GOP senatorial apparatchiks such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who has become one of the president’s loudest enablers.

The problem, however, isn’t just that we have a mendacious crypto-fascist in the White House who looks to other crypto-fascists for counsel and succor. The problem is that the National Emergencies Act (NEA), passed in 1976 and which Trump would invoke to get his way, makes it easy for any president to declare emergencies.

Trump’s threat to deploy extraordinary powers to counter a fake crisis on our southern boundary should spark a clarion call to reexamine, repeal and replace the NEA. The act may have been well-intentioned as a post-Watergate reform, but in practice it has been a dismal failure.

The NEA was designed to place congressional checks and balances on the emergency authority of the president, and to restore the separation of power between Congress and the executive branch. The act may have been well-intentioned as a post-Watergate reform, but in practice it has been a dismal failure.

Historically speaking, there is nothing new in Trump’s emergency posturing. Prior to the adoption of the NEA, American presidents issued scores of emergency orders, dating back to George Washington’s 1794 proclamation. Aimed at suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion (a rural uprising against the nation’s first excise tax) in western Pennsylvania, the first US president’s declaration facilitated the mobilization of state militias.

In succeeding decades, other presidents invoked more sweeping powers. At the start of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans. In the midst of the Korean War, Harry Truman attempted to seize the country’s steel mills to avert an industrywide labor strike.

Apart from the Supreme Court’s decision in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952), which invalidated Harry Truman’s takeover bid, federal courts have been reluctant to overturn presidential emergency declarations. In 1944, to cite perhaps the most egregious instance of judicial abdication, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s Japanese internment order in Korematsu v. United States. It wasn’t until last year—in its decision affirming Trump’s Muslim travel ban, ironically—that the high court officially repudiated the Korematsu case.

By the early 1970s, Congress had enacted some 470 statutes, delegating extraordinary powers to the president in times of crisis on issues ranging from public health, natural disasters and land management to national defense and security. A 1934 law still on the books even allows the president to shut down or take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” (arguably, the internet in the digital era) upon his proclamation “that there exists a state or threat of war … or other national emergency.”

As Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, writes in The Atlantic, the NEA was passed to “rein in this proliferation.”

Problematically, the act doesn’t define what constitutes an emergency. “The president,” Goitein explains, “still has complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration—but he must specify in the declaration which [statutory] powers he intends to use, issue public updates if he decides to invoke additional powers, and report to Congress on the government’s emergency-related expenditures every six months. The state of emergency expires after a year unless the president renews it, and the Senate and the House must meet every six months while the emergency is in effect ‘to consider a vote’ on termination.”

Thirty-one states of emergency are in effect today, according to Goitein. Many, such as the freeze on Iranian government assets imposed in 1979, have been regularly renewed. Goitein also notes that “during the 40 years the law has been in place, Congress has not met even once, let alone every six months, to vote on whether to end them.”

While there is little question that Trump has the legal authority to declare a state of emergency, it remains to be seen whether doing so will actually get him the money he wants for the border wall. It also remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will step in, as in the Youngstown Steel case, to stop him.

Under the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, Congress controls the power of the purse. It alone among the three branches has the authority to appropriate funds.

As a result, to secure funding for his wall, Trump will have to redirect federal funds that have already been appropriated for other purposes, but have not yet been spent. Some legal experts expect that Trump will attempt to tap into the Defense Department’s budget, invoking federal statutes governing military construction projects. The president might also try to withdraw relief funds earmarked for Puerto Rico, Texas, California, Florida and other states hit by recent natural disasters.

Any legal challenge to such maneuvers will face several obstacles, beginning with the question of “standing”—the requirement that a plaintiff must allege personal harm or injury in order to bring a lawsuit.

One possibility, according to University of Texas Law School professor Robert Chesney, is that House Democrats might establish standing as a legislative body, arguing that any border-wall emergency declaration and redirection of federal funds would violate the Appropriations Clause and undermine the role of Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Landowners along the border, following the lead of the steel companies in the Youngstown case, might also have standing to challenge Trump’s emergency order if the administration tries to seize their property to construct the wall.

Assuming that standing requirements are met, the challengers would have to persuade federal judges—and ultimately the Supreme Court—that conditions along the southern border don’t amount to a real emergency. Unlawful border crossings have dropped precipitously since 2000, most drugs enter the country through ports of entry, and border communities are among the safest in the nation.

Unfortunately, however, there is no binding legal definition of a national emergency.

The closest the Supreme Court has come to defining an emergency occurred in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell, dealing with mortgage lending and foreclosures. In the 1934 case, the court characterized the Depression-era emergency in housing and homeownership as a sudden, unanticipated disaster akin to a natural calamity like a fire or flood.

Because there are already crossing stations, walls, fences and other barriers along 654 miles of the 1,954-mile-long southern border and because immigration has long been a topic of high-level policy debate, the situation at the border cannot, objectively, be described as an emergency.

Getting the Supreme Court to agree, however, will prove a daunting task, especially in light of last year’s genuflection in the court’s travel ban ruling.

Worse still is the prospect that after pressing the emergency button for the border wall, Trump’s appetite for even more outrageous initiatives will expand exponentially until he destroys our democracy piece by piece, one phony national emergency at a time.

Cornered Trump’s Near Suicidal Move in South China Sea Amid Trade Talks

By: Kayhan Int’l 

At home, while the quixotic US president, Donald Trump, has painted himself into a corner through his rash decision of ‘government shutdown’ in a futile bid to force the Congress to yield to his whimsical demand of funding the building of a wall on the Mexican border, on the international scene he is trying to flex his over-inflated muscles.

It is an exercise in futility, since neither the gangster Mike Pompeo whom he has made Secretary of State nor the bespectacled bozo John Bolton (his National Security Advisor) are capable of either terrifying opponents in Latin America and West Asia or lifting the sagging spirits of clients in those regions.

Thus, with failures looming large on all fronts, Trump made a near suicidal move in desperation on Monday by sending American naval ships to the South China Sea dangerously near to the Xisha Island chain (called Paracel by Beijing’s rivals), in a battle of nerves, even while the US and China are holding vice- ministerial level trade talks in Beijing.

The Chinese, unlike the upstart Americans, have a culture and statecraft dating at least two millennium, and they know how to checkmate their cowboy opponents.

After sending aircraft and warships to warn off the intruding Americans, Beijing launched a strong protest with Washington, pointing out with diplomatic courtesy that one wrong move or an accident might ignite a war – that will definitely drag on to the North American mainland before it reaches mainland China.

Is Trump the Dotard playing with fireworks in a vain effort to pressure the Chinese in the trade talks?
If so, he will be burned before he realizes what is really happening.

Meanwhile, irrespective of the strategic location of South China Sea and its exhaustive marine and hydrocarbon resources which the countries on its rim can peacefully share, provided the meddling Americans stay out, the trade talks in Beijing are having a positive effect on the stock markets of east and southeast Asia, right up to Australia – all of whom are tired of the trade war triggered by Trump.

According to reports, the US team led by Deputy Trade Representative Jeffrey Gerrish has had "positive and constructive discussions” with their Chinese counterparts.

As per the statement released by Lu Kang, the spokesman at the Chinese foreign ministry, Beijing is willing to resolve the trade disputes with Washington on an "equal footing”. 

It is worth noting that the world’s two largest economies slapped a series of punitive tariffs on each other’s goods last year, sparking concerns over a global economic slowdown.

If the US has put tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese goods and has threatened duties on double that value of products, China has responded with tariffs on $110 billion in US goods, targeting politically important industries such as agriculture.

As a result of the current talks which are still underway, stocks in Asia gained on Monday. This is a positive trend that should be allowed to take its course, if not the world economy will suffer.

It remains to be seen whether Trump and his team of tramps (with no adults left among them) are capable of reaching a deal with China, or will push the region and the world to the edge of the precipice by resorting to misadventures like the American naval intrusion in Chinese territorial waters, which might spark a doomsday confrontation in view of the military might of the two sides.

China is taking no chance, as is clear by last week’s signing of an order by President Xi Jinping that warrants its armed forces to prepare for a "comprehensive military struggle”.