Category: Opinion Columns

California’s Diverse Communities Need Real Solutions to the Housing Crisis

Posted on by Greenlining

By Adam Briones
Los Angeles Daily News

California is in the midst of a profound housing crisis. While reasonable people can debate solutions, no one can argue that today’s housing market works for anyone but millionaires. Even before the COVID-19 recession, skyrocketing rents made it difficult for even middle-income Californians to make ends meet, and astronomical home prices have pushed the dream of homeownership almost completely out of reach for people of color.

For too long California has failed to deliver the kind of effective housing reforms our diverse communities need. Rather than reasonable solutions, a stark ideological choice is often presented to voters: you can support more targeted low-income housing or the production of market-rate housing, but not both. If we want to remain a growing state that welcomes everyone, we need to move beyond simplistic narratives and accept that our state needs all kinds of housing for all kinds of Californians. At the same time, we also need to recognize that Black, Asian American, Latino and other communities of color were purposefully blocked from the way in which most American families have built wealth—homeownership.

Beginning in the 1930s, public and private sector leaders prevented diverse families from renting or buying into White neighborhoods, otherwise known as redlining. When courts invalidated explicitly racist laws decades later, cities and towns across the country restricted the construction of multifamily housing — a more legally defensible way to keep out families that might “change the neighborhood character.” Since systemic racism requires systemic solutions, any path out of our housing crisis has to address the wealth that was stolen from our communities and what reparations could look like.

Today’s housing crisis has profoundly impacted people of color, which make up more than 60 percent of our population. Our state has six of the nation’s 11 most expensive large metropolitan rental markets and more than two-thirds of Californians facing unaffordable housing costs are people of color. The average rent in Los Angeles has jumped 65 percent since 2010 and the real estate research firm CoStar noted in April that “the coronavirus outbreak won’t fundamentally alter Southern California’s severe housing shortage, which continually tilts the playing field in favor of landlords and owners.” The result is low-income, often immigrant families across the state living in unsafe, overcrowded homes, with no path to homeownership.

First, we must dramatically increase targeted affordable housing resources to help very low-income families and those experiencing homelessness. The private market will never adequately serve these folks and it’s important we make that explicit.  At the same time, making the process to build quality housing fairer will lead to more affordable rents and home prices for the nine out of ten Californians who live in market-rate housing. For this to happen we need our elected leaders to pass legislation that will support diverse housing types and end “one-size-fits-all” building restrictions. A number of important bills in Senate President Pro Tem Atkins’ housing production package can help. Senate Bill 902 and Senate Bill 1120, among other current bills, will help create more of the small-scale housing development California needs and they should receive strong support. But more needs to be done to address affordable homeownership.

Earlier this month, Assembly Bill 3155, a bill focused on creating more entry-level homeownership opportunities by streamlining the creation of smaller projects, was sidelined in the Assembly. Specifically, it would have made it easier to build developments with 10 or fewer units—the kind of projects corporate builders turn down but that are a good fit for small firms owned by people of color and immigrants. While that bill is dead, the principles can and should still be incorporated by Pro Tem Atkins into existing legislation, including speeding the creation of smaller buildings aimed at working-class homebuyers.

Public policy excluded people of color from neighborhoods and homeownership opportunities for generations, contributing to a wealth gap where Black and Latino families have only ten percent of the wealth white families have. By 2040, our state will be 70 percent people of color and our leaders must ensure greater opportunities for affordable rents and homeownership now and in the future. There is no excuse for further delay.

Adam Briones is the Director of Economic Equity at The Greenlining Institute, a policy, research, organizing, and leadership institute working for racial and economic justice.

Let’s Bridge the Digital Divide

Posted on by Greenlining

By Gissela Moya
Newsday

As COVID-19 has pushed many Americans online to work and attend school, we hear a lot about Zoom fatigue and other annoyances. But what about the tens of millions of Americans who either have only limited internet access at home, or no access at all?

Lack of internet access in some households and communities has long been a national problem. The pandemic has turned it into a national crisis.

It’s time to close our nation’s digital divide.

Millions of American can access the internet only through smartphones. That’s better than nothing, but plagued by serious limitations: Data caps and slower speeds greatly limit what users can do. And some important tasks — like filling out complex applications for employment or college admission — are much harder, given the limits of a tiny touch screen.

The nonprofit group where I work has been talking to folks here in California and elsewhere about life on the wrong side of the digital divide, which makes everything harder, especially education. We spoke to a high school student taking business classes who struggles to create and upload web design assignments on her smartphone, and an older woman who had to drop out of a professional management course because she had no way to do the course work online.

Fabiola Espitia, a counselor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., told us about a recent high school graduate she counseled who couldn’t take an Advanced Placement exam due to lack of internet access. Others had their education disrupted when the pandemic forced the closing of a campus library, their only internet connection.

Unsurprisingly, the digital divide mirrors economic and racial ones. Last year, a Pew Research survey found distinct patterns in who lacks internet access at home. While 92% of families with a household income of $75,000 or more have a home broadband connection, that figure drops to 56% for incomes of $30,000 and below. While 79% of white households have a home internet connection, just 66% of black households and 61% of Latino households do.

Lack of internet access is a problem in urban and suburban homes, as well as in rural communities. And it is especially destructive when it comes to education. Overall, approximately 12 million students nationwide are affected by this digital divide, putting their futures at risk.

“Schools have shuttered and more than 50 million students have been told to head online for class,” wrote Jessica Rosenworce, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, while dissenting from the rosy conclusions reached by the FCC’s Republican majority in its annual Broadband Deployment Report. “This pandemic has demonstrated conclusively that broadband is no longer nice-to-have. It’s need-to-have.”

COVID-19 has shown us that the digital divide isn’t sustainable if we want all Americans to have a fair shot at success.

The FCC needs to do more to bridge the digital divide, especially in urban and suburban homes. Congress must act swiftly and decisively by providing federal funding to build a future-proof, all-fiber network that reaches every household in the nation, and eliminating state-level bans on communities building their own networks.

Ensuring that everyone in the United States has access to robust, affordable, high-speed internet access should be a national priority.

Gissela Moya is the Manny Garcia Technology Equity Fellow at The Greenlining Institute and co-author of Greenlining’s recent report, “On the Wrong Side of the Digital Divide.” This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

Racial inequality and COVID-19

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BY DE’ZHON GRACE, CAROLYN JOHNSON and TREVA REID
Capitol Weekly

Both the New York Times and ProPublica have written about the impact of COVID-19, reporting that in states where Black communities make up only a relatively small portion of the population, nearly half — if not majority — of all COVID-19 deaths are members of the Black community.

This is largely due to environmental, economic and political factors that have compounded for generations, putting black people at higher risk of chronic conditions that leave lungs weak and immune systems compromised: asthma, heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. Redlining and environmental racism, for example, have consigned Black neighborhoods to breathing some of America’s dirtiest air, drinking contaminated water, and living in food deserts.

Black people account for 25 percent of those who have tested positive and 39 percent of the COVID-related deaths, while making up just 15 percent of the general population.

COVID-19 is having  a clearly disparate impact on the Black community, and we have a clear need for data to be disaggregated by race and ethnicity, in addition to resources focused on our most vulnerable communities.

Consider the following:

From a recent New York Times article, we know that Black people account for more than half of those who have tested positive in Chicago and 72 percent of the COVID-related deaths, while making up less than a third of the population. In Illinois, Black people account for 25 percent of those who have tested positive and 39 percent of the COVID-related deaths, while making up just 15 percent of the general population.

In Michigan, Black people account for 40 percent of the COVID-related deaths and just 14 percent of the population. In addition, according to the Louisiana Department of Health, in New Orleans Black people account for almost 60 percent of the COVID-related deaths, while making up less than a third of the population.

Black people are dying of coronavirus at an alarming rate that is about 2.5 to 3 times higher than other groups.

Here in California, African Americans are about six percent of the population but 10.6 percent of deaths.

The AMP Research Lab reports that the Black community is experiencing a COVID-19 mortality rate 2.9 times higher than the rate for Asians, 2.7 times higher than the rate for Whites, and 2.5 times higher than the rate for Latinos.

Currently, the national COVID mortality rate for Black people is 23 deaths per 100,000 residents. In six states and Washington, D.C., mortality rates exceed the national rate, New York: 88 deaths (per 100,000 residents); Michigan: 72; Connecticut: 58; Louisiana: 49; New Jersey: 32; Illinois: 30; Washington, D.C: 27.

Though we don’t have racial and ethnic data from every state, clearly  Black people are dying of coronavirus at an alarming rate that is about 2.5 to 3 times higher than other groups. For the Black community this is like waking up in the middle of a horror film that adheres to the old trope of the Black people dying first, except this is real and we still have no clear sense of when this nightmare will be over.

For many reasons, homeless people are at increased risk from COVID-19.

For years, the Black community has been reported as having, on average, the lowest life expectancy compared to other communities. ProPublica reported “In Milwaukee, simply being Black means your life expectancy is 14 years shorter, on average, than someone White.”

In California, 2017 data indicates that being Black in Alameda County means having an average life expectancy six to nine years less than your White or Hispanic counterparts. We are more likely to be uninsured compared to our White counterparts. and it is not by choice.

When they encounter the health care system, Black patients often get unequal treatment. When assessing pain, for example, clinicians — mostly White clinicians – underestimate, and therefore, undertreat Black patients, partially due to a common misconception that Black people have higher pain tolerance.

According to CalMatters, Black people make up just six percent of the population in California but 30 percent of our state’s homeless population.

In a recent Slate interview, Dr. Uché Blackstock, an emergency medicine physician, mentions an algorithm that is used to allocate resources to critically ill patients, which has been shown to underestimate the needs of critically ill Black patients. So, when it comes time for hospitals and clinicians to ration resources, we can assume Black patients will be at a disadvantage.

For many reasons, homeless people are at increased risk from COVID-19. We see a disproportionate number of Black people experiencing homelessness, and many more are currently at risk for displacement due to several systemic inequalities. According to the 2018 Alameda County  “Plan to End Homelessness,” Black people make up just 11 percent of the county population but 49 percent of its homeless population;  in Oakland, African Americans make up a staggering 70 percent of the homeless population. According to CalMatters, Black people make up just six percent of the population in California but 30 percent of our state’s homeless population. The nightmare continues.

The largest share of Black-owned businesses with employees, 29 percent in total, are in the health care and social assistance professions.

Black business owners are in the center of the fight against COVID-19 for several reasons. First, the median White family has nearly 10 times the amount of wealth as the median Black family, according to the Brookings Institution. This translates to our businesses having less reserves — both financial and operational — than other businesses. Not to mention the impact that negative perceptions of Black-majority neighborhoods held by consumers had on Black businesses last year. In 2019, those perceptions cost these businesses roughly $4 billion in revenue. COVID or no COVID, Black-owned businesses suffer at the hand of underinvestment due to racial and socioeconomic factors. The current pandemic exacerbates this reality.

Black businesses, and the professionals who work in them, have faced the largest impact from social distancing precautions.  The largest share of Black-owned businesses with employees, 29 percent in total, are in the health care and social assistance professions. These firms account for $17 billion in annual revenue, which is the largest share of revenue generation for Black-owned firms with paid employees. These organizations include frontline healers, essential workers, and economically vulnerable workers — the glue currently holding our nation together.

“Of the 2.6 million black-owned businesses, 2.5 million have no employees.” — Ron Busby

Despite their importance, these organizations haven’t received the resources to sufficiently protect themselves and serve our communities, such as personal protective equipment.Based on the experience of the East Oakland Black Cultural Zone Collaborative, our  community-serving nonprofits in Oakland and the Bay Area, for example, have smaller quantities of Medical Grade PPE supplies, but are uniquely positioned to provide the only care that some of our community members will receive or trust.

To further put things into perspective, the second largest share of revenue generation for Black-owned businesses is the retail trade, which generates $14 billion. Retail is greatly affected by social distancing precautions, compounded by a shortage of resources to market services and products through online platforms.

The CARES Act offers relief to small businesses through the Small Business Administration’s  Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This program has to-date set-aside  more than $650  billion in funding to allow small businesses to receive forgivable loans for payroll and other employee costs.This is concerning because the majority of our businesses do not have paid employees. In fact, Ron Busby, president of U.S. Black Chambers — a coalition of Black chambers of commerce — was quoted saying, “Of the 2.6 million black-owned businesses, 2.5 million have no employees.”

We need block-by-block support for mutual aid networks as the first line of defense.

The first round of PPP funding only lasted two weeks and small businesses are already suing banks for funneling opportunities to larger businesses. Politico reports that each bank was “reshuffling the PPP applications it received and prioritizing the applications that would make the bank the most money.”  While Congress recently approved approximately $350 billion for the second round of funding, that money is anticipated to last only two to three weeks at most.

One positive sign: The new funding sets aside nearly $125 billion for small businesses that do not have existing relationships with banks. Targeting underbanked businesses is a good start, but we need  an explicit focus on Black businesses to effectively reach our most vulnerable communities.

From Resilience to Recovery
The Black community has proved its resilience time and time again, from slavery, through the Black Codes, Jim Crow, redlining, to the New Jim Crow, the New Black Codes, the War on Drugs and more. Prior to this pandemic, acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and family members has provided the much needed strength to overcome horrific times. Resilience and perseverance are in our DNA, but though they are still essential, right now more is needed.

Although not all nonprofits carry out functions of critical importance to the government, a surprising number of them deliver services that the Black community depends on

What the Black community in Oakland and the rest of California needs is support from our elected officials, at the federal, state and local levels, backed up by concrete actions:

  • In the short-term, we need Gov. Newsom and California elected officials to provide support for the frontline, grassroots nonprofits responding in real time to the crisis and filling in gaps where the public and private sector cannot or will not serve families and individuals in the Black community. We need block-by-block support for mutual aid networks as the first line of defense; testing in our communities without requiring a referral; PPE for frontline healers and essential employees, particularly the economically vulnerable workers; badges for frontline healers/street soldiers; respite for essential workers; access to subsidized and/or free mental health therapy sessions; and tailored support for our seniors (including senior centers, senior housing, service providers and food distribution).Grassroots Black organizations are ramping up service to Black neighborhoods even while their own funding goes down. Organizations such as the Black Cultural Zone, Roots Health Clinic, East Oakland Collective, Allen Temple Health and Social Services, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, Black Housing Union, Richmond Housing and Neighborhood Services, and so many more, sacrifice day in and day out in these front lines.
  • Although not all nonprofits carry out functions of critical importance to the government, a surprising number of them deliver services that the Black community depends on. The modern welfare state has largely been subcontracted to nonprofits. Unfortunately, Black nonprofits that fail cannot be so easily replaced or restarted. Few have the type of hard, tangible assets that can survive a gap in income. If they fail, there is no clear motive to fueling a reconstruction. Philanthropy is not good at providing front-loaded, re-start capital at scale.
  • We call on the governor and California elected officials to create specific, tangible supports for our nonprofits. It could begin with the creation of a $100 million community nonprofit grant fund that can be targeted to the Black community and other communities of color, with a common application for individuals, businesses, artists and entrepreneurs. It should provide technical assistance, including translation services, as needed. Such a fund could pre-pay existing state contracts and increase the speed and flexibility in budget reimbursements to small nonprofits to ensure they can focus on serving vulnerable families rather than just keeping the lights on. California could also create a tax credit, similar to what already exists in Massachusetts, to maximize philanthropy to small organizations.
  • We also call on the governor to support another critical component of the Black community’s resilience, our small businesses — our community’s economic engine that risks being decimated due to the pandemic. We need direct relief and call on him and all officials to target the following support to Black businesses: Use supplier diversity and state agency contracting as a tool for economic stimulus directly to Black businesses; make $100 million available for mom-and-pop Black businesses and sole proprietors left out of the federal recovery funds (which in its original iteration ran out in 13 days); create a commercial rent tax credit for restaurants and non-grocery store businesses to ensure Black businesses are not driven out due to rent that was previously high and now is completely unpayable for shuttered businesses; waive annual LLC fees for small business to ensure that Black entrepreneurs, who already have approximately five cents in personal assets for every dollar of the White community’s assets, are able to protect what wealth they do have; use diverse media outlets owned by Black Californians to reach vulnerable Black communities. Also, to accomplish this targeted support and outreach, we ask the governor and legislature to put their full support behind the movement to repeal Prop 209 and stop all race-blind policy making.
  • In the long term, we call on the governor and California elected officials to also address the need for a statewide ban on criminal background checks for rental housing, similar to what already exists in Oakland, and better prepare our formerly incarcerated folks to re-enter society. Our people are being released in the middle of the night without necessary resources, no place to stay, thousands of job restrictions and are being placed into the same environments that provoke recidivism. We also need rent and mortgage subsidies, increased access to banking for our underbanked and unbanked businesses and community members, and a California job corps program for our Black and Brown communities.
  • We recognize that California can’t address our communities’ needs by itself. Therefore, we need a federal government that provides student loan forgiveness, universal health care, targeted long-term commitments to minority-owned communities, businesses, and nonprofits, and works to flatten the curve of racial bias. We also need expanded Community Development Financial Institutions lending for Black owned micro-businesses. There must also be data collection and transparency around the race/ethnicity of businesses that eventually receive Federal funds to ensure that Black businesses, which are on the smaller end of the small business continuum, receive proportionate access, at a minimum, to the financial, technical and marketing support, assistance and resources that are and will become available.

Conclusion
COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity virus. Indeed, it’s shined a spotlight on America’s pandemic of inequality. Everything we know thus far says that its burden falls disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color, especially the Black community.

The Black community is also standing up for, and standing in solidarity with, other communities who are suffering. This is particularly true of the Asian Pacific Islander American community, which is seeing a spike in despicable hate crimes, and the undocumented immigrant community, which has cruelly been denied access to federal economic recovery funds.

We call on the governor and legislative leaders to meet with us and other representatives of the Black community to discuss concrete steps the state can take in addressing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on our community, as well as targeting our community in its recovery efforts. Governor Newsom and California elected officials must act immediately to ensure that our community’s economic engine is not decimated due to the pandemic.
—
Editor’s Note: Carolyn Johnson is the executive director at Black Cultural Zone Community Development Corporation/East Oakland Black Cultural Zone Collaborative (collectively the “Black Cultural Zone”). Treva Reid is a resident of Oakland’s District 7 and on the executive Board for Black Women Organized for Political Action (BWOPA). De’Zhon Grace is the Economic Equity Fellow at The Greenlining Institute, which works to ensure that communities of color thrive and race is never a barrier to economic opportunity.

Congress needs to get the next coronavirus relief package right

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By Adam Briones
Miami Herald

The new $484 billion COVID-19 relief bill that Congress passed on April 23 takes some useful steps, but it still fails to deliver substantive relief to tens of millions of Americans. Our leaders must do better, and quickly.

What’s needed is a relief package that matches the scale of the economic disaster now hitting American families. It needs to be far-reaching, and tailored to help those who need it most.

Here is some of what the next COVID-19 relief package should include:

  • Long-term cash assistance. The $1,200 payments now going to some Americans are not even enough to cover a single month’s rent in Phoenix, let alone in pricier cities like New York or Los Angeles. With 27 million U.S. jobs lost in just the last few weeks and states lagging on processing unemployment insurance claims, families need serious cash assistance. The Automatic BOOST to Communities Act — just introduced by Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington — would provide $2,000 to every American immediately, followed by $1,000 a month for a full year after the end of the crisis.
  • A bailout for Main Street, not Wall Street: The $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, part of the first stimulus bill, was supposed to help small businesses. But while more than 70 publicly traded companies — some large and prosperous — received loans, it’s been estimated that fewer than one in 10 businesses owned by people of color will get this help. We must rescue the small mom-and-pop businesses that anchor communities but don’t have an accounting staff to submit loan applications or high-priced lawyers to restructure their debt.
  • Help for renters and homeowners: While many states and municipalities have a moratorium on evictions (at least for now), people around the country are still struggling to keep a roof over their heads. The economic downturn will disproportionately impact people of color who already spend more of their income on housing than white families. Congress should pass a national housing voucher program to support low- and moderate-income renters and homeowners through the next two or three years.
  • Aid for state and local governments. Astonishingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has suggested that states should go into bankruptcy rather than get federal help. States, which unlike the federal government cannot print their own money, shoulder an enormous burden in funding hospitals and other vital services even as tax revenues plummet. From 2008 to 2013, state governments shed 170,000 jobs, worsening the Great Recession. Let’s not repeat this mistake.
  • Keep it honest. We need tough, thorough oversight to ensure that help goes where it’s most needed. A provision in the new stimulus bill calls for the creation of an oversight committee to monitor “efficiency, effectiveness, equity and transparency.” Future legislation must make a similar commitment. House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters, D-California, is a legislative champion on this issue.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States already was suffering from a pandemic of inequality. How is it that in the world’s richest country, the people we call “essential workers” often have no paid sick leave or access to healthcare? The coronavirus calls on us to rethink everything, and redouble our commitment to get real help to those who need it.

Adam Briones is economic equity director at The Greenlining Institute.

Extend the census deadline to protect public health

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By Gissela Moya and Vinhcent Le
SFExaminer

In 1920, as the world was recovering from the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu, the U.S. Census Bureau told Congress that the “ravages of the influenza pandemics” meant “many cities and towns have been disappointed with the census figures and have filed protests questioning their accuracy.” Nearly 100 years later, we risk repeating history as the coronavirus pandemic undermines outreach efforts for the 2020 Census.

To protect community health, and to ensure we have an accurate count, Congress should act to extend the census deadline by up to one year. Brazil postponed its 2020 Census by a year due to fears that the coronavirus outbreak could risk the health of census workers and the households they survey. Congress should follow suit and allow the Census Bureau to extend its December deadline to complete the census. An accurate census is key to our democracy, since it ensures our cities and towns receive a fair amount of federal funding and political representation.

Census workers who knock on doors and ask residents to participate are responsible for up to 40 percent of responses (you can also respond to the census online, over the phone or by mail). These workers were supposed to begin outreach in May. However, social distancing and lockdown orders will negatively affect that work, resulting in lower participation and possibly a massive undercount — a development that would harm hard to count populations such as Low-income households, communities of color and non-English speakers the most. With a coronavirus vaccine at least one year away, delaying in-person census outreach will help “flatten the curve.”

Prior to the outbreak, the census was projected to undercount up to four million people. However, the spread of the coronavirus means these numbers could balloon. The Bureau has already suspended census field operations twice, first delaying the start of in-person outreach until April 1 and revising it later to April 15.

Outreach to immigrant and low-income communities has also ground to a halt as officials cancel large gatherings and close public spaces like libraries and schools. Closed college campuses make counting students living on campus much more difficult and confusing: Students should be counted where they live most of the time — i.e. in their dorms — regardless of where they may be temporarily.

On a more practical level, the economic uncertainty of this public health crisis will likely depress census participation, particularly among low-income groups who do not have the luxury to telework. Only 16 percent of Latino and 20 percent of Black workers are able to work from home, compared with 30% of white workers. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment claims have begun to rise, and economists expect that to continue.

Amidst this very real economic and health anxiety, census participation may seem relatively unimportant to people just trying to get through their daily lives. However, Congress must extend the census deadline to ensure we have accurate data because census data is used to make important decisions across the country. Medical researchers in 2018 warned that “a census miscount of the population could create challenges for public health surveillance and research activities that inform public health policies and interventions.” We should heed these warnings, as health researchers are using census data to model the spread of the coronavirus and federal and state officials are now scrambling to fairly distribute critical supplies of masks, ventilators and other equipment to hospitals across the country. Call your congressperson and ask them to take action on extending the 2020 Census.

Vinhcent Le is technology equity legal counsel at The Greenlining Institute. Gissela Moya is the Manny Garcia Technology Equity Fellow at The Greenlining Institute.

Senate COVID-19 Relief Bill Put Corporations First – Now, Let’s Take Care of People

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By Debra Gore-Mann and Adam Briones
CommonDreams

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated glaring structural and racial inequities in American society. What the Senate has put forth is not nearly good enough.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks with reporters during her weekly press conference at the US Capitol March 26, 2020, in Washington, DC. – The US Senate unanimously passed the nation’s largest-ever rescue package late March 25, 2020, a $2 trillion lifeline to suffering Americans, critically depleted hospitals and an economy ravaged by a rapidly spreading coronavirus crisis. The measure now heads to the House of Representatives, where a Democratic leader said he expected it to pass by voice vote March 27 before it goes to President Donald Trump for his signature. (Photo: Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty Images)

The Senate’s approval of a COVID-19 relief and economic stimulus package—seemingly on track toward House approval as we write this—marked a significant first step. Cash payments and increased unemployment benefits will provide some help to many, but in truth this bill did more for corporations than people. Much more will be needed to support American families, particularly in the communities of color that have been especially hard hit by the pandemic and the economic crisis it has caused.

“While it provides some needed short-term help, the current bill represents just the first, small step in a journey toward an economy that truly works for all.”

While the payments to families, expanded unemployment insurance and support for small businesses included in the bill will help to slow the bleeding, they represent just the beginning of what we must do. We need a plan for a just recovery that supports workers and families and recognizes the special challenges faced by communities of color, where families and small businesses have fewer resources to fall back on. In addition, we also need a long-term plan that addresses structural racism and inequality while moving us toward a more environmentally sound, healthier, more sustainable economy.

While it provides some needed short-term help, the current bill represents just the first, small step in a journey toward an economy that truly works for all.

In the near term, another round of relief and economic stimulus will be needed, and soon. As they consider next steps, Congress and the president must consider the following:

  • Implementation will be critical. The oversight committee that will oversee aid to companies must look like America—not like corporate America—with at least three of five members being nonwhite and at least three being women. The inspector general’s and oversight committee’s purview should be expanded to include a review of the small business fund. This oversight should include a report within six months examining how long it has taken for funds to reach small businesses and to what extent those funds have reached businesses owned by people of color
  • Families need consistent cash payments for the next 12 months. Economists are predicting “an economic tsunami” that will not end in a few weeks or even a few months. A one-time payment of $1,200 just isn’t enough
  • Small businesses need an additional recovery package that matches the $500 billion industry funding in the current bill. They also need a pause in debt payments and incentives for landlords to pause commercial rent payments
  • Homeowners and renters need a 12 month pause in housing payments, along with no foreclosures, evictions, or utility shut-offs during that same period. Such actions should also include a particular focus on immigrants and unhoused populations
  • Students need their debt wiped clean, which will add $100 billion in economic activity to the economy
  • Cities need urgent help. The Federal Reserve should ramp up its acquisition of local municipal bonds so that cities have the funds needed to support communities
  • Nonprofits, especially grassroots organizations providing desperately-needed community services, need a bailout. This economic tidal wave threatens small and medium-sized nonprofits, especially those led by people of color, and they need assistance equivalent to the roughly $60 billion being set aside for airlines. These organizations provide critical support to domestic violence victims, unhoused persons, those struggling with substance abuse and more – and those critical services are in danger unless these groups get support, and soon
  • Ensure access to health services. The gaps in our health care system have never been more glaring. The $130 billion in aid for hospitals should ensure that funds are used to remove barriers to accessing care for low-income people who may lack adequate health coverage

Speaker Pelosi has stated that another round of recovery legislation is already in the works. Greenlining’s proposals, and the values they represent, should be considered in the follow up legislation, but even they represent just a beginning. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated glaring structural and racial inequities in American society. It’s long past time we had a serious conversation about how to rectify them permanently.

The Many Reasons to Impeach Trump

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By Debra Gore-Mann
The Progressive

The president’s embrace of white supremacy has manifest in impeachable offenses.

We the people of the United States of America are deeply invested in the impeachment trial now underway in the U.S. Senate, prompted by two articles of impeachment brought by the House of Representatives.

But the House, we should remember, omitted several other potential grounds for impeachment, including racism, sexism, and what the Dalai Lama aptly called the president’s “lack of moral principle.”

The House sought to simplify the impeachment process in the hopes of successfully removing the president from office. That was a tactical decision. But Trump could just as easily be impeached for his other offenses.

Texas Democratic Representative Al Green introduced articles of impeachment against Trump for racism after tweets in July 2019 telling four young congresswomen of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” This is a president who has referred to African countries as “sh-tholes,” Mexicans as “rapists,” and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

For communities of color, Trump has long since violated our public trust, and we know that a multitude of possible articles were excluded.

To be clear: bigotry, racism, and white nationalism are impeachable offenses. They were, in fact, a big part of the reason that President Andrew Johnson was impeached.

President Trump could and probably should be facing impeachment for his disregard of human rights. Over the past twelve months, at least six migrant children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody. U.S. immigration officials have separated more than 5,400 children from their migrant parents at our southern border. Hundreds of those children were locked up in cages, a clear violation of international law. Some experts with the United Nations’ Human Rights Council believe this Trump policy may have amounted to “torture.”

Trump has also incited violence. On at least eight occasions identified by media sources, he has encouraged his supporters, including members of the armed forces, to attack his political opponents. The president is a threat to law and order.

And then there’s fraud: In November 2016, Trump settled three different fraud lawsuits related to Trump University for $25 million. Last November, the New York Attorney General formally announced that the president paid $2 million for misusing charitable funds for his own political gain and his Trump Foundation was shut down for misconduct.

In these trying times, I reached back to listen to the eloquent opening statement made by the late Barbara Jordan, a U.S. congresswoman from Texas, at the House Judiciary Committee hearings considering impeachment of Richard Nixon. Representative Jordan acted as a moral compass during that time of crisis.

“I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution,” Jordan declared, saying that the jurisdiction for her involvement “comes from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” She added, “If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.”

The House of Representatives did not let Trump’s conduct go unchallenged. But it did not challenge him for all that it could.

For communities of color, Trump has long since violated our public trust, and we know that a multitude of possible articles were excluded.

It is time to hold the president accountable. We the people demand that the Senate vote to convict and remove this president.

California regains its power to regulate internet service providers. Here’s why that’s good news for consumers

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By Debra Gore-Mann and Paul Goodman
CalMatters

 

Eight years ago, major internet service providers convinced the California Legislature to deregulate their industry.

It was a bad decision that, mercifully, came to an end Jan. 1 when this ill-conceived law sunsetted. The California Public Utilities Commission’s power to protect consumers has been restored.

Let’s be honest: Communities of color suffer the most harm from un- or under-regulated industries. We could list examples all day, but here are a few:

For the past three decades, internet service providers, and their predecessors, phone companies, have successfully waged a war to deregulate their industry.

Regulation, they argue, will stifle innovation. That may have been true 30 years ago. But now, the only innovation we see is ISPs coming up with new ways to charge you more while delivering less, even as they find new ways to discriminate against people of color.

That’s why we, as advocates for communities of color, joined with other consumer advocates in opposing the deregulation push.

But legislators have generally bought the providers’ argument hook, line, and sinker.

California’s Legislature may be a leader in environmental justice and clean energy, but it has repeatedly done the bidding of internet service providers, which in 2012 convinced the lawmakers to essentially deregulate broadband services until 2020—all in the name of “innovation.”

Over the past seven years, internet service providers have come up with quite a few “innovations”:

So it’s no surprise that ISPs are consistently rated the worst companies in America, worse than airlines, banks and insurance companies.

The good news is that Californians are tired of this behavior and sent a clear message to legislators: Stop doing the ISPs’ bidding. This time, the legislature listened, and we stopped an industry-sponsored bill that would have extended the deregulation of internet services permanently.

Now, the California Public Utilities Commission has regained its authority to enforce service quality standards, require that internet service functions during power outages, and ensure that every household has access to high-speed, robust, and affordable internet service.

California needs to hold ISPs accountable, because the Federal Communications Commission—the federal agency that is supposed to regulate them—is being run by a chairman bent on eliminating every consumer protection he can get his hands on.

With the California commission’s authority restored, it can finally take actions critical to California’s consumers.

For years, providers have refused to provide detailed pricing data to the commission. Now, the commission has the power to force them to do so and to protect consumers from being gouged.

Similarly, the commission can enforce California’s new law on net neutrality, which is the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

Maybe most urgently, the California Public Utilities Commission can address how the companies ensure that internet services, including internet-based phone services, work during natural disasters.

While broadband providers claimed that they were prepared for Pacific Gas & Electric’s recent northern California power shutoffs, those claims were wrong.

Many households that lost power also lost their broadband and phone service. The commission can now take swift action to require that broadband providers have sufficient backup power to keep services running for at least 72 hours.

Public safety is at stake. When you dial 9-1-1, should you need to worry about what type of technology you are using? No. You just want to know that you can reach someone on the other end when there’s an emergency.

Internet service providers don’t give up easily.

We’ll see them back in Sacramento, making their same, shop-worn, baseless claims that they need to operate free of regulation. We need to maintain pressure on legislators to ensure that every Californian—not just ISP shareholders—benefit from everything a free, open, and affordable internet has to offer.

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Debra Gore-Mann is president and chief executive officer of The Greenlining Institute, debrag@greenlining.org, and Paul Goodman is Technology Equity Director, paulg@greenlining.org. They wrote this commentary for CalMatters.

Pay for student-athletes is a racial justice issue

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By Debra Gore-Mann and De’Zhon Grace
San Francisco Chronicle

 

The college football championship game will be played Monday in New Orleans. Millions of dollars will go to the conferences and participating universities, trickling down to their coaching staffs, athletic administrators and everyone in between — except the student-athletes playing in the game, who won’t earn a penny.

As controversy continues over the NCAA’s recent decision — spurred by a new California law — to take a step toward allowing student-athletes to profit from the use of their name and likeness via endorsement and marketing deals, we need to remember the real issue at play here: race.

America since its founding has profited from the labor of black and brown bodies while excluding them from the wealth they generated. This was true for enslaved families on southern plantations in the 1800s, for servicemen of color who were denied G.I. benefits in the 1940s, and it’s true today for student-athletes.

The authors of this piece have seen this issue close up through their own experiences in college athletics: Debra Gore-Mann played basketball on scholarship at Stanford and went on to serve as athletic director at the University of San Francisco. De’Zhon Grace is a first-generation intercollegiate student-athlete from Oakland who played on the UC Berkeley football team.

The CFP National Championship reminds us that college athletics is a billion dollar business — with the NCAA reaching a milestone of $1.1 billion in revenue in 2017 while some coaches, such as Dabo Swinney, have landed contracts north of $90 million over 10 years. And coaching is white-dominated. Per the NCAA’s database, 80% of men’s basketball coaches and 86% of head football coaches are white, wildly out of proportion to the percentage of black student-athletes they coach.

It’s also not just the NCAA and coaches who profit. ESPN committed $5.64 billion to the owners of the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Orange, Cotton, and Peach Bowls for 12 years worth of broadcast rights. That’s equivalent to ESPN giving the 42,000 students at UC Berkeley more than $130,000 each. These “bowl game owners” are in effect a cartel. But that’s another story for another time.

These profits have not flowed — or even trickled down — to the student-athletes who make these teams and universities so profitable. In fact, coaches like Swinney threaten to quit rather than allow student-athletes to make a few thousand dollars. That’s right: A coach with a $93 million contract complained that “there’s enough entitlement in this world”— while some student-athletes literally went to bed hungry.

Unfortunately, this unfair system falls primarily on the shoulders of young people of color. According to the NCAA’s Demographic Database, 47% of Division I college football players and 55% of basketball players are black. While we don’t begrudge the $90-plus million paid to a head coach, we do take issue with the exclusion of the 85 scholarship student-athletes who make up his team — the people whose work, sweat and sacrifice create the value that everyone else gets to cash in on.

Let’s just leave it all on the field. While the NCAA has reluctantly opened the door a crack for this discussion around compensating student-athletes for their effort and labor, the NCAA and bowl games cartel must do more. We can’t help but wonder if the hesitation is because the largest grossing sports have the largest percentages of black athletes. We cannot have an honest conversation on compensation until we have an honest conversation about the role of race.

The NCAA has a unique and groundbreaking opportunity to provide an appropriate form of reparations and reduce the wealth inequality gap. The ball is in their court.

Debra Gore-Mann is president and CEO and De’Zhon Grace is economic equity fellow at The Greenlining Institute.

Why California should toughen standards for electric trucks

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By LESLIE AGUAYO
The Mercury News

 

From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, surges in online holiday shopping bring more than packages to our doorsteps. Every time we check out, we order fleets of heavy-duty delivery trucks to our streets, and toxic diesel pollution into our air. Even if shipping is free, our lungs, our communities, and our climate pay a steep price.

Online shopping doesn’t need to cost us our health or our climate: California has a historic opportunity to change the way we ship goods, for good. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is currently establishing the nation’s first electric truck manufacturing standard. If CARB passes a bold standard, California will jumpstart the electric truck industry, meaning more zero-emissions trucks on our roads and fewer toxic emissions in our air.

But, as currently drafted, CARB’s proposed rule is too weak, despite undeniable evidence that Californians suffer from an air quality crisis that requires aggressive policy intervention. The proposed rule only requires four percent of trucks on the road by 2030 to be zero-emissions electric trucks. While 4% is a start, it does not meet the scale of the worsening air pollution crisis — which exposes more than 90% of Californians to unhealthy air at some point during the year.

The draft rule also fails to protect communities living in “diesel death zones” — within one-third of a mile of a highway, port, warehouse distribution center or other freight corridor —with chronic exposure to truck exhaust. We know that African American and Latino Californians face 43% and 39%, respectively, higher rates of fine particulate matter pollution than white Californians, exposing them to health consequences like asthma, heart and lung diseases, cancer and premature death.

The good news is that we have the technology to address this air pollution problem. The heavy-duty truck market is naturally moving toward zero-emissions trucks, and all-electric trucking fleets will soon be the norm. Electric trucks are on the market from several manufacturers, with more on the way, and plans for adoption are already in the works. Here in the Bay Area, the West Oakland Community Action Plan in partnership with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District have proposed transitioning to zero emission drayage truck operations by 2035. Private corporations such as Frito Lay, UPS, FedEx and Amazon have also committed to incorporating electric trucks to their fleets.

But our communities and our climate don’t have the luxury to wait for the market to move itself, especially as the online shopping and shipping industries grow rapidly. There are already 1.9 million heavy-duty trucks on California’s roads; in Southern California alone, the number of miles driven by trucks is projected to grow by 80% between 2008 and 2035. If we continue with business as usual and ignore the harmful impacts of diesel trucks, air pollution and smog in our state will continue to worsen.

CARB has a critical opportunity to once again lead the nation—and the world—in tackling air pollution and spurring a job-creating clean-air industry. With the right policies and training programs, this growing electric vehicle industry can offer family-supporting opportunity to workers from underserved communities.

We have all the parts required to set a competitive, health-protective electric trucks standard: the zero-emissions technology, the manufacturer buy-in, and a track record of bold leadership from CARB. CARB must wave the starting flag and set truck manufacturers on a race toward innovating the shipping industry and cleaning up the air for California’s most polluted communities.

Leslie Aguayo is the environmental equity program manager for the Greenlining Institute.

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