12 Shot, 5 Fatally As Baltimore Murder Crisis Erupts In New Year
Baltimore City Police (BCP) responded to multiple shooting on Saturday that left five people dead, reported CBS 13 Baltimore.
In total, 12 people were shot, and five died on Saturday. The shootings were widespread and weren’t concentrated in a single neighborhood.
All of the shootings and deaths occurred in low-income neighborhoods where wealth inequality is at extreme levels. These communities would be on the brink of social unrest if another Freddie Gray incident occurred.
Baltimore City broke the murder record of the century in 2019, recorded 347 homicides for the year, breaching 342 seen in 2015 and 2017.
With about 602,000 residents, the city’s homicide rate hit 57 per 100,000 residents last year, one of the highest rates in the country.
Last year was the 5th year the city recorded murders over 300, due mostly to the Ferguson effect post-2015 riots and socio-economic deterioration in the town.
Out of control murders, extreme wealth inequality, and an out of control opioid epidemic comes as the total population in the city crashed to a 100-year low, many are fleeing the city for the suburbs as the local economy continues to dive deeper into a depression, never recovered since 2008.
Homicides in the county recorded 50 for 2019, surpassing the previous high of 42, set during the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, according to FBI statistics. On a yearly change, homicides in the county are up 85%.
County homicides usually fluctuate in the low 20s. It wasn’t until the 2015 riots that murders started to increase.
Please do yourself a favor this year and avoid traveling to Baltimore.
This latest revelation should not surprise anyone who has been actively following the exploits of the current Trump Administration and its partner organization, Israel’s Netanyahu government.
According to a recent report released by the Times of Israel, it was officials in Tel Aviv who provided the White House with the key intelligence details leading to the targeted double assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader, General Qasem Soleimani, and senior Iraqi PMU commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, on January 3rd.
The illegal assassinations prompted an Iranian missile strike on two US bases in Iraq, and bringing Washington and Tehran dangerously close to a larger military confrontation, until Trump stood down in the face of reprisals by Iran and its allies in the region.
This latest news also validates previous analysis by 21WIRE which concluded that Israel has been the primary source of “intelligence” provided to the White House, relating to the recent chain of events involving the United States, Iraq and Iran.
Netanyahu Lied About Involvement
This also indicates that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was lying last week when he told ministers that the killing of Soleimani was “carried out solely by the US,” and that Israel was not involved. According to Axios:
“Netanyahu told Security Cabinet ministers Monday that the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was carried out solely by the U.S. and that Israel was not involved in any way and must not be dragged into the escalating conflict, two ministers who attended the meeting told me.”
This calculated move to walk-back his previously hawkish stance on Soleimani and Iran appears to have been a shrewd and cynical political maneuver to avoid being implicated in the political maelstrom which ensued in Washington – where US Senators and Congressional Representatives were demanding the White House present any of the illusive intelligence relating to the successive incidents. Their calls were met with complete stonewalling from the Trump Administration who claimed that any discussion into the matter would be ‘helping the enemy.’
The question now is whether or not Israel also provided the White House the illusive intelligence that prompted Trump’s illegal assassination orders – the mysterious intelligence which claimed there were “imminent threats” to the United States. Elected representatives are still waiting.
The new reports now reveal how Israeli intelligence officials provided President Trump the location and reconnaissance data which resulted in the state-sanctioned murder of Soleimani. Details of the operation also appeared in an NBC News report:
Armed with a tip from informants at the airport in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the CIA knew exactly when a jet carrying Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani took off en route to Baghdad. Intelligence from Israel helped confirm the details.
Once the Cham Wings Airlines Airbus A320 landed, American spies at Iraq’s main airport, which houses U.S. military personnel, confirmed its exact whereabouts.
Three American drones moved into position overhead, with no fear of challenge in an Iraqi airspace completely dominated by the U.S. military. Each was armed with four Hellfire missiles.
(…) On large screens, various U.S. officials watched as an Iraqi militia leader walked up a set of stairs to greet the leader of Iran’s Quds Force as he emerged from the airplane. It was past 1 in the morning, so the black and white infrared imagery wasn’t very clear. No faces could be seen.
It is important to note that from the onset of the Trump presidency, Israel has played a visible role in directing US policy regarding Iran. In fact, the current round of hostilities between the US and Iran was started when the White House unilaterally withdrew from the landmark international JCPOA Iran Nuclear Agreement in May 2018. Leaked recordings reveal that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about his own role in convincing the White House to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA deal.
Feds To Bill California Fire Victims If PG&E Doesn’t Pay $4 Billion Owed: Report
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is prepared to bill California wildfire victims to recover a portion of some $4 billion it says it’s owed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E), in the event the debt isn’t resolved under the utility’s bankruptcy case, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The reimbursement would cover costs from the government’s response to fires in 2015, 2017 and 2018. According to the report, any payment to FEMA would have to come from the company’s $13.5 billion allocation intended to settle claims from fire victims. FEMA’s claim would consume around 30% of the settlement. Victims’ lawyers are now battleing the agency, which told the Chronicle that it is compelled to first seek reimbursement from the utility – otherwise “individual victims would be on the hook if they get settlement money that duplicates funds already paid by the federal government,” according to the report, citing FEMA regional administrator Bob Fenton.
FEMA has “no interest” in reducing the amount of settlement funds made available to fire victims, said Fenton.
“What we are interested in doing is holding PG&E responsible and accountable for the billions of dollars taxpayers provided to assist individuals and communities affected by the wildfires,” he added. “The last thing I want to do is have to go after these individuals that have received claims from the bankruptcy where certain parts of that claim may duplicate funding that we’ve already given them. … It’s much easier up front to go ahead and simply deal with PG&E directly.”
As we have noted, PG&E’s latest bankruptcy – the second in two decades – has been a total mess, with US Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali stripping the utility of exclusive control over its recovery process as the utility attempts to modernize its infrastructure and battle annual fires.
After filing for bankruptcy one year ago this month, the company won court approval to deal with victims’ attorneys, as well as a separate $11 billion settlement to deal with insurance company claims.
That said, the company needs to meet several requirements to move forward with the rest of their case – including the formulation of a broader bankruptcy exit plan.
FEMA has asserted about $3.9 billion in bankruptcy claims against PG&E because of the 2015 Butte Fire, the 2017 wildfires in Wine Country and the 2018 Camp Fire. Court papers show that only about $282 million of the total relates to individual assistance FEMA gave to victims of the disasters — the rest is for aid provided to other government agencies and administrative costs.
The maximum amount of funding FEMA could possibly seek to recoup from individual victims would be even less than $282 million, according to FEMA spokesman David Passey. He said the individual assistance figure includes nonfinancial help, such as temporary housing, that the agency provided to disaster victims and would not try to recoup. –San Francisco Chronicle
In response to FEMA’s attempt to recover money from PG&E, 40 Congressional Democrats criticized the agency in a sharply worded letter claiming that the $4 billion sought “puts at risk the possibility that the thousands of families still struggling to rebuild their lives will not receive the restitution they deserve,” adding that the “inequality of this situation is evident.”
Former FEMA director and Democrat James Lee Witt also criticized the agency’s efforts to collect – telling the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that it was an “unusual” and “inappropriate” request.
Eric Goodman, an attorney for a committee of fire victims involved in the PG&E bankruptcy case, said FEMA’s defense of its $3.9 billion request “doesn’t hold any water” with him. Goodman’s firm is asking Montali to reject FEMA’s claim, in part because he says the relevant section of a federal law cited by the agency would apply only if the company intentionally started fires. –San Francisco Chronicle
“They haven’t alleged that PG&E is an arsonist,” Goodman said.
PG&E, meanwhile, told the Chronicle that FEMA’s request is inappropriate, and that the agency “does not have a valid legal claim against the company.”
The request is expected to come under consideration by Montali at a hearing next month.
President Donald Trump is offering plenty of justifications for the US government’s recent military actions against Iran, including that the actions were taken to prevent the deaths of Americans and to prevent a war. Not so, says former US House of Representatives member and presidential candidate Ron Paul in a Wednesday interview with host Ernest Hancock at Declare Your Independence.
Incessant US attacks on Iran from sanctions to the killing last week of Iran General Qassim Suleimani, says Paul, are a consequence of a different policy that the US has had “for a long time” and that is endorsed by both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, as well as the deep state.
Paul, in the US-Iran-relations-focused interview, describes this policy as follows:
We want to own Iran like we owned it when we had the Shah in power, and nobody’s going to be happy until that happens.
For an introduction to the US effort to place the Shah in power in Iran, aid the Shah’s government for the following 25 years, and, for the 40 years since the Shah’s departure, regain control over Iran, read Jacob Hornberger’s February of 2019 article “Understanding Why Iranians Bash the US Government.”
Toronto In Panic Following Erroneous Nuclear Meltdown Alert
Around 7:25 am Sunday, the Canadian province of Ontario sent out a mass alert notifying residents of an “incident” at Pickering nuclear power station near Toronto, reported CP24 Toronto.
“Emergency staff are responding to the situation,” the alert read, which was sent to cells phones across the province.
It went on to say, “There has been NO abnormal release of radioactivity from the station…People near the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station DO NOT need to take any protective actions at this time.”
About an hour later, a retraction alert was tweeted by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), followed up by a 9 am mass text telling residents that the incident at Pickering was a false alarm.
Important update: the alert regarding #Pickering Nuclear was sent in error. There is no danger to the public or environment.
“There is no danger to the public, there was no radiological event and what I can tell you is that we are working with the province to investigate what happened,” OPG spokesperson O’Neal Kelly told CP24.
Solicitor General Sylvia Jones, who oversees and runs the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre, said the false alarm was a routine internal training exercise that was accidentally released to the public.
Please see my statement in response to the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station emergency alert. There was no incident at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station that should have triggered public notification. Nor was there ever any danger to the public or environment. pic.twitter.com/F9dnQCCWgD
“There was no incident at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station that should have triggered the public notification. Nor was there ever any danger to the public or environment,” Jones said.
Pickering Mayor Dave Ryan tweeted Sunday that he was “very surprised” when he received the alert, but quickly discovered it was sent by error.
Like many of you, I was very troubled to have received that emergency alert this morning. While I am relieved that there was no actual emergency, I am upset that an error such as this occurred. I have spoken to the Province, and am demanding that a full investigation take place.
“I’m very angry and very concerned that this has occurred,” Ryan told Global News.
“We’ve demanded a full investigation and I’ve had confirmation from our local MPP that an investigation will be undertaken. We’ll understand what has happened, why, how and what’s going to be done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
And the last time a major municipality made a communications error and alerted citizens of Armageddon was several years ago in Hawaii when officials said the island was under ballistic missile attack.
Former CIA Officer and counter-terrorism expert Kevin Shipp says the threat of outright war with Iran is over – for now.
But, Shipp warns that Iran will change its strategy from overt conflict to covert conflict against the US…
“Iran has backed down. There is no question about that, and even their so-called missile strikes against the U.S. are basically just kicking sand, intentionally missing their target. Iran understands if they entered into a war with the U.S., they would be left with nothing more than a burnt stump. So, Iran is backing down…
What Iran is going to do is engage in asymmetrical warfare. I think they are going to start activating their sleeper cells in the United States and other countries like Saudi Arabia. We are going to start seeing attacks on easy targets in places like Iraq and activation of cells within the United States.”
Shipp is also an expert on the Deep State Shadow Government. Shipp says things are “quiet” on the prosecution of the failed coup plotters who tried to remove President Trump, but ‘that is a good thing.’ Shipp says,
“The evidence is already there to pass an indictment on Hillary Clinton and some of the others. So, there is not even an investigation in that regard…
Barr’s investigation is now a criminal investigation. They are trying to get a hold of Brennan’s (former CIA Director) emails and correspondence, through subpoenas, during this soft coup, and it looks like they are in the middle of that now, so, hence the silence. They are quiet now and that is a frustrating thing about any investigation…
They can’t come out and reveal where they are heading, especially when it comes to the CIA and intelligence agencies. You can’t tip your hand to the person you are investigating. Then they start destroying documents, and people start getting afraid and start covering things up.”
Shipp says the Democrats know they most likely will not win back the White House in the upcoming Presidential election.
“Their chance of winning in 2020, especially now with Trump’s success, is getting slim, and they are getting desperate.
When they get desperate, and they have done this before, I think we can count on voter fraud.They are going to have to use it, and they have used it before. In any event, they have very little chance of winning now, in my view, because the majority of Americans find their platform distasteful. So, I think this (voter fraud) is going to happen.”
Shipp says the Deep State is worried that Trump will have a second term:
“I think they (Deep State) are in a state of shock.
They want to get rid of Trump because for the first time in their careers, they can be prosecuted for what they have done. I think they are afraid of that, and that’s why John Brennan and others are coming out as mocking birds on CNN and MSNBC and constantly attacking the President.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former CIA Officer Kevin Shipp.
Deepfake Artist Puts Scorcese To Shame With ‘Irishman’ De-Aging
An amateur Deepfake artist using free software took scenes of ‘de-aged’ actors from Martin Scorcese’s “The Irishman” and took them to the next level.
As Movieweb‘s Kevin Burwick notes, despite Netflix spending millions of dollars to ‘de-age’ Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, Scorcese’s CGI was mediocre to the point of distraction.
A scene showing De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, who is supposed to be in his 30s, beating down some mobsters looks more like a 50-year old doing the damage. It is pretty distracting and takes away from some of the greater parts of the movie for some viewers. The new DeepFake video does an excellent job of pulling off what Netflix and ILM could not do. –Movieweb
“All I can say about this, is HOLY SHIT” tweeted director Joe Carnahan, in response to the deepfake – to which someone replied “They are de-aging the already de-aged footage though. Hardly a fair comparison.”
They are de-aging the already de-aged footage though. Hardly a fair comparison.
“Then that’s what they should have been doing. Results is results, guys. We can say it’s 2k and wouldn’t hold up, yadda-yadda but the stuff on the right, looks better than the stuff on the left,” responded Carnahan.
Then that’s what they should have been doing. Results is results, guys. We can say it’s 2k and wouldn’t hold up, yadda-yadda but the stuff on the right, looks better than the stuff on the left.
Fox News is not pro-Trump enough for Trump allies. Their solution is something that amounts to a Trump News Network.
Hicks Equity Partners, a firm tied to Republican National Committee co-chair Thomas Hicks Jr., is pitching GOP donors on buyout of One America News Network.
Allies of President Trump are pursuing an effort to acquire right-leaning news channel One America News Network, according to people familiar with the matter, in a bid to shake up a conservative media market that has been dominated by Fox News.
The investment firm Hicks Equity Partners is looking to acquire the channel and is pitching other wealthy GOP donors to arrange a bid of roughly $250 million for the channel’s parent company, the people said. The firm is owned by the family of Thomas Hicks Jr., co-chairman of the Republican National Committee and a close friend of Donald Trump Jr.
The efforts come as Mr. Trump has periodically rebuked Fox News for being too critical—despite its opinion-show hosts’ general support of his administration—and has praised One America News Network. The channel’s opinion programming is known among its cable-news peers for its praise of Donald Trump and its advocacy for conservative causes.
Some Republican donors say privately that Fox News isn’t doing enough to toe the party line, according to people familiar with the matter. They have noted, for instance, that the network doesn’t always carry the president’s full campaign rallies live on air, the people added.
Trump Blasts Fake News on Fox
Watching Fake News CNN is better than watching Shepard Smith, the lowest rated show on @FoxNews. Actually, whenever possible, I turn to @OANN!
Both Commiecast MSNBC & Fake News CNN are watching their Ratings TANK. Fredo on CNN is dying. Don’t know why @FoxNews wants to be more like them? They’ll all die together as other outlets take their place. Only pro Trump Fox shows do well. Rest are nothing. How’s Shep doing?
Powell In 2014: “A Large Balance Sheet Might Prove A Magnet For Trouble Over Time”
Two years ago, when the Fed released the transcripts from its 2012 FOMC sessions, we first disclosed several passages stated by then governor Jerome Powell which almost convinced us that the former Carlyle partner would not pursue the catastrophic bubble-bust policies that had been enacted by his predecessors.
As a reminder, this is what Powell, who replaced Janet Powell as Fed chair in early 2018, said during the October 23-24, 2012 FOMC meeting – just one month after the Fed announced QE3:
I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.
First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?
And then the punchline:
[W]hen it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.
Ah yes, the Fed’s “short volatility position” something which vol sellers over the past several years have grown to love and admire – occasional inverse VIX disasters like February 2018 notwithstanding.
But it was something that Powell said next that was an even more remarkable admission:
My third concern—and others have touched on it as well—is the problems of exiting from a near $4 trillion balance sheet. We’ve got a set of principles from June 2011 and have done some work since then, but it just seems to me that we seem to be way too confident that exit can be managed smoothly. Markets can be much more dynamic than we appear to think.
…
When you turn and say to the market, “I’ve got $1.2 trillion of these things,” it’s not just $20 billion a month— it’s the sight of the whole thing coming. And I think there is a pretty good chance that you could have quite a dynamic response in the market.
In retrospect, this observation by Powell turned out to be quite prophetic: after all, who can forget Powell’s “autopilot” comment on the Fed’s quantitative tightening, i.e., balance sheet unwind, which together with the Fed’s 2018 rate hikes, sent the S&P to a mini bear market when stocks tumbled in the last few months of 2018: “quite a dynamic response in the market” indeed, and one which forced Powell just days later to reverse on the Fed’s entire tightening policy and, several months later, to launch QE4.
Which, of course, is especially ironic in light of what Powell said next in the October 2012 FOMC meeting, which as we said earlier, almost gave us the impression that Powell was just the man to unwind a decade of capital misallocation even if meant the bursting of the biggest asset bubble in history:
I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.
Either year, one failed attempt at normalization and one QE4NOT QE later launched by the very same Jerome Powell, and we can now safely scrap the “almost”: it is now without a doubt that the Fed is, as Powell said, “blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road” and that “investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses.”
And they have Fed Chair Powell to thank for that, whose historic flipflop will be one for the history books when the asset bubble finally bursts. But until then, contrary to his now iconic warning, it was Powell who took it upon himself to make it very “easy” for investors to make money and the Fed’s only job is to make sure they “have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so.“
* * *
With all this in mind, let’s fast forward to the transcripts of the 2014 FOMC meetings, which the Fed declassified on Friday, and where we got some more delightful pearls of wisdom and warnings from the current Fed chair, who now appears hell bent to do absolutely every single thing he so prudently cautioned his colleagues he Fed should not do.
For the purpose of this article, we will focus on the transcript of the FOMC April 29-30 2014 meeting, which was remarkable in that it was the first one where the Fed extensively discussed the Fed’s rate “liftoff” policy which would, after several delays, finally took place in December 2015 when the Fed hiked by 25bps from the “zero bound”, and then proceeded to hike another eight times before eventually cutting rates three times in the summer of 2019 (with stocks at all time highs). Nested inside a lengthy discussion of Powell’s view of the mechanics of liftoff – which focused on his view of the floor vs corridor system and where Powell concluded that “an administered floor approach may be simpler and cheaper than a corridor with a market rate” – Powell made the following statement:
I kind of think that a large balance sheet might prove to be a magnet for trouble over time, and those two considerations pull me in opposite directions, I admit. So I tentatively land on a floor system with the smallest possible balance sheet. But that brings you to the really interesting question, I think, that Governor Tarullo and Governor Stein were all over, and that is the use of the balance sheet for financial-stability purposes. Very, very interesting questions, and I don’t have a lot to add on them here today, but I think those are the things we are going to be talking about for years to come.
Well he was right, because almost six years later, not only are we still talking about these “things”, but the use, and role, of the Fed’s balance sheet for financial-stability purposes, has never been more topical at a time when the Fed’s balance sheet has grown by over $100 billion per month in the past 4 months, allegedly to stabilize the repo market but in reality to unleash a historic market melt-up that has sent us to the highest, and most overvalued, S&P on record.
Amusingly, a little later in the same April 2014 meeting, Powell, a former private equity professional, shared some views from the perspective of a PE professional.
As long as we’re talking about private equity, I do keep in reasonably close touch with what’s going on out there. I would say that prices are high, leverage is high, and equity is low—in all cases, not as bad as it was in 2007. Prices might be in the mid-9s. We talked about leverage. Equity contributions are in the low 20s. So, again, not as bad as in 2007, but, in all cases, it’s getting stretched.
This was in 2014, six years ago. Anyway, back to Powell, and the following delightful snippet why a decade of covenant lite deals means the zombies will ravage the world for a much longer time than most expected:
The other really important difference is that rates are incredibly low. They swap out a lot of the floating-rate debt anyway at very low rates. You put all of this into the mix—I’m not at all sure that there’s a big wave of defaults being cooked up here because coverage ratios are pretty good. Certainly, the equity returns are under a lot of threat. But there are no covenants. It’s going to be really hard to default or fail to pay.
In response to this summary, former Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker had the perfect laconic summary: “No dysfunction to worry about.” None whatsoever.
Which brings us to the punchline: Powell’s parting words from the April 2014 FOMC, which as in the case of Oct 2012, were delightfully prophetic:
I see financial conditions as a potential risk down the road. The risk of continued rising froth in fixed-income markets, followed by a correction that could halt progress, is a real one. If this starts to have the feel of a classic credit cycle, then the level of damage when the cycle turns is hard to predict.
To summarize, after years of warning about the potentially catastrophic consequences of a giant balance sheet, ultra low rates and super easy monetary policy, Powell – now in charge of the world’s most important central bank (as Trump’s twitter account reminded him every so often) – gazed into the abyss of tighter financial conditions, higher rates and a smaller balance sheet… and quickly did everything he himself had warned years ago against doing.
Oh, and speaking of the Fed’s “magnetic” balance sheet, 4 months after his face to face with the “abyss”, Powell managed to undo more than half of the Fed’s entire “normalization.”
University of California-Los Angeles professor made her views on climate change public in a recent op-ed, questioning American private homeownership in response to climate change, particularly California’s forest fires.
Professor Kian Goah, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA, whose expertise includes urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the issues of climate change and global urbanization, argued in an op-ed for The Nation that what makes the California forest fires even worse is urban planning. Its subtitle reads, “if we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership.”
“Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of homeownership, and belief in the importance of private property,” she writes.
Goah compared two ideas of thought: The American tradition of private property ownership and the collective property theories.
She suggesting the cause of the issue is private homeownership and advocated for “more collective” cities.
Some examples she cited for public housing were put in practice by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Bernie Sanders. Another solution would be cooperative housing, and community land trusts.
She argues that public housing would put more power into the federal government as opposed to the “Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.” The “Jeffersonian agrarian ideal”, cheap energy, and individual property “have created the scorching landscapes we see today.”
Goah concluded with how one should seriously question the American Dream with obtaining private property in the face of modern issues.
“The ideals of the American Dream that have been instilled for more than 150 years will be difficult to dispel. Those deals have blinded us to other possibilities…
We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.”
Campus Reform reached out to Goah but did not receive a response in time for publication.
