A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Guns & Gold Edition
Guns are Killing Our Future
Courtlin Arrington was just one month from turning 18 when she was shot and killed sitting in her classroom in Birmingham, Alabama on March 7, 2018. With dreams of becoming a nurse, Courtlin would become one of 117 children killed by gun violence in the U.S. in 2018.
A deadly epidemic, gun violence kills or injures 19 children every single day in America.
A new report, Protecting the Parkland Generation: Strategies to Keep America’s Kids Safe from Gun Violence, by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence warns, “The dangerous consequences of the gun violence epidemic cannot be overstated.”
The report points out that, “School shootings may garner the most attention, but in fact they represent a small percentage of tragedies when it comes the deadly intersection between kids and guns—many more children experience gun violence in other ways, like domestic violence, urban gun violence, unintentional shootings, and suicide. And the impact of gun violence on kids is staggering:”
- Since Columbine alone, more than 150,000 minors have been shot in the United States. Additionally, 150,000 students in at least 170 elementary, middle, and high school have experienced school shootings.
- Guns are now the third-leading cause of death for all Americans under age 18.
Following the school shooting in the wealthy enclave of Parkland, Florida, a renewed attention to gun violence in America and the predatory gun industry that fuels it, has captured national headlines and ignited the youth led movement, #NeverAgain. As the Giffords Law Center report which was issued as a “tool for the new generation of activists,” points out, while mass shootings garner more public attention, it is “children of color who live in impoverished cities where a high concentration of gun deaths occur.”
It should not be ignored that black Americans are more susceptible to be killed by gun violence. In fact, black Americans are “eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white.”
Although death by firearms in America is a public health crisis, it is a crisis that legislators accept as a societal norm. Some have suggested it is due to the fact that it is blacks and not whites who are the predominant victims, and our data support this striking disparity.
Included in this higher risk for death by gun violence, are the killings carried out by police. In an article published yesterday in The Intercept, journalist Maha Ahmed examines a recent Boston University’s School of Public Health study that finds that discriminatory economic policies and housing practices are major factors.
“Of all the symptoms of structural racism, the factor that had the strongest relationship with police shooting disparities was residential segregation, followed by economic inequality.”
A HIDDEN FACTOR IN POLICE SHOOTINGS OF BLACK AMERICANS: DECADES OF HOUSING SEGREGATION
DATA HAS SHOWN that, across the country, black Americans are more likely to be killed by police than whites. But the problem is worse in the most segregated states, according to a recent study showing that racial disparities in fatal police shootings are linked to histories of structural violence.
Police killings, more than just the consequence of a few bad-apple officers that can be rooted out of the system, instead can be traced back to the discriminatory housing and economic policies of the mid-20th century, the study’s senior author, Michael Siegel, told The Intercept.
In what Ahmed describes as “structural violence,” she explains that racialized police killings are a result of “more than just the consequence of a few bad-apple officers that can be rooted out of the system;” but due to decades of interconnected, oppressive systems which have created “broader disparities in outcomes and living conditions like segregation and economic status.”
In reality, the foundation for racialized police violence was laid by political and economic institutions created many decades ago, through mechanisms like Jim Crow-era redlining and so-called sundown town policies. “It’s not just about how individuals interact,” says Siegel, “but how society is structured.”
Redlining, “the practice of banks and real estate agents steering black and Latino families away from predominantly white neighborhoods,” is not merely a tactic of the past, but is common today. It’s simply has morphed into more insidious methods. That is until now. This week, the Senate voted on the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that would roll back regulations on 25 of the country’s largest banks.
Gold. The Rush to Steal Wealth from the Most Vulnerable
"Predatory capitalism is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense….Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labour. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it."~Noam Chomsky
Of the most striking regressions found in the rollback bill, is the undoing of protections against mortgage discrimination that were set forth by the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law sought to address this by setting tougher predatory lending rules and by requiring banks to turn over a broader swath of information to the newly created CFPB. In addition to basic facts about loan approval or denial, lenders had to report a borrower’s age and credit score as well as the property value of the home being purchased, the interest rate, loan terms, and other pricing features of each mortgage. All of this information can be used to help determine if families of color are being ripped off or disproportionately pushed into predatory loans. The CFPB looks through the data for violations or red flags, and publishes it online so consumer groups can do their own research.
The bill the Senate will consider next week would wholly exempt banks that make 500 or fewer mortgages a year from reporting any of this additional data. That would shield about 85 percent of banks and credit unions from scrutiny, according to the CFPB’s estimates. These smaller lenders issue only a small fraction of the home loans provided by the financial system, but still work with hundreds of thousands of borrowers every year.
As Ryan Cooper pointedly stated in a recent The Week article, “This deregulation package is racist both in specifics and in general effect.” The deregulation package is being considered at a time when banks are realizing historic profits and black homeowners have hit a low point of home ownership not seen since the 1950’s, still reeling from the the predatory Wall Street grab of black wealth committed during the 2007-2010 foreclosure crisis.
BANK EARNINGS ARE SOARING, BUT CONGRESS WANTS TO GUT POST-CRISIS SAFEGUARDS
This week, the Senate considers the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that represents the greatest threat to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law since its passage in 2010. The bill would relieve all but the country’s largest dozen banks of increased scrutiny and ease mortgage rules imposed after the financial crisis. It would undermine fair lending rules designed to counteract race discrimination and weaken the Volcker rule, which limits a bank’s ability to make speculative trades with federally insured deposits. The arguments that Bove has been making publicly for years are the same specious ones being offered by the bill’s co-sponsors, and the trade groups calling for a rollback of banking regulations: Banks are suffering and so, by extension, are consumers, businesses, and the economy at large.
Not only does this rollback bill put black wealth in greater jeopardy, but also increases the risk for another economic collapse. In what Elizabeth Warren calls the #BankLobbyistAct, the bill exemplifies predatory capitalism, giving rise to an urgency for a “revolutionary leap” as described by Naomi Klein.
She said that "it's in the interplay between the two where revolutionary power lies."
She pointed to successes seen in The New Deal, which brought about key safety net gains. But we can do better, she argued.
One obstacle is the dominant structure of movements based largely on a sort of silo-fication of issues. While these movements are making strides forward and calling for bold changes, "what we're still missing is that coherent picture of the world we're fighting for," she said.
"The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better," she concludes. "But first we need to picture the world that we're fighting for. And we have to dream it up together. Right now, every alarm in our house is going off simultaneously. It's time to listen. It's time to leap.
In the struggle against predatory capitalism, be it the fall out of the NRA’s influence over politicians through their blood money or Wall Streets’ stranglehold on our elected officials, our commonality is our power of the vote.
Transforming the energy of youth led political movements be it Black Lives Matter, Never Again, Occupy Wall Street, Dreamers and Climate Activists, to electoral power, is the thread that binds us together. “It’s time to leap.”
#VoteThemOut
Action Items:
#Congress: immigrant youth deserve real solutions. Pass a #CleanDreamActNow! CALL: 844-551-6766 #HereToStay
Sign Up and Plan to attend the MarchForOurLives rally
Volunteer to Register Voters with a local activist group or your county Democratic party
Please suggest further action items in comments.