Poverty, Inequality, Media, & more…
What Crowding Looks Like During a Pandemic
San Francisco Public Press
The sidewalk on Hyde Street was jam-packed with people hustling for survival. A wiry young man in cutoff shorts, his legs pockmarked by needle wounds, barreled through the crowd. A tall slender middle-aged man clutched a wad of bills, eyes alert.
Koch Foundation Journalism Grants Ignite Criticism
Columbia Journalism Review
While Koch Industries snared headlines last fall for its partial acquisition of Time, Inc. (including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and other holdings), the business empire’s nonprofit Koch Foundation made a smaller, little-noticed investment—granting $80,000 to the American Society of News Editors for its freedom of information hotline program.
The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps
Mother Jones/Food & Environment Reporting Network
In September, just two days after a Census Bureau report showed that food stamps helped keep 4 million Americans out of poverty last year, the US House of Representatives approved a $39 billion cut to the program (known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) over the next decade.
The Case for Food Stamps
Los Angeles Times
To hear Republicans — and some Democrats — in Congress talk, you’d think food-stamp dollars just disappear into a black hole. The prevailing debate in the Senate and House versions of the farm bill, which contains funding for food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), is over how much to cut. But when more than 15% of Americans remain impoverished, slashing food assistance for the poor makes no sense in humanitarian, economic or public health terms.
A Tale of Two Zip Codes
Race, Poverty & the Environment
At the corner of Turk and Hyde Streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, just a few blocks from the glittering commerce and bustling tourism of Union Square, lies a little slice of the Third World that visitors rarely see — unless they go to India or Africa.
Banned in Britain: Across the pond, new perils—and possibilities—for press freedom
Columbia Journalism Review
The documents are ugly and embarrassing. In e-mails riddled with terms like “gasoline slops” and “caustic washing,” officials with Trafigura, a major global commodities trading firm, described plans to clean and re-sell contaminated oil from Mexico and deposit the wastes in Africa, since they were too toxic for regulators in Europe or the U.S. In one 2005 e-mail discussing oil-cleaning profits, Trafigura staffer James McNicol wrote, “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars.”
One issue largely absent from the agenda of this January’s global commons conference in Hyderabad, India was the idea of limits to consumption and material accumulation. There were presentations aplenty on how commons are being limited and threatened by development, land-grabbing, and ecological decay, but little discussion of how global consumption, notions of material ‘progress,’ and ‘development’ factor into the evolving equation of how humans and the planet will survive.
Global Commons Idea Navigates Public Private Split
Shareable.net
America’s bitterly divided discourse about government and the public sector is all but absent here at the global commons conference in Hyderabad, India where criticisms of government seem driven more by an impulse to protect communities from state-corporate takings of common lands than by the urge to eliminate taxes and regulation.
Homebuilder Lennar uses federal taxpayer funds to balance its books
San Francisco Public Press
In 2006, things were looking good for Lennar, America’s second-biggest homebuilder. That year, before the U.S. housing market’s epic collapse, the Miami-based giant pulled down $15.6 billion in revenues and closed sales on 29,568 homes. The ink was just drying on a massive and potentially lucrative deal to transform Treasure Island with new housing complexes, and the well-connected Lennar already had secured a deal to develop the Hunters Point Shipyard that the Navy was turning over to San Francisco.