Clarence Thomas’s problems multiply at Supreme Court
Al Weaver – May 5, 2023
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing a fresh round of scrutiny after the third blockbuster report in less than a month links him financially to GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.
ProPublica reported Thursday that Crow, a Dallas-based real estate developer, paid thousands of dollars in tuition to a private boarding school for Thomas’s great-nephew, whom Thomas has said he raised “as a son.”
Federal ethics laws require the justices to report gifts given to a “dependent child,” but that term is defined to only include the justices’ children or stepchildren. Thomas’s allies have insisted the payment doesn’t violate the disclosure law since it was for Thomas’s sister’s grandson.
But the revelation has only added to the increasing pressure from Democrats for the justices to adopt a binding code of ethics.
“Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question. I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done—the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.
When asked during a SiriusXM interview about impeaching Thomas, however, Durbin said “no.” He noted that only one justice, Samuel Chase, had been impeached previously, and Chase was acquitted in the Senate in 1805.
“I don’t think an impeachment is in the works, particularly with the House in a political situation that it’s in today,” Durbin said on “The Briefing with Steve Scully.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a Judiciary Committee member, argued the matter should be referred to the Department of Justice.
“There’s a potential criminal violation in the misreporting or failure to report certain benefits, gifts and financial transactions. There’s just a drip, drip, drip of additional information that is gravely undermining the Court, but also creating the need for a full factual investigation,” Blumenthal said.
“If [the Justice Department] fails to do so, Congress definitely has a role,” he added.
Thomas did not return a request for comment through a court spokesperson.
Later on Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist who played a key role in the Supreme Court’s rightward shift, directed tens of thousands of dollars be paid to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, roughly a decade ago.
Leo requested that she not be named in the paperwork, according to the Post. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist herself, has long insisted that she doesn’t talk about the court’s business with her husband.
Judiciary Committee Democrats have been hamstrung on taking action regarding the court, including on a potential subpoena for Chief Justice John Roberts. He declined an invitation from Durbin to appear at a Tuesday hearing on Supreme Court ethics, noting that it is “exceedingly rare” for a chief justice to give testimony.
That could change if Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has been absent for months due to shingles, returns and once again gives Democrats an 11-10 majority on the panel — though even then subpoenaing the chief justice of the Supreme Court would be an extraordinary step.
Thursday’s ProPublica report was the latest financial transaction involving Thomas and Crow to come to light. The investigative outlet last month reported Thomas had accepted luxury trips from Crow, including flying on his private jet, without disclosing the travels.
ProPublica also reported Crow had purchased real estate from Thomas’s mother that Thomas had an interest in.
“The definition of insanity is seeing the same Supreme Court justice violate ethics rules over and over again and expecting him to actually hold himself accountable,” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, said in a statement. “How many more examples of Thomas flouting disclosure rules do our elected leaders need to see before they intervene? Thomas needs to answer for his misconduct. It’s time to subpoena him.”
Republicans, on the other hand, indicated little willingness to wade into the waters related to the justice who has served on the court for 32 years. They say this is an issue for the Supreme Court to deal with and not something that requires congressional oversight. Interfering, they argue, would go against the separation of powers.
“The Supreme Court … writes its own rules and if there is any policing of those rules to be done, I think it ought to be done by them,” Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters. “I assume the members of the Court, who I have a high level of confidence in, will make the right decisions for the justices on the Court and for the people who work at the Supreme Court in the same way as we make the rules for all members of Congress.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who recently indicated that he was dismayed by reports of the ethical issues for Thomas, said the Court needs to make ethics changes.
“These revelations with regards to a number of justices, both those appointed by Republicans and by Democrats, suggest that the Court itself needs to evaluate what their disclosure rules are and ethics rules are and methods for enforcing those,” Romney said. “I presume that the chief justice will undertake that.”
Republicans have further portrayed the Thomas scrutiny as a double standard, taking aim at the ethics of the high court’s liberal justices.
They note that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accepted an award in 2010 from the Woman’s National Democratic Club.
They have also pointed to liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor not recusing herself when the court considered taking up two cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House, despite disclosing payments from the conglomerate for her books. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also received payments from the publisher for his book, similarly did not recuse.
‘We will keep killing Russians,’ Ukraine’s military intelligence chief vows
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, told Yahoo News that Russian forces no longer have the ability to launch a “serious offensive anywhere in Ukraine.”
Michael Weiss and James Rushton – May 5, 2023
Ukrainian soldiers in Donetsk, April 24. (Muhammed Enes Yildirim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
KIYV, Ukraine — The light is dim and the windows are sandbagged. Classical music plays on an unseen speaker somewhere. The man sitting at the large wooden desk, in this fortified bunker office on the Rybalsky Peninsula, on the edge of the Dnipro River, has a pistol holstered at his side.
“They’ve been trying to charge me with terrorism since 2016,” Maj. Gen. Kyrlo Budanov, the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, said. “But I want to begin by saying that the things they call ‘terrorism,’ we call liberation. And this began not because I went mad and started killing people in Moscow. It happened because they invaded our country back in 2014.”
“They” refers to the Russian government. On April 21, just a few days before Yahoo News sat down with Ukraine’s most recognizable spymaster, the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow arrested Budanov in absentia. He stands accused of creating “a terrorist community,” the “illegal acquisition of weapons by a group of persons,” and “the illegal acquisition of explosive devices by a group of persons.”
Chief of Ukrainian Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov, center, attending an event in Kyiv, March 10. (Yurii Stefanyak/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
The implication is that Budanov’s intelligence service, more commonly known by its Ukrainian acronym HUR, was behind a string of audacious and lethal attacks inside Russian territory — or what the Kremlin considers to be Russian territory. These include the August car-bomb assassination of Daria Dugina, daughter of Russia’s notorious far-right theorist Aleksandr Dugin, in central Moscow, and the suspected truck bombing in October that partially dismantled the Kerch Bridge, Russia’s only direct link from the Black Sea to occupied Crimea.
U.S. intelligence has attributed Dugina’s killing to the Ukrainian government, although not specifically to the HUR. Asked about this allegation, Budanov said, “Don’t continue with that topic. All I will comment on is that we’ve been killing Russians and we will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine.”
At 37, Budanov has a full face, dotted with light stubble and a slightly shorn forelock, possibly to raise his hairline in an effort to appear older. He is one of the youngest generals in modern Ukrainian history, and probably the youngest director the HUR has ever had — certainly the most famous. Memes of Budanov grinning or his eyes alight in bright red, à la Superman villain General Zod, routinely circulate online whenever something catches fire in Russia or goes badly wrong for Russian occupiers on the Ukrainian battlefield.
After a surprise Dec. 26 drone attack on the Engels-2 air base in Saratov, home to Russian strategic bombers, Budanov told an interviewer he expected to see more of its kind, “deeper and deeper” in enemy territory. According to the Washington Post, the CIA had to persuade Budanov to “postpone” HUR anniversary strikes on Russia on Feb. 24, including one proposed naval-borne TNT assault at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
An oil tanker moored at the Sheskharis complex, one of the largest facilities for oil and petroleum products in southern Russia. (AP)
Officially, the HUR claims no responsibility for any cross-border attacks, of which there have been many documented examples. It adopts a Mossad-like air of menacing ambiguity whenever they occur.
On some matters, though, Budanov is unambiguous. “As of today, Russia has no military, economic or political potential to create another attempt for a serious offensive anywhere in Ukraine,” he said. “Besides that, it is completely capable of waging serious defensive operations, and this is the very problem we are about to face,” referring to Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.
Budanov believes that Russia’s supply of missiles are running low, almost to the point of exhaustion. “They are trying to accumulate certain stocks and have them ready in order to try to disrupt our offensive, but the truth is that they have taken their stocks almost to zero.”
As with Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, Budanov declines to offer details of where and when that campaign will be. But he is equally confident that occupied Crimea “will be liberated because our victory is impossible without liberating Crimea.”
Policymakers in Washington have long fretted that a recapture of Crimea, assuming such a thing is even feasible, would be something Russian President Vladimir Putin could not tolerate and would prompt him to undertake a massive retaliation, possibly with weapons of mass destruction, but Budanov is not swayed by those fears.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the Federal Assembly, April 28. (Alexey Danichev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
“I’d like to underline here that it is unpleasant for me to recognize the following but it’s the truth,” Budanov said. “Unfortunately, the Russian Federation knows how to work with the information space. That is why any event — imagine a rocket that falls into the Kremlin — they will show it as a victory for Russia. They will claim that they’ve prevented the biggest catastrophe to mankind by having that rocket fall into the Kremlin, that this missile has actually demolished the building it was supposed to and has even helped them. It sounds like a joke, but indeed, Russian society is accepting of such stupidities.”
Yahoo News’ interview with Budanov took place on April 24, more than a week before two drones were recorded striking the Kremlin, lightly singeing its domed roof. The Russian government has blamed Ukraine for the attack, which it hyperbolically characterized as an assassination attempt on Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky denied his government’s involvement. “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” he said while on a trip to Finland. “We fight on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington could not validate reports of the drone attacks, adding, “I would take anything coming out of the Kremlin with a very large shaker of salt.”
Budanov is calculating and curt. He speaks English well enough to field questions in the language but prefers to answer more precisely in Ukrainian. Often he begins replying before the question has fully been articulated, and throughout the hour Yahoo News spent with him, he at times betrayed an impatience bordering on hostility.
Some of his more eyebrow-raising claims — that Putin is “terminally ill with cancer” and other ailments, or that the Putin shown in photographs or on television is a body double — have a whiff of psychological warfare to them. In that regard, they are hugely successful, fueling tabloid speculation to the point that even Western intelligence has had to sprinkle cold water on them.
“Back in 2021, there was a statement, I believe it was mine,” Budanov said, “that Putin is greatly sick with cancer. It has been two years since then and now everyone starts saying something might be wrong with him. Time will show who was right.” (Bill Burns, the CIA director, characterized Putin as “entirely too healthy” at a public event in July 2022.)
Whatever the veracity and intent of Budanov’s big assertions, there is no doubt he has at his disposal a vast intelligence-gathering capability, if not an extensive agent network operating inside Russia, as is obvious from what the HUR has managed to do. Behind his chair hangs a large portrait of an owl grasping a bat in its talons. This is in homage to the HUR’s official emblem, whose motto in Latin is sapiens dominabitur astris, “The wise man will rule the stars.” The nocturnal bird of prey was selected by a previous HUR director because the bat features in the emblem of the special forces of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency and the HUR’s counterpart. “And owls eat bats,” that director said.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. (Andre Pain/AFP via Getty Images)
About four months before the Russian invasion, one of his deputies showed Yahoo News a website HUR put together featuring the personal photographs, fake passports, even the results of a prostate ultrasound, all belonging to Maj. Gen. Andrey Averyanov, commander of Russian GRU Unit 29155. Also featured were the fake passports of the various young Russian women with whom Averyanov has traveled on “business trips” to Sochi and Crimea. Unit 29155 is an elite murder-and-sabotage squad that Western intelligence has blamed for poisoning GRU defector Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury, England, in 2018; mounting a failed coup in Montenegro; and blowing up a series of weapons and ammunition facilities in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.
How did the HUR manage to quite literally see up the backside of a senior Russian intelligence operative? This question prompted a rare bit of laughter from Budanov. “We are not a consuming body,” he said, “we are a collecting body. That is why everything we say oftentimes is very much different from what others say. We base our assessment on things that are real and some other people watch a lot of TV or just talk to other people and that’s how they build their assessments. The fact that we are geographically close to Russia — let’s put it this way: We have capabilities in the Russian Federation, quite powerful ones.”
Ukrainian soldiers take part in military exercises outside Kyiv, April 20. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Budanov was appointed to what became a crucial wartime intelligence role in August 2020 after having served a brief stint as deputy director of one of the departments of Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service. Before that, he was a HUR Spetsnaz or special forces commando dispatched behind enemy lines: Even now, he occasionally appears in selfies from the front, kitted out in full tactical gear, in what one senior HUR official said are no mere photo ops: “Budanov still takes part in special operations.”
In August 2016, so one story goes, he was part of a saboteur campaign in Crimea that killed a lieutenant colonel of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, one of the successor agencies of the Soviet KGB. Whatever Budanov got up to as a soldier, it was enough to merit receipt of Ukraine’s Order for Courage, roughly equivalent to the Medal of Valor. Russia has tried to assassinate Budanov ever since, including by blowing up his Chevrolet Evanda in 2019 (the bomb detonated too early).
There is a birdcage at one end of Budanov’s office with two chirping canaries. An apocryphal but plausible tale has it that they’re here to die — that is, provide an early-warning system in the event poison gas is ever deployed in this room. The truth is more mundane: They’re just pets, as is the frog frantically trying to climb the glass wall of its aquarium behind Budanov.
According to leaked Pentagon intelligence, Budanov played an instrumental part in fortifying the besieged city of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine. For months, the Russians have been devoting enormous resources and manpower into capturing the city, in itself of limited strategic significance, but symbolically a large prize for Moscow. Ukraine’s policy has been to bleed the Russians there for as long as possible in order to weaken their defensive capability when Kyiv presses its counteroffensive in the next few weeks.
A Ukrainian soldier on a destroyed Russian tank in Luhansk, Ukraine, June 9, 2022. (Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The U.S. was highly skeptical of such a plan. It anticipated that Bakhmut would fall in January, and U.S. intelligence, as reported in the Pentagon leaks, cited Budanov describing conditions in the city as “catastrophic.” He personally ordered a Ukrainian special forces detachment, the so-called Kraken unit, to deploy to Bakhmut to help beat back the threat of Russian encirclement. It worked. Budanov, who correctly predicted the date and timing of Russia’s Feb. 24 full-scale invasion, is dismissive of those in the West who argued that the effort to save Bakhmut would fail or wasn’t worth the cost in untold Ukrainian lives.
“Whoever says this, and you just mentioned these leaks of U.S. materials — we can add to the statements of the Russian leadership at various levels,” he said. “They have been saying since June 2022 that they have almost captured Bakhmut. We are almost in May now and they are still capturing Bakhmut. It’s very easy to talk about territories you have no relation to. It happened in Syria, with people saying, ‘This can be given away, that can be taken.’ It happened in Chechnya. It happened also in Iraq.”
While Bakhmut remains contested, Russia has made unmistakable gains toward the center of the city, largely thanks to the Russian mercenary group Wagner, the vanguard fighting force that has suffered its own catastrophic losses. “It’s three times the number of killed in action that the United States faced on the Guadalcanal campaign in World War II, and that was over the course of five months,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said of Russian losses in Bakhmut on Monday. Nearly half of those killed in action since December, Kirby explained, were Wagner fighters.
A Ukrainian medic on the frontlines in Bakhmut, Ukraine. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Budanov esteems this enemy, now labeled by the U.S. as a transnational criminal organization, above all other Russian military formations. “Unlike the regular troops of the Russian military, Wagner engages in training,” Budanov said. “Even the convicts they recruit from Russian prisons are being trained to serve and that is why the results are a lot better than what normal regular army have. They are our enemy, but we need to admit that they are an enemy you’re not ashamed of. It’s incomparable to the level of regular troops. They are a lot higher.”
In yet another sign that the Bakhmut meat grinder has had serious repercussions in Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, this week took to social media to denounce the Russian Ministry of Defense, general staff and “fat-bellied” bureaucrats in Moscow for what he alleges is their refusal to supply adequate ammunition to his guns for hire. “My lads will not be taking senseless and unjustified casualties in Bakhmut without ammo,” Prigozhin said, surrounded by dozens of masked Wagner mercenaries, in a video. Whether a theatrical ploy or something more serious, he threatened to withdraw all his forces from Bakhmut on May 10, a decision that would in effect mean a Russian abandonment of the city.
For Budanov, Prigozhin has played politics over his private army’s sacrifices in the war since last year because he has to. “His political future is directly linked to his physical survival because there are too many forces in the Russian Federation who want to eliminate him. He obviously will try to defend himself because for him it’s not even an issue of exile or prison; it’s an issue of life and death.”
America is refusing to do the one simple thing that would solve the Great People Shortage
Gaby Del Valle – May 4, 2023
The US needs more workers or it will face serious economic chaos. There’s a clear fix: more immigration.Tyler Le/Insider
Two simple words: more immigrants
America needs more workers.
The United States is already running low on critical positions such as nurses, home-health aides, farmworkers, and truckers. And there are fewer young people on the way to make up the difference: The National Bureau of Economic Research found that birth rates in the US have declined by nearly 20% since 2007, while the fertility rate has been below the replacement level for decades.
That means that unless people start having a lot more kids, the US population could eventually start to shrink — just like China’s population has. The problem, though, isn’t just a smaller population, but an aging one. With fewer people to pay into Social Security to support the growing number of retirees and fewer workers in critical industries, including healthcare and agriculture, a declining population would have devastating consequences for the American economy.
“This is the issue of the future, because this is going to become the first-order issue for all kinds of industries in America,” Lant Pritchett, a development economist and RISE Research director at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, told me. “They just won’t be able to attract workers.”
Politicians have suggested various ways to encourage people to have more children: “We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom,” former President Donald Trump said at a conference in March. But even if these policies went into effect, we’d still have to wait for those kids to grow up before they could enter the workforce. The labor imbalance is already here, and the economy needs more workers now. That’s why a growing number of demographers, economists, and business executives support letting more immigrants into the US as a more immediate way to fill in the gaps. President Joe Biden’s economic advisors even said in March that more legal immigration is needed to boost the economy. And while immigration is a politically touchy solution, the quickly aging US economy is running out of options to keep itself afloat.
“The only solution is more workers,” Pritchett said.
America’s People Shortage
The US fertility rate first dipped below the replacement level — the rate needed to sustain the population, which is about 2.1 births per woman — in the 1970s. After rebounding in the 1990s and early 2000s, the rate began a steady decline in 2007 that has not reversed. While the US population has managed to avoid an outright drop, population growth reached an unprecedented low of 0.12% in 2021. Some of this loss can be attributed to the deaths of over 1 million Americans during the pandemic, but the COVID crisis only exacerbated preexisting demographic trends. Americans are getting older: The median age of the US population has increased by roughly 3.5 years since 2000, according to the Census Bureau, and 2021 saw the largest upward shift in the population age ever recorded.
According to estimates, these trends won’t reverse anytime soon. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this year that population growth will slow between 2023 and 2053, and that by 2042, any growth will be from immigration, not births. Kenneth Johnson, a professor of sociology and a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, pointed out that the demographic mismatch is even more dire when you look at county-by-county data. Deaths outnumbered births in two-thirds of US counties in 2021, creating a phenomenon that demographers call “natural decrease.” Even before the pandemic, roughly half of all US counties had more deaths than births, he said.
Johnson said that one big debate among demographers is whether people are simply delaying having children or just putting it off altogether. It’s possible that a combination of factors, including the lingering effects of the Great Recession, coupled with crushing student-loan debt, the rising cost of housing, and the pandemic simply pushed back the timeline for many people to have children. After all, birth rates did rise slightly in 2021, likely because of stimulus payments and the flexibility of remote work. But Johnson told me, “Right now, my impression is that a fair number of those babies aren’t going to be born.”
Policymakers and economists have suggested myriad ways to increase the number of babies people are having — ranging from “baby bonds” to a stronger social-safety net. But some ideas to boost fertility come with a sinister undercurrent. The preoccupation with increasing birth rates has particularly taken hold on the political right, which has long had a fascination with the racist conspiracy theory that there is a global plot to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. Trump’s baby-boom plan, for instance, may have been inspired by Hungary’s family-planning program, which is designed to encourage white heterosexual couples to have more children. “Migration for us is surrender,” Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in 2019.
Kenneth Johnson, University of New Hampshire
The pronatalist movement, which argues that people should be having more babies, has also grabbed hold in Silicon Valley — but some of its adherents don’t believe that just anyone should be having children. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk (who has 10 children) have become convinced that they need to have lots of children to save the human race. And one Silicon Valley couple has started a campaign to encourage more people like themselves to have children, speaking openly about their use of reproduction technology to select embryos based on genetic testing.
But so far, policies designed to induce people into having more kids have been a bust. Japan has struggled with a declining birthrate for decades despite efforts to encourage families to have more children. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Japan was “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” due to population decline, adding that it was “now or never” to solve the problem. China’s population is both aging and shrinking as well, and after decades of restrictive family-planning policies, the country is trying to change course. In recent years, China has reversed its notorious “one-child policy” and started restricting abortions for “nonmedical reasons.” But the country’s population is still declining.
How immigration can boost the economy
In the face of looming population decline and resulting labor shortages, there is a clear answer staring the US in the face: immigration. Allowing more people to become Americans would not only help immediately alleviate some of the labor shortages plaguing the US economy but would also help to stem some of the country’s long-term population decline. Historically, the median age of immigrants has been younger than the median American age. And people of working age — meaning those between 18 and 64 — comprised 77% of the immigrant population in 2021, compared to just 59% of the US-born population that same year. Immigrants, Johnson said, “bring not only themselves,” but also the potential for more children, further boosting the US population and productivity.
Though current immigration rates — particularly the number of migrants apprehended at the border — are the subject of contentious national debate, recent Census data shows that the total number of immigrants arriving in the country isn’t enough to offset population losses. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of immigrants in the 20 most-populous counties in the country nearly tripled, but most of those counties still saw their overall populations decline. Despite increased immigration, Los Angeles County’s population declined by 90,000 people in 2022 — and by 180,000 people the previous year.
In order to truly prevent a people shortage, the US will need to let more people into the country. And there’s already evidence that immigrants can help boost local economies — and transform entire cities. Immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the US, and recent data shows that they’ve started more than 25% of businesses in seven of the eight fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Because of that, research has found that immigrants actually create more jobs than they take. Plus, across the US, several key industries — including agriculture, meatpacking, manufacturing, and healthcare — depend on immigrant labor. And if we boost immigration rates, the incoming workers could help ease labor shortages in these critical fields.
Critical industries such as agriculture and healthcare rely on immigrant labor.Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
From central Indiana to New York City, businesses are struggling because they can’t hire enough workers to fill their open roles. “If we don’t do this and have a positive conversation about immigration today, it will continue to crush Hoosier households and economy,” Patrick Tamm, the president and CEO of the Indiana Restaurant and Lodging Association, told a local publication.
Take Utica, New York. The city’s population declined from 100,410 people in 1960 to just over 60,500 in 2000. But instead of facing extinction, the postindustrial city’s population slowly began rebounding in the 1990s with the arrival of Bosnian immigrants fleeing the Yugoslav Wars, who were followed by refugees from Myanmar in the 2000s and, more recently, Bantu refugees from Somalia. The city’s relatively low cost of living has made it a hub for people fleeing conflicts around the world, who resettle with the help of refugee-aid organizations. Though the city’s population still hovers around 60,000, it would be much lower if not for the resettled refugees and their families who now make up about 25% of Utica’s population.
“The refugee population has helped the city’s economy tremendously,” Brian Thomas, the commissioner of Utica’s Department of Urban and Economic Development, told CNBC.
Political compromise?
Immigration has, of course, been a political hot potato for decades. One 2022 survey found that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe in tenets of the so-called “Great Replacement” theory. A February Gallup poll found that just 28% of responding Americans are satisfied with our current immigration rates, and most of those who are dissatisfied want immigration to decrease. But even without a huge overhaul of the entire system, there are clear solutions that could help welcome more talented, much-needed workers to America.
One way the US could encourage more immigration is by focusing on temporary visas for specific industries that need workers. Japan took this approach and quietly opened itself to foreign workers in 2019 when it began allowing “specific skilled workers” in 14 key industries. These workers are allowed to stay in the country for up to five years on temporary labor visas — but they aren’t allowed to bring their families. Lawmakers hoped that the policy would attract around 345,000 workers in a five-year period, or an average of 5,750 people each month. Pritchett said this model could also work in the United States.
“A lot of people in the world would love to come work in a high-productivity place and would be more than willing to do so not in an exploitative way, but on a term-limited basis,” he told me.
There are already two guest-worker programs in the United States: the H-2A program for temporary agricultural laborers and the H-2B program for temporary non-agricultural workers. Both programs give temporary work visas to people tied to specific employers. The current programs are not perfect, however, and workers on H-2A and H-2B visas have sounded the alarm over squalid living conditions, wage theft, and exploitation. And the treatment of workers in the country on temporary visas has been a problem for decades. For these programs to be expanded, there would need to be significant safeguards in place to ensure workers aren’t exploited.
And there are other approaches that could work. Tara Watson, an economist and the director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, said that solutions focused on bringing people here on a long-term basis are more in line with what the US needs. “I’d rather see more expansion on the permanent side than the temporary side, because I think the challenges that we’re facing are long-run challenges and they really require long-run solutions,” Watson said.
She said that a good place to start would be expanding both family- and employment-based migration by simply allocating more visas in each category. Scaling up both programs would make an immediate difference, she said. Other simple solutions include lifting the cap on the number of skill-based green cards issued to immigrants from each country and letting people on nonimmigrant visas renew their status in the United States, rather than having to leave the country to do so.
Regardless of the approach, the biggest hurdle is a matter of political will. “I think there will be some resistance to this as a solution,” said Watson. “But I also think it’s essentially an imperative.” After all, the US is running out of options, and soon its growing people shortage is going to spell economic disaster.
Watson said that the economic forces will eventually overwhelm the “white-nationalist far right” that has “played an outsize influence” on the immigration debate. “If we don’t solve this problem in the next couple of years, it’s going to come to a head,” she said.
Gaby Del Valle is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. She coauthors the immigration newsletter BORDER/LINES.
Flood insurance costs will soar in Florida. See the expected increases in your ZIP code
Nicolas Rivero – May 4, 2023
Brace for a few years of flood insurance rate hikes, South Florida. And they’re going to be steep — doubling, even tripling for thousands of homeowners.
FEMA has changed the way it calculates flood insurance prices. Instead of relying on old flood zone maps covering broad areas, it’s now basing premium prices on a wider range of factors, like an individual property’s distance from the ocean, rainfall levels and the cost to rebuild a home.
Last month, for the first time, FEMA shared estimates for what that will mean for the average flood insurance premium by ZIP code. For the worst-hit ZIP code in South Florida — 33469, a stretch of coastal Palm Beach County that covers parts of Jupiter and Tequesta — that will mean a 342% premium increase, on average.
In the most expensive ZIP code for flood insurance in South Florida — 33149, which covers Key Biscayne — average premiums will rise north of $7,000 a year.
How your costs compare
Type in your ZIP code to see what is happening to flood insurance costs in your community.
Some important qualifiers: The premium hikes won’t hit all at once for existing policyholders, and not everyone will see an increase. FEMA estimates that about 20% of Florida policyholders will actually see their premiums drop under the new pricing regime, known as Risk Rating 2.0.
For those with current federal flood policies, the good news is that the rate won’t immediately skyrocket. Congress has capped price hikes at 18% per year. The bad news is, you might see that flood insurance premium go up 18% every year for several years until it reaches the new Risk Rating 2.0 calculation for your home.
If you’re buying a new flood insurance policy, however, you’ll get hit with the new premium all at once. Since April 2022, new policyholders have had to enroll at the full Risk Rating 2.0 price.
FEMA says the new premiums reflect the reality of Florida’s increasing flood risk, as people continue to build homes in flood-prone areas and climate change raises sea levels and makes “rain bomb” events, like the 1,000-year floods that recently inundated Fort Lauderdale, more common.
The agency also argues that the new premium regime is more fair. “The new methodology allows FEMA to equitably distribute premiums across all policyholders based on the value of their home and the unique flood risk of their property. Currently, many policyholders with lower-value homes are paying more than they should and policyholders with higher-value homes are paying less than they should,” FEMA wrote in an April 2021 press release announcing the change.
Mortgage lenders and banks often require that home and property owners get federal flood insurance. Although Florida has the highest number of policies in the country, roughly 4 out of 5 Florida homes aren’t covered. Emergency management experts warn that just about anyone in a state vulnerable to hurricanes and heavy rains should get it.
The number of Florida flood insurance policies is likely to rise. This year, Florida lawmakers passed a bill requiring anyone with hurricane and wind policies from Citizens Insurance to also get flood insurance. That affects 1.2 million Citizens policyholders in the state.
Across South Florida, the biggest premium hikes will go to policyholders in the Keys, South Miami-Dade and coastal Broward and Palm Beach counties. Rates will remain relatively stable in North Dade and inland Broward and Palm Beach.
The 10 biggest premium hikes in South Florida affect ZIP codes up and down the coastline from Summerland Key to Jupiter — and three ZIP codes in inland Miami-Dade County.
Those hikes will eventually lead to average increases in annual insurance bills as high as $4,056 in ZIP code 33036, which covers Islamorada. But the increases will phase in gradually. In ZIP code 33469, which covers parts of Jupiter and Tequesta, the average policyholder will see eight straight years of 18% insurance hikes before their premiums stabilize at the new Risk Rating 2.0 level.
Under the new risk rating regime, the highest average premiums in South Florida will all be in ZIP codes in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. Key Biscayne, Islamorada, Marathon, Miami Beach, North Bay Village, Bal Harbor, Surfside, and Sunny Isles will be among the most expensive areas to insure against flooding in South Florida.
Key Biscayne will have the sixth highest insurance premiums of any ZIP code in the state.
In Miami-Dade, the biggest premium increases are coming in the southern part of the county, in ZIP codes where home prices are particularly high (33146, i.e. Coral Gables) or where premiums have been historically low (33033, i.e. Leisure City and 33170, which runs west from Goulds to the Everglades).
In Broward, the biggest premium increases are concentrated on the coast, especially in ZIP codes surrounding Fort Lauderdale. ZIP code 33315, which covers Edgewood, one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in the Fort Lauderdale floods, will see a relatively modest 64% premium hike. But a few miles north in ZIP code 33305, premiums are expected to double on average.
Conservative lawyer Leonard Leo reportedly ensured Ginni Thomas’ name was kept off the paperwork.
The nonprofit that was billed filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court that same year.
A little more than a decade ago, a conservative judicial activist helped Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, secure consulting work that yielded her nearly $100,000 — all the while asking that her name was left off the financial paperwork, according to a new Washington Post report.
Leonard Leo, a lawyer and conservative legal activist, told then-GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit he advised, Judicial Education Project, and give that money to Ginni Thomas in January 2012, the outlet reported, citing financial documents.
That very same year, Leo’s nonprofit filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in a key voting rights case in which a 5-4 majority — that included Thomas — ultimately opted to strike down a component of the Voting Rights Act.
The Post highlighted an opinion that Thomas wrote for the case, in which he favored the same outcome that the Judicial Education Project pushed for alongside other conservative organizations. However, he did not mention the amicus brief submitted by the nonprofit.
The Post said documents show that Leo instructed Conway at the time to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” noting that the billing information should have “no mention of Ginni, of course.”
“When you funnel tens of thousands of dollars to the wife of a Supreme Court justice and go out of your way to specify that her name must be kept off all records of the transaction, that means you know you are doing something wrong,” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of the Supreme Court advocacy nonprofit Take Back the Court, said in a statement shared with Insider.
Leo told The Post in a statement that Ginni Thomas’ work at the Judicial Education Project “did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues.”
“Anybody who thinks that Justice Thomas is influenced in his work by what others say or do, including his wife Ginni, is completely ignorant of who this man is and what he stands for,” Leo’s statement read, per The Post. “And anybody who thinks Ginni Thomas would seek to influence the Supreme Court’s work is completely ignorant of the respect she has for her husband and the important role that he and his colleagues play in our society.”
The conservative activist said he kept Thomas’ name off the financial paperwork “knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be,” per The Post.
“I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni,” he told the outlet.
Leo and Thomas first met when the justice was a clerk in the District of Columbia Circuit, and have been friends for decades, per The New York Times. Thomas is the godfather to one of Leo’s children and has spent time at the activist’s vacation home, The Times reported, while Ginni Thomas considers Leo a mentor, per The Washington Post.
Leo himself has been under recent scrutiny. Politico reported in March that Leo’s personal wealth soared as he started playing a key role in political fundraising and assisting then-President Donald Trump in 2016 with creating a conservative Supreme Court majority.
And on April 6, a nonprofit watchdog organization in Washington accused Leo of acquiring $73 million over six years from nonprofit groups that illegally sent money to his businesses.
Representatives for Ginni Thomas and the Supreme Court, did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours. Leo’s firm, CRC Advisors, and Conway’s website did not immediately respond to similar requests.
GOP Lawmaker’s Wild Claim About Those Who ‘Hate Homosexuals’ Causes Literal Jaw-Drop
Ed Mazza – May 3, 2023
Fox News Flips Over ‘Woke’ Legos
The right-wing network has added another new enemy to its list — the Lego toy company.
There was a jaw-dropping moment on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives this week after a Republican lawmaker’s comment about who really hates the LGBTQ+ community.
“ISIS, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Those are the folks who discriminate,” state Rep. Jeff Holcomb said Monday. “Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals more than we do.”
It’s not clear if he misspoke or intended to say it like that, but he was speaking in support of a bill that urges Congress to prohibit “woke social engineering and experimentation” that are “eroding” the military.
The implication that Republicans hate the gay community ― but terrorists hate them even more ― led to gasps in the audience, while Democratic Rep. Kelly Skidmore’s jaw literally dropped:
Florida GOP Representative Jeff Holcomb says the quiet part out loud on the House floor today.
“Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals MORE THAN WE DO.”
‘Older generations are so confused’: A young woman on TikTok says Gen Z, Millennials don’t share the same work ethic as Boomers — 3 reasons why she might be onto something
Vishesh Raisinghani – May 3, 2023
Generational grumble is old as time itself.
There’s probably a cave painting about how the younger generation had ruined the hunter-gatherer economy with their “fancy agriculture.” Since then, every successive generation has found a new medium to express their disappointment with ‘them young’uns.’
A recent example comes from the comment section on TikTok, which recently erupted when a young lady explained why Gen Z and Millennials don’t exactly share the same values regarding work.
“Older generations are so confused about why we don’t want to work hard anymore or prioritize our careers,” Demi Kotsoris said in the clip “We know how short life is now.”
Kotsoris goes on to explain that the pandemic and greater access to information have reshaped the perspective of younger generations and made them question whether work should be the center of their lives.
Of course, the response was heated. “This mindset is so [‘you only live once’] that you will regret those decisions later,” says one comment on Kotsoris’ video.
“People are just SELFISH & LAZY NOW,” says another.
But the replies may have missed the point of the video. Here’s why Kotsoris’ message resonates with so many younger workers and why her experience highlights some deeper truths about modern work.
Work isn’t as rewarding anymore
For Baby Boomers, there were clear rewards for working hard. Putting in an average amount of effort allowed a typical worker to buy a nice home, raise children comfortably and travel the world. In the 1980s, the average home price was just four or five times the median income. Now, it’s closer to 7.5 times.
Having a college degree was also far more rare in the 80s. Now, nearly everyone in the job market has a degree so its value has been eroded. Meanwhile, the dollar has been eroded too. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation for decades, so an hour of work today isn’t worth as much as an hour of work in the 80s.
Upward mobility has declined too. A person born in a middle-class family in the 1940s was 93% likely to outearn their parents by the age of 30. For those born in the 1990s, that rate is just 45%.
Some Boomers could beat the odds and create generational wealth by investing in stocks. However, even that is not as easy as it used to be. The S&P 500 was trading at around 10 times its earnings during the 1980s. It’s now trading in the low-20s.
The relationship with corporations has changed
The employee-employer relationship has also changed since the 80s. Defined-benefit pension plans are nearly extinct. A major corporation that went public before the 1970s was 92% likely to survive the next five years. By the early 2000s, the rate had dropped to 63%.
Unions have also declined, which means workers now have far less bargaining power than their parents.
All these factors have made younger workers question the value of company loyalty and lifelong careers.
The pandemic altered perspective
The global pandemic may also have shifted work culture
This is true across generations because the crisis triggered a retirement boom too. Meanwhile, younger workers saw how short life can be, and how easily their lifestyle can be disrupted by a global crisis like a pandemic or climate change. A study by Deloitte found that Gen Z and Millennials are more likely to prioritize work-life balance, flexible work arrangements, and purposeful work.
The pandemic highlighted that remote work is a viable option for many companies. In fact, a survey by Buffer found that 98% of remote workers would like to continue working remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their careers.
The warning is in effect for Northeast and Central Florida from noon to 7 p.m. In some locations, the warning is in effect until 8 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.
Low humidity, breezy winds and critically dry conditions prompted the warning.
Winds of 15 mph are expected to be out of the west today, with gusts up to 25 mph. Relative humidity is forecast to be 20 percent to 30 percent.
Much of Florida is under a red flag warning May 3, 2023.
A red flag warning means warm temperatures, very low humidity, and stronger winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger, according to the National Weather Service.
Conditions also can cause reignition of any smoldering fires started by recent lightning strikes.
What are the dangers with a red flag warning?
Wildfires can grow quickly under these conditions.
What Florida counties are under a burn ban?
Conditions in Florida prompted a red flag warning for much of the state May 3, 2023. Burn bans in effect.
The Florida Forest Service reports the following counties are under a burn ban as of May 1:
Citrus
Collier
Desoto
Glades
Hendry
Hernando
Highlands
Lee
Pasco
Polk
Burning of yard debris is prohibited year-round under county ordinance in these locations:
Duval
Hillsborough
Pinellas
Sarasota
How dry is it in Florida?
Florida rainfall around the state from Jan. 1 through March 31, 2023.
As La Niña continues to make itself felt, for the southeastern U.S., that includes a dry and warm winter and a potentially active wildfire season for Florida, according to the Florida Forest Service.
A combination of above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation was in the forecast throughout all North Florida through March.
There may be good news on the horizon: The drought coverage and intensity may have peaked across Florida in recent past weeks, according to the Climate Prediction Center.
What should you do when under a red flag warning?
If you are allowed to burn in your area, all burn barrels must be covered with a weighted metal cover, with holes no larger than 3/4 of an inch.
Do not throw cigarettes or matches out of a moving vehicle. They may ignite dry grass on the side of the road and become a wildfire.
Extinguish all outdoor fires properly. Drown fires with plenty of water and stir to make sure everything is cold to the touch. Dunk charcoal in water until cold. Do not throw live charcoal on the ground and leave it.
Never leave a fire unattended. Sparks or embers can blow into leaves or grass, ignite a fire, and quickly spread.
Where are active wildfires in Florida?
There are 42 active fires covering more than 5,000 acres currently across the state. The Florida Forest Service maintains a map showing the location, size and percentage contained of current wildfires.
‘Poor people are not stupid’: I grew up in poverty, earned $14 an hour, and inherited $150,000. Here’s what I have learned from my windfall.
Quentin Fottrell – May 3, 2023
‘When I open my accounts and see how they are growing it really fills me with a sense of pride and determination.’
‘My tiny house has been one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made, and has truly changed my whole mindset on what makes me happy.’ MARKETWATCH
In September 2018, this woman from Texas, then 36, wrote to the Moneyist to ask how she should invest her windfall — over $150,000. It was small by some people’s standards, but it was life-changing to her. She didn’t have a college degree, said she would never earn more than $30,000 a year, and worked full-time for $15 an hour, in addition to a part-time job at $10 an hour. She paid $1,050 a month in rent.
She paid off her car, and bought a “tiny home,” which she owns free and clear, she wrote in an update a year later. She deposited $70,000 in a high-yield online savings account. She topped up her retirement portfolio and invested $30,000 into emerging markets. She maxed out her IRA and invested $10,000 between very safe dividend stocks and ETFs. She also spent $7,000 on dental work in Mexico.
And today? Five years after her first letter, she has updated MarketWatch readers on her progress, and what she learned from this experience:
Dear Moneyist,
There are a lot more Americans making less than $50,000 a year than there are those who make more. I feel like we aren’t really represented in the financial-advice world. I’d love to see more columns helping people to invest $25-$100 when they can. It’s empowering to invest. I might never be a Warren Buffet, but when I open my accounts and see how they are growing it really fills me with a sense of pride and determination.
As to how I’m doing? Beautifully. I hate to say it but the pandemic was a blessing to me personally. I feel terrible saying that because of the loss and devastation so many others suffered and are still suffering because of it, but for me, the pandemic opened up a world of possibilities. A job opportunity landed in my lap because of the shutdown, and I’m making almost $4,000 a month now after taxes.
Yes, me! I’ve never made so much money before (outside of the inheritance I received). I am still frugal and live off of about $1,800 a month, and that includes health insurance, long-term disability insurance, full-coverage car insurance, and pet insurance! Everything else goes to savings and investments. I won’t say what it is I’m doing because it might identify me, but I will say it is a job that allows me to be happy every second I’m “working.”
My tiny house has been one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made, and has truly changed my whole mindset on what makes me happy. As I’ve lived in it I’ve altered certain parts of the design to be more efficient, and I can honestly say I intend to live tiny until some mobility issue — hopefully age-related and not an accident of some kind! — forces me back into a more conventional dwelling. Tiny living forces you to be mindful. Not only of your space, but also of yourself, and how you live in your space. It might sound strange to hear, but living tiny has truly made me a better person and improved my quality of life in ways other than financial.
I would like to address some of the comments I read in response to your previous article on my letter. While most were truly supportive others were coming from a place of judgment and condescension. I’d like to thank everyone who wished me well, and for them to know that their words meant a lot to me. That people took time out of their day to read about me and wish me well was uplifting. I send them all virtual hugs and hope each and everyone is happy and healthy.
However, I’d also like to address some of the comments that were less encouraging. Several people insisted that my letter was obviously fake because of how well I wrote, and that someone with my education level could not possibly be in the financial situation I’m in. I was less hurt by this attitude as I was utterly astounded by it. That people genuinely believe the educated cannot struggle financially just floored me.
‘There are more ‘poor’ Americans than there are ‘rich’ Americans, and we are not stupid or lazy. We’re trying to make it work.’
Poor people are not stupid. We’re not illiterate country bumpkins struggling to figure out how to work a computer. We’re the nurse that lives down the street with two roommates to be able to afford rent. We’re the teachers still living with their parents because they can’t find enough roommates to qualify for an apartment. We’re the cops working at Home Depot on the side trying to save up for a baby. We’re the lawyers doing Uber just to afford student-loan payments. There are more “poor” Americans than there are “rich” Americans, and we are not stupid or lazy. We’re trying to make it work — usually by having 2-3 jobs.
There is a financial crisis in this country. I believe it comes from unchecked capitalism. When corporations are allowed to buy up single-dwelling homes and drastically raise rents, and banks/lending institutions are allowed to prey on people with obscenely high interest rates, you foster an environment of exploitation. Our society allows for the targeting of young people before they even graduate high school. Credit-card companies and college-loan institutions begin preying on people as soon as they hit 18. If their parents are financially illiterate, and considering most public schools rarely teach financial literacy, too many young people start out life with insane amounts of debt. Additionally, wages have not kept pace with the cost of living in this country, and you have a lot of educated “poor” people.
I just could not believe those comments that insisted this story was fake because I was too educated to be poor. Then I was mad. Mad because that stereotype is what prevents a lot of change from taking place. Nothing is ever going to get better if we keep thinking the worst of each other.
Anyway, I again want to thank you for thinking of me and sharing my story. Hopefully it helped more people. As I said before, investing is truly empowering. I didn’t know that before, but I know it now, and I wish it for many more Americans.
Sincerely,
Not Quite As Low Income, But I’m Still A Couponing Lady
Dear Not Quite As Low Income,
Thank you for your insightful and eloquent letter. Your words and story continue to inspire me, and I hope will inspire many others out there in America who never had a head start in life and/or continue to face financial struggles. I wish you the best of everything in your life, and I hope more good things continue to happen to you.
Former GOP Lawmaker Rips Republicans With ‘Simple’ Answer To Gun Violence
Lee Moran – May 2, 2023
Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) on Monday suggested a “simple” political solution to America’s gun violence.
“I would say the political answer to gun violence in America is never again elect a Republican. It’s that simple,” Jolly told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace during an analysis of the latest mass shooting in Texas in which five people were killed.
“They are bad-faith actors,” Jolly, who left the GOP in 2018, said of his former Republican colleagues, further slamming them for focusing on “motive as opposed to the means.”
“Listen, there is no motive that can accomplish gun violence without the means and the means is the weapon and the access to that weapon and in cases like we just saw, to weapons of war,” he explained.
Jolly noted a general consensus nationwide about “common sense measures” for gun control but said he felt “we need to get more aggressive” and talk about “licensing and registration” and much deeper background checks.
"The political answer to gun violence…is never again elect a Republican, it's that simple… If they want to focus on motive as opposed to the means…there is no motive than can accomplish gun violence without the means" – @DavidJollyFL w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/oeWM19BsCr
