Deterring Tourism

Just on general principle, I don’t particularly want governments, particularly Trump’s-USA, inquiring into my Internet life… they are welcome to read this blog, however. There’s nothing scary there, but I resent the intrusion, even though I know experts can hack into anything. The world is increasingly distrustful of strangers, and there is a general growing disdain for all things American. Trump may well be the most hated global leader on earth, and, combined with the ramp up of mass shootings plus a reluctance to control guns, the United States is no longer the go-to destination it used to be.

“As an economic force, the American tourism industry has few equals. According to U.S Travel Association, one in nine jobs feeds off it. Aviation workers, shop owners, tour guides, hotel staff, taxi drivers, restaurant employees, and bartenders — along with so many other middle-class professions — need a robust tourism industry to survive.

“So when a successful hotel owner became 45th president of the United States, this sector seemed poised for growth. Instead, President Donald Trump issued a travel ban and started tweeting hostile messages to nations around the globe. Not surprisingly, foreign tourists responded by taking their vacations elsewhere. In total, forecasters at Tourism Economics estimated the industry lost $2.7 billion in the months after Trump took office.

“Economic data proved the new president’s first year in office was dreadful for the industry, with $32 billion in revenue and 40,000 jobs lost. In short, the predicted Trump tourism slump became reality.” CheatSheet.com, 6/8/18. Tourism is still falling – by an estimated 4% per year – and since the trade war with China, to no surprise, numbers of travelers from the Peoples’ Republic has fallen 5.7%.

“China issued a travel warning for the United States on Tuesday [6/4], saying Chinese visitors have been interrogated, interviewed and subjected to other forms of what it called harassment by U.S. law enforcement agencies… The warning — the latest salvo in a trade battle that appears to be escalating by the day — threatens to further hurt some U.S. luxury goods makers, which depend on deep-pocketed foreigners for a not-insignificant part of their sales.

“It urges Chinese citizens and Chinese-funded bodies in the U.S. to step up their safety awareness and preventive measures and respond ‘appropriately and actively.’ It was issued by the foreign ministry, the Chinese Embassy and consulates in the United States…The warning comes amid an increasingly bitter trade dispute between Beijing and Washington and tougher immigration enforcement by the Trump administration.

“China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued its own travel alert for the U.S. on Tuesday, citing recent ‘frequent’ shootings, robbery and theft, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday. It didn’t provide any statistics or further details. Chinese students abroad were urged Monday to assess the risks involved given tightened visa restrictions.” Los Angeles Times, June 5^th. 

But potential international visitors from almost anywhere also face restrictions imposed by the U.S. government. Travelers desiring to enter the United States from countries where visas are required “will now be required to submit [their] social media information to the US government as a part of the necessary information in [their] visa forms. This new requirement was introduced on May 31, 2019, for most visa applicants, including temporary visitors. This requirement has been put in place per an order to put extreme vetting into place for visitors to the USA, which was set in motion via an Executive order in 2017.

 

“Applicants will be required to list their social media identifiers, in a drop-down menu format, along with other information needed for the visa. One will need to provide all Social Media accounts used over the past five years.  They can also choose to say they don’t use Social Media, but as per The Hill, who talked to some officials in the US State Department, said that if the visa applicant lies about the social media use, they could face serious immigration consequences.

 

“In addition to social media histories, visa applicants are also going to be required to submit five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, international travel and deportation status, as well as a declaration if any family members have been involved in terrorist activities. Only applicants for certain diplomatic and official visa types are exempted from the requirements…

“There is no getting around the fact that to access the USA, you will now have to provide more information than you would be comfortable with earlier. This might also set off a trend where other governments would even start imposing such requirements and social media might begin to become patrol media rather than just fun.” BoardingArea.com, June 1^st, which posted the above picture. I wonder how negative criticisms of Donald Trump impact a visa application. For a determined terrorist, getting into Canada is pretty easy, and crossing into the United States from Canada a snap. So this has to be part of Trump’s catering to his xenophobic white Christian base… but this hostility to foreigners kicks most of the rest of us in the wallet.

We are already filtering out the best and the brightest foreign engineers, scientists, tech experts and mathematicians, hobbling our fabled Silicon Valley (and its ilk all over the country) just when we need to be more competitive. China’s patent filings are rising, just as ours are falling. See my Canada’s Big Smile at U.S. Immigration Policies blog. Cities like Las Vegas and Orlando, rather dramatically built on tourism are hurting, but so is just about every big city in the nation, from New York and Washington, D.C. to San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

They say the country will vote “the economy” in 2020, and computer models predict that if the numbers stay as they are, Trump will coast to an easy victory and assume his second term. But those numbers are based on averages, and while many in Trump’s base are content to view that as success, that virtually all of the gains have gone to the wealthiest in the land needs to be addressed. That distorts “averages.” Feel the insecurity yet? When is the time for “most of us”?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and we are reshaping the world into a planet that we really are not going to enjoy living in.

Sociological Gobbledygook – Empirically Ending Gerrymandering

“[The] whole point is you’re taking these issues away from democracy and you're throwing them into the courts pursuant to, and it may be simply my educational background, but I can only describe as sociological gobbledygook.”

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Harvard Law School Magna Cum Laude grad John Roberts, in the fall of 2017, describing computer-driven demographic analytics applied to determining gerrymandering and provide unbiased reconfiguration

In a modern era, particularly using artificial intelligence and objective data generated over decades, through voting records, Census information and other governmental “objective” demographic analysis, it is beyond doubt that computer-driven reviews of voting districts can very accurately determine whether voting districts have been artificially-drawn to favor political affiliation while denying a large number (often even a majority) of voters their objectively proportional vote. Gerrymandering. The Democrats were masters of that distortion in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, and Republicans became the masters beginning in the late 20^th century until the present.

We already have a political system that disproportionately empowers rural regions over heavily urbanized states: the Senate, where a state with almost 40 million residents or a state with 600 thousand will each have two U.S. Senators.  We also know that the alignment of voting districts leaks into the composition of our Electoral College system of electing a president. Add the unleashing of spending limits allowed so-called SuperPac by the 2010 Supreme Court Citizen’s United decision, and ordinary voters’ power was significantly if not permanently eroded in favor of the mega-rich able to fund such campaign efforts.

This combination of organic bias in our political system, combined with voter district distortion (gerrymandering) and voter suppression of minority voters (mostly in red states) have let the prestigious British periodical, The Economist, to label the United States a “flawed democracy,” as not being fully representative of its constituency. But without all of this voter distortion, the GOP would be seriously impaired, particularly when it came to national elections. The result is that a GOP-leaning supporter casts the voting equivalent of 1.8 times an average Democratic vote. 

Thus, without that manipulation, Republicans would not, as they do now, control 27 gubernatorial and 30 state legislatures plus the U.S. Senate and the Presidency, despite the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by almost 3 million votes. By 2040, 16 states will hold an estimated 70% of the U.S. population, which states will control less than one-third of the U.S. Senate. The Supreme Court could end substantial aspects of this distortion, but their recent conservative decisions seem to moving the court in the opposite direction.

In the 2013 Shelby County vs Holder, the Supreme Court effectively eviscerated federal supervision (under the amended Voting Rights Act of 1965) of states that routinely practiced statutory voter discrimination, mostly against minority voters likely to cast the ballots of Democrats. Given Chief Justice John Roberts’ claim of undereducated ignorance (really?) above, it seems reasonable to expect that the court, facing two gerrymandering cases (by Republicans in North Carolina and Democrats in Maryland), is likely to let stand the pernicious practice of voting district distortion simply to maintain incumbent control.

The available analytic systems apply algorithms based on the above-noted data, and measure physical distances within the district (“spatial analysis”), how those distances are populated with party affiliation, how the overall voting in the region is reflected in the actual districting (the “efficiency gap”), etc. There many such mathematical structures, all reasonably equal in accurate analysis, systems that are routinely and generally supported by academics the world over.

Except in the case of blatant racial discrimination, the courts have generally eschewed tackling the issue of political gerrymander to favor incumbents. John Roberts’ quote is very indicative of this tradition. The Constitution relegates the creation of voting districts to the states, but the question of whether they can distort the one person, one vote system may have other constitutional limitations. 

The argument is that courts are not configured to manage the task. A few states have forced voter initiatives to set neutral districting bodies, usually challenged by the incumbent party in court, but most states still relegate districting to elected legislatures, which usually draw lines sympathetic to their party. But technology has now rendered the courts’ claims of inability to manage districting challenges moot. Special masters, a common legal practice, could certainly engage one or more of these analytic processes and bring their substantiated conclusion to the court for final ratification. Easy. Accurate. Relevant. American democracy is at stake.

But even in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court does the right thing and tackles unrepresentative gerrymandering to favor incumbents, don’t expect red states to alter their practices based on such a decision. They will probably hold the decisions to be limited to the states directly involved in the litigation, forcing further litigation, state by discriminatory state, to apply the underlying principles to their own gerrymandered distortions.

“Both parties are guilty of gerrymandering, but Republicans have made it an art form. In fact, the GOP has proved that, as long as it controls statehouses, it will be hell-bent on preserving and advancing its agenda through redistricting and other moves, no matter the cost. Republican statehouses have tried to impeach judges who challenged their gerrymandered maps , stripped power from newly elected Democratic governors , overturned voter-approved ballot initiatives , passed voter-suppression laws tightening their grip on the electorate, and of course, manipulated district lines to the point that they held on to more than a dozen gerrymandered seats in Congress even during the biggest Democratic wave since Watergate.

“Republican tactics aren’t suddenly going to change should the court strike down the maps in Maryland (Benisek vs. Lemone) or North Carolina (Rucho vs. Common Cause), or establish a new legal standard for partisan gerrymandering. Anyone who thinks that Republicans will go quietly into the night needs a dose of reality. If voters allow the GOP to remain in control of state legislatures after the 2020 election, the party will gerrymander Congress and rig our democracy all over again.

“Should this happen, more legal challenges will inevitably ensue as GOP-controlled states are forced to once again defend new maps in court. However, these legal battles will take years — just like it did for the latest gerrymandered maps to reach the Supreme Court. In that time, Republicans will continue to have a built-in gerrymandered advantage of seats in congressional and state elections, empowering them to obstruct progress at a profoundly consequential moment for our country.

“Need more proof of Republican willingness to go around the Supreme Court to get their way? Look no further than what’s happened to women’s reproductive rights since Roe vs. Wade. After the court ruled in Roe in 1973 that women had a constitutional right to an abortion, Republican-controlled state governments immediately began challenging the ruling with an onslaught of new laws limiting a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions. Those unconstitutional and restrictive laws were not overturned until 1992, nearly two decades later. And now, we are watching firsthand as Republican-controlled state governments in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere take the lead on challenging the very foundations of Roe with egregious abortion bans. There are zero reasons to assume the GOP won’t use its control of state governments to challenge a new Supreme Court precedent on partisan gerrymandering with new gerrymandered maps in 2021 as well.

“The Republican Party’s leaders know that the future of the congressional map doesn’t lie with the Supreme Court, and they’re not hiding it. That’s why the national Republican State Leadership Committee has spent nearly $100 million over the last decade solidifying the GOP’s grip on state elections via its ‘Redmap’ program, a strategy to dominate the redistricting process. Even in 2018, a banner election year for Democrats in Congress, Republican fundraising outpaced Democrats in state elections. In Florida, the preeminent battleground state that historically has had some of the nation’s most extreme maps, Republicans outraised Democrats by more than 5-to-1 in the average statehouse race. Yet Democrats at the top of the ticket shattered fundraising records.” Vicky Hausman, writing for the June 7^th Los Angeles Times.

Yup, Republicans clearly aren’t hiding their efforts, just claiming that there is nothing the courts can do about it. “[In] the 2010 midterm election, the GOP won full control in states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Republicans drew election maps so that their party would typically win a lopsided majority of the seats… Those gerrymanders helped the Republicans protect their majority in the House of Representatives until the Democratic wave in 2018, and kept them in control of all five of the state legislatures even though Democrats won more votes in those states… Citing the partisan tilt, judges recently struck down the district maps in each of those states on the grounds that Democratic voters were denied the right to a fair and equal vote.

“The Supreme Court, however, has never struck down a partisan gerrymander. The justices sounded closely split in March when they heard an appeal from North Carolina’s Republican leaders, who freely admitted they drew the districts for a ‘partisan advantage,’ aiming to ensure Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats. 

“The census dispute also has become intensely partisan. Citing the climate of fear in immigrant communities, demographers and political scientists testified in lower-court proceedings that millions of people will refuse to answer if the census includes a citizenship question. That would lead to a significant undercount of the population in states like California that have large immigrant populations — areas that also typically tilt in favor of Democrats. Federal judges in New York, San Francisco and Baltimore have ruled against the added question.

“Last week [first week in June], lawyers who sued over the census plan raised a second concern. They said a 2020 census with detailed data on citizens would permit states to divide their election districts based on the number of eligible voters, not the total population. This ‘would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites’ and ‘would clearly be a disadvantage for Democrats,’ Republican strategist Tom Hofeller wrote in 2015.” David Savage writing for the June 8^th Los Angeles Times. 

Unless the court addresses this fundamental distortion, they will simply add one more giant nail to a coffin that may someday soon hold the end of the United States as we know it.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and if you truly care, scream, yell and vote!

Missing the Point

How much money would it take for you to live in a country where you are at best a second class citizen with second class rights, limited in where you can travel, live, work and how you can vote, where your faith is considered at best an objectionable and barely tolerated belief system, out of the mainstream of the state’s official religion, where you need passes to move within your home country? A better job? $10K/year more? Never!!!!

They are gathering in Bahrain to begin Donald Trump’s “money is the solution” Palestinian peace plan. A naïve Jared Kushner – I could only get into Harvard when my father “donated” $2.6 million – special. OK, some Arab nations are politely attending the conference, but everyone knows nothing can or will happen.

“The White House website on Saturday [6/22] posted a plan to help Palestinians that was described as having the potential to facilitate more than $50 billion in new investment over 10 years. Its three initiatives focus on people, economy and government, and could transform the West Bank and Gaza, according to the plan.

“‘Peace to Prosperity lays out a vision for a prosperous Palestinian society supported by a robust private sector, an empowered people, and an effective government,’ the plan says. ‘It shows what is possible with peace plus investment, and how success is achievable through specific programs supported by a portfolio of realizable projects.’” Los Angeles Times, June 23^rd. No Palestinian representatives showed up. Israel, for political reasons, was not invited, but no worries, their committed representatives, Jared Kusher and U.S. Envoy Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, are there.

And, no, there was no tuchus oyfn tish, money on the table (literally Yiddish for “ass on the table”), just a willingness by the United States to “facilitate” a global initiative to raise an average of $5 billion a year for a decade from the international community for investment in Palestine. But even if there were an immediate and full $50 billion commitment funded solely by the United States, the entire notion of bribing a people to give up freedom and dignity for investment capital is as inane and laughable as it seems. The plan was such a joke that, well, presenting the specifics has indefinitely been postponed.

“No Palestinian representative, however, will attend the gathering in Bahrain. Palestinian leadership has boycotted the United States since Trump’s December 2017 announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, omitting any reference to Palestinian aspirations to establish the capital of a future state in East Jerusalem.

“And ultimately, the U.S. did not invite Israel to the Bahrain gathering… [Greenblatt] said the oft-postponed Middle East peace plan’s final presentation will be delayed again, ‘probably’ until early November, because of the Israeli electoral calendar. [Right!]

“It is unclear what remains of the ‘ultimate deal’ for Middle East peace that Trump has been championing since his 2016 campaign, and few observers believe he will risk announcing any major peace plan during his reelection campaign.

“This is a remarkable denouement for a policy Trump was singularly focused on even before taking office, when he appointed Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and protege, to spearhead the plan.

“On Jan. 19, 2017, at an inauguration eve dinner for top Republican supporters, Trump affectionately turned to Kushner, who was seated with his wife, Trump’s older daughter, Ivanka, and who had celebrated his 36th birthday nine days earlier. Trump declared, ‘If you can't produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can.’

“Two and a half years later, Kushner, a real estate developer with no previous experience in diplomacy or politics, has shown no signs of bringing peace to the region. The administration is also in the midst of heightened tensions with Iran.

“Recent conversations with senior Palestinian and Israeli officials privy to Kushner’s work indicate that neither side expects to be provided with an American road map for Middle East peace in the foreseeable future.

“In separate interviews this month, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, both of whom are familiar with the Kushner team’s efforts, told The Times they believed the initiative was unlikely to advance beyond the Bahrain workshop.

“‘It will be the biggest embarrassment for Kushner,’ Erekat said in an hour-long interview in his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah… ‘We appreciate the [nature of the] relationship between Kushner and Trump,’ he said, but the workshop is ‘already a failure.’” LA Times. Understatements of alarming proportions.

With foreign policy being among the Trump administration’s weakest and least effective efforts, it is equally clear that the United States has so repositioned itself as “all Netanyahu, all the time” that it is probably the least likely nation on earth to mediate the Israeli/Palestinian impasse to a peaceful solution. If anything, the United States has hardened each side to the crisis, making a real solution that much more difficult to achieve. If peace ever does come to the region, and don’t hold your breath, this is definitely not the path.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and the depth of ignorance of the historical facts and political realities underlying this Trump “peace plan” is staggering.

Homelessness, Just a Symptom or More

“[When Ronald] Reagan was elected President in 1980, he discarded a law proposed by his predecessor that would have continued funding federal community mental health centers. This basically eliminated services for people struggling with mental illness… He made similar decisions while he was the governor of California, releasing more than half of the state’s mental hospital patients and passing a law that abolished involuntary hospitalization of people struggling with mental illness. This started a national trend of de-institutionalization.

“In other words, if you are struggling with mental illness, we can only help you if you ask for it… But, wait. Isn’t one of the characteristics of severe mental illness not having an accurate sense of reality? Doesn’t that mean a person may not even realize he or she is mentally ill?

“There certainly seems to be a correlation between the de-institutionalization of mental health patients in the 1970s and early 1980s and the significant number of homelessness agencies created in the mid-to-late 1980s.” Joel John Roberts writing for PovertyInsights.org, 10/14/13. 

Dumping the mentally ill onto the streets, many winding up behind bars in prisons dramatically underequipped to handle them (30% of those in jails and prisons have serious mental issues), may have seemed like a good idea in the 1970s and 80s, but we are definitely paying for that today.

States with the largest concentrations of homeless people relative to the total population are also often those with the highest cost of housing, states like New York and California. The problem with dealing with homelessness is the variety of causes combined with the fact that building housing takes years and NIMBY reactions make dealing with the issue horribly difficult. 

Looking at the U.S. as a whole: “A total of 552,830 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2018. This number represents 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States. HUD’s Annual Point-in-Time Count, the only nation-wide survey of homeless people, provides this data and other useful statistics.

“Most people experiencing homelessness are individuals (67 percent). The remainder (33 percent) are people in families with children. Public policy has put a focus on additional subpopulations.

“One of the subpopulations is youth who are under the age of 25 and living on their own (without parents or children). This group is 7 percent of the total homeless population. In recent years, coordinated efforts at all levels of government have also targeted veterans (7 percent of the total homeless population) and chronically homeless people (18 percent). This last group consists of people with disabilities who have been homeless for an extended period of time or repeatedly.” EndHomelessness.org. 

California’s struggles with its vast homeless population (130 thousand or 33 out of a thousand) are drawing headlines across the United States, particularly Los Angeles County where in November of 2016 voters authorized the creation of a $1.2-billion fund to finance as many as 10,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people in the city of L.A. But to date, the resistance to allowing such housing “in my neighborhood” has resulted in not one new unit of such housing being built to date.

Good weather and liberal attitudes mix with the high cost of living: “California’s wealth, in a way, is driving its poverty. The coastal-city empires of commerce can’t function without the support of those who teach our children, take our blood pressure, deliver our mail and fix our cars, but those hardworking folks are barely hanging on in this housing market while tech execs count bonuses and drive the cost of shacks into the millions.

“One-third of the county’s residents are paying half or more of their household income on rent as the distance between an apartment and a tent continues to narrow. And we can’t pass a housing bill or deliver more protection to renters?” Steven Lopez writing for the June 6^th Los Angeles Times. 

Cadres of homeless people set up their tents under bridges and overpasses all over LA County. Lacking bathrooms and sanitary facilities, these amalgamations of homeless people often generate the stench of that reality, compounded by rats and insects that propagate and migrate to neighboring houses and apartments. The “not in my backyard” cry is stronger here. Crime and drug use is high. 

Local vagrancy ordinances, bans on sleeping in public places and angry neighbors fighting back make a bad problem much worse. Police used to drive the homeless out of these haphazard communities, confiscating the dregs of property of the hapless residents, but courts continually step in to try and instill some level of protection for human beings in dire straits. Still the ordinances are passed and enforced. More than one homeless person has purposely and openly committed a crime in plain sight of the cops… to get a bed, medical attention and three meals in the local jail.

It’s not as if LA County is ignoring the problem, even as it gets worse. “In L.A. city and county, [local residents] taxed [themselves] to do something about it, and last year alone $619 million was poured into housing and services… But statistics released Tuesday [6/4] show that the number of homeless only grew — a 16% increase in the city and a 12% jump in the county — to a staggering total of nearly 60,000 people without homes.

“It’s fair to wonder what happened, and how it’s possible to spend all that money only to see the misery multiply and extend deeper into the Westside and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys… More than 20,000 people were brought indoors, so it’s not like we got nothing for our investment. But tens of thousands more spilled onto the streets or took up residence in vehicles, shelters and parks.” Los Angeles Times, June 6^th.

The numbers throughout Southern California, granted in a area with some of the worst homeless statistics in the nation, are downright depressing: “‘Overall, the service portion of the effort on mental health, substance use, the issue of housing, rent subsidies, those are important and we should stay the course,’ [LA County Supervisor Mark] Ridley-Thomas said. ‘Where we have to work much harder is in the area of affordable housing.’

“Without the flow of new dollars for services, [Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority] said, the point-in-time count would have been worse and more closely resembled the dramatic jumps in neighboring Southern California counties and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Orange County changed the way it conducted its count and recorded a 43% increase from its last count in 2017. Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern counties reported increases of 20% or more… Lynn pointed to two vulnerable groups as proof that resources work. Even though nearly 3,000 more veterans were reported homeless last year, there was no noticeable change in the number of homeless veterans on the street. Families experiencing homelessness grew by 8% with nearly 8,000 families being provided homes.

“One of the largest increases, however, was among people 18 to 24 years old. Lynn said a 24% jump was partly the result of a change in the methodology of the count. But still, he said, ‘there was a significant increase, many more unsheltered. We were able to house more youth this year than last year, but this is an overflow population.’

“Also exceeding the county average was a 17% increase of the chronically homeless population — people with a mental or physical impairment who have been on the street or in shelter for more than a year… Lynn said the dent made in that population by transitioning nearly 5,000 people into permanent housing was overshadowed by the phenomenon of people ‘aging in’ — those who were counted last year but, at that point weren’t ‘chronic’ because they had been homeless less than a year.

“The growth of homelessness was also uneven across L.A. County. The Westside experienced the largest increase at 19%, following a year in which its numbers were down by even more. The San Gabriel Valley was close behind with a 17% increase, marking the second consecutive year its homeless population had grown.” LA Times. 

But even as the California State Legislature mandates local governments to allow great concentrations of people per dwelling, particularly in areas near local transportation hubs, local communities resist. They see their home values dropping and their taxes rising.

The United States really hasn’t experienced this level of economic dislocation since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is the clearest evidence of the worst income inequality in the entire developed world. Not only is income inequality widening, as we pass tax cuts and deregulate to the virtual exclusive benefit of the richest in the land, but the bottom end of that polarized reality is living a life that would seem more appropriate to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the slums in Mumbai… not an area in the immediate vicinity of Beverly Hills. We just cannot continue to exist with this widening gap… and expect to survive as a nation. How is homelessness impacting the community where you live? What do you think you can do to help?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and when we think that solving this problem is charity to others, perhaps we need to remember that our entire society will inevitably collapse from the same problems giving rise to homelessness.