Divest From Prisons, Invest in People—What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
Divest From Prisons, Invest in People—What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
This article is the second part of a series of conversations with contributors to the demands of the Movement for Black...
This article is the second part of a series of conversations with contributors to the demands of the Movement for Black Lives. Part One was on reparations.
In July 2015, more than 2,000 members of The Movement for Black Lives—a group composed of more than 50 racial justice organizations—convened in Cleveland to recognize the violence committed against Black people in this country and around the world. At the assembly, participants decided the Movement needed to form a coalition that articulated concrete ways to build a more equitable society. Six legislative platforms emerged that covered issues like economic justice, reparations, political empowerment, and divestment from policing and incarceration. In their Invest-Divest platform, the authors called instead for investment in programming, like restorative justice initiatives, that would decrease incarceration and strengthen communities.
We’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions.
According to the Brookings Institution, White Americans are equally likely to use and more likely to deal drugs, while African Americans are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced harshly. For U.S. residents born in 2001, the Bureau of Justice Statistics predicts that 1 in 111 White women will go to prison in her lifetime, while 1 in 18 Black women will. For White men, the likelihood is 1 in 17; for Black men, 1 in 3.
“At the heart of the Invest-Divest demand is the recognition that our city, state, and federal budgets reflect the dehumanization, and the degradation of Black life through lack of investment in anything besides Black incarceration or surveillance,” says Marbre Stahly-Butts, co-author of demands from the Invest-Divest platform that call for reallocating government funds from law enforcement to long-term safety, and decriminalizing drug and prostitution crimes.
Stahly-Butts, a facilitator of the Cleveland convening and deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, explains that our current criminal justice system is based on a premise of comfort, rather than of safety: Instead of addressing the roots of uncomfortable issues such as drug addiction, mental illness, and poverty, we’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions. This disproportionally affects African Americans.
Here she discusses why divestment from the prison and military industries is as critical to a just future as investment in public institutions.
The following interview has been lightly edited.
Liza Bayless: How does the Invest-Divest platform play into the Movement for Black Lives?
Marbre Stahly-Butts: The call for Invest-Divest has been at the center of organizing and activism work for at least the last decade, if not more. Since slavery, but especially in the age of mass incarceration in the last 30 or so years, [there has been an] incredible increase in the amount of spending that goes to police departments—to cages, prisons and jails, corrections offices, military equipment, and surveillance equipment. At the same time, [there has been] divestment from the social safety net, from social services and education to affordable housing.
What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages.
What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages, but employment opportunities, safe housing, jobs, education, restorative justice. To live in the world we’re envisioning requires a real investment—both by private parties, but also by public dollars.
Bayless: In August, the Department of Justice announced it would end use of private prisons. How significant is this step?
Stahly-Butts: It’s an important step and in many ways a symbolic step, but I think it’s essential that states follow suit. The caging of our people actually happens on a local level, and so the same week that the Department of Justice made that announcement, I believe in Florida they decided to continue contracts with local prisons and, in fact, expand them.
Most of our people are kept in public facilities, so there’s a real need to decarcerate and not just de-profitize. It would matter a lot if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did it, because that’s, in fact, where most of the [prison] beds are.
A month [after the announcement], the Department of Justice released guidelines around its increased funding of police officers and officers in schools. So it’s important to realize that the criminalization—and the incarceration—of our people really is something that the government has not divested from, and in some ways has actively continued.
There’s a lot of work to be done, but I was pleased about implications of ending those contracts.
Bayless: Usually we hear from organizations about investment more than divestment. What makes the concept of divestment so important to this platform?
Stahly-Butts: I think that we see a general narrative on the left around the need to increase infrastructure and investment. Obama, Clinton, and other progressives constantly affirm their commitment to investment strategies, whether it’s health care, job programs, or educational funding. But the divestment piece is essential to a conversation around the livelihood, wealth, health, and survival of Black, brown, and poor communities.
There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration.
If we continue to lock up and put one of every three Black men under police control; if we continue to incarcerate Black women at the highest-growing rates; and continue surveillance and denying people [driver’s] licenses and housing opportunities when they are out of incarceration, [then] we’re undermining our investments if we’re not also divesting from these systems that have led to this mass criminalization of folks for behaviors that often have nothing to do with public safety.
Bayless: The topic of mass incarceration has been at the forefront of the country’s conversations about racial injustice. Is there something missing from that discussion?
Stahly-Butts: It’s essential that we talk about the entire purview of things that don’t belong under the criminal code, from the way poverty is criminalized to the ways homelessness is criminalized. Even in Florida, wearing saggy pants [has been criminalized].
There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration, and not just changing the practices of putting people in cages, but also changing the entire orientation for communities that criminalize them en masse, that have police in schools, that believe that the only answer to mental health and other issues is cages and handcuffs. There’s a real need for cultural change and a social conversation about the roots of the system, and other ways to deal with these issues that is not state violence.
Bayless: By focusing on decriminalization of certain crimes—in this case, nonviolent ones such as drug and prostitution crimes—as fundamentally different from “violent” crimes, is there a risk people convicted of the latter could end up with harsher sentences?
Stahly-Butts: There’s a false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent crimes. We often talk about it as if there’s some fine line, but in fact every state, every city defines that differently. Whether we’re talking about crimes that hurt people or impact property, or crimes that are about mental health or drug addiction, the idea of investment is key to all of them.
Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice.
If we use the money that we’re currently using to cage people, and take the literally trillions of dollars to invest in the well-being of our people—in jobs, education, trauma-informed services, restorative justice—we would see a real addressing of all sorts of social issues, including the ones that make people less safe.
Bayless: Anything else you’d like to add about this platform?
Stahly-Butts: Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice, to divest from policing and invest in communities. Despite the past two years—where we’ve seen literally dozens of Black folks be killed on video, and uprisings in communities from Baltimore to Ferguson—we’ve seen incredible movement and energy.
By Liza Bayless
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CPD's Josie Duffy Debunks Scaffold Law Myths on Capital Tonight
Capital Tonight's Liz Benjamin interviews Center for Popular Democracy Policy Advocate Josie Duffy on the Scaffold Law...
Capital Tonight's Liz Benjamin interviews Center for Popular Democracy Policy Advocate Josie Duffy on the Scaffold Law. For more information on how the construction industry safety standards elude workers of color, read CPD's report "Fatal Inequality."
Fed Up on Nightly Business Report
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014 ...
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014
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What The Federal Reserve Would Look Like If Progressives Had Their Way
What The Federal Reserve Would Look Like If Progressives Had Their Way
The progressive Fed Up coalition released an ambitious Federal Reserve reform plan on Monday designed to increase...
The progressive Fed Up coalition released an ambitious Federal Reserve reform plan on Monday designed to increase discussion of Fed policy in the presidential campaign.
The reforms, which would require the passage of new legislation, would turn the Federal Reserve into a public entity akin to other federal agencies, with the goal of dramatically increasing the accountability of the world’s most powerful financial body.
Currently, the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are owned by private commercial banks. As a result, financial executives dominate the regional Fed banks’ boards of directors, giving them an outsized role in key decisions like the selection of the banks’ influential presidents.
Four of the current presidents are alumni of Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs.
Fed Up and other progressives argue that the present governance structure undermines the Fed’s role as a regulator of the country’s financial institutions. These critics also argue that the influence of big banks tends to make Fed officials more sensitive to concerns about inflation, even as they hear little from ordinary workers affected by nominal changes in the unemployment rate.
Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and former adviser to the Fed chair, who authored the proposal, said on a call with reporters that the changes would bring the Fed’s structure into line with major central banks in other countries. He mocked the plain conflict of interest inherent in giving the financial industry so much power over an institution charged with regulating it.
“It should be amazing for people in the public that banks actually own shares in the Fed. A lot of people would be shocked to hear that,” Levin said.
“It would be like if lawyers owned shares in the FBI,” he added.
In the new system Levin devised, the selection process of the regional banks’ directors would be supervised by the Washington-based Federal Reserve Board of Governors, with involvement from individual governors and members of Congress in the relevant Fed bank’s jurisdiction. The majority of each bank’s directors would need to come from small businesses and nonprofits. These more diverse boards, in turn, would have to make public their process for selecting a bank president.
Members of the Fed Board of Governors, unlike the regional Fed banks, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, which is one reason why Fed reform advocates consider them more accountable to the public.
Levin and Fed Up made clear that they view the new governance structure as a way of generating greater ethnic and racial diversity among Fed officials as well. Levin noted that in the Fed’s existence of more than a century, not one of the regional Fed presidents has been African American.
Levin called the statistic “clear evidence that something is broken.”
In making the Fed a public institution, the modified system envisioned by Levin would subject the regional Fed banks to the Freedom of Information Act and the oversight of the Fed Board of Governors’ inspector general.
The entire Fed, including the Fed Board of Governors, would also undergo an annual review by the Government Accountability Office, a government body tasked with evaluating the efficacy and accountability of federal agencies.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors declined to comment on the new plan, but chairwoman Janet Yellen has opposed past efforts to audit the Fed.
In addition, Levin’s plan changes the terms of both regional Fed bank presidents and Fed governors to seven years. Currently, regional Fed presidents serve for five years, and can be reappointed to a second term — which almost always occurs, thanks to a process that Levin and Fed Up say is typically no more than a formality. Fed Board governors now serve 14-year terms.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors declined to comment on the reform plan. But Fed chair Janet Yellen has condemned legislation in the past that would audit the Fed’s finances, claiming it would “politicize” the institution’s decisionmaking. Yellen’s stance suggests she would likely oppose the even broader GAO review.
Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was a top economist at the Fed for many years, said of the reform plan that he is “more concerned that there are already too many limits on the Fed’s power to help the economy.”
Gagnon nonetheless said he views most of the new proposals favorably. His biggest specific objection is to the plan’s seven-year term limits, which he worries would open the Fed up to more political pressure by allowing a single president to decide its makeup.
The rollout of the Fed Up-backed proposal is timed — and packaged — to encourage presidential candidates to speak out. The coalition sent out model questions for the candidates to accompany the release of the reform proposal.
“It is important that we have a president who sees the need for sensible, pragmatic, nonpartisan reforms that will put the Fed on a path to serve the public for the next hundred years,” Levin said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has released his own plan to make the Fed more accountable to the public. His campaign expressed support for the spirit of Fed Up’s reform proposal.
Warren Gunnels, top policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), joined the call to express support for the spirit of Fed Up’s proposed reforms.
Sanders “believes we need to structurally reform the Fed so that it is a democratic institution that is responsive to ordinary Americans not just CEOs on Wall Street,” Gunnels said.
Gunnels would not say if Sanders endorsed the proposal, however, claiming the senator needed more time to review it.
He instead pointed to the Federal Reserve platform Sanders laid out in a Dec. 23 New York Times op-ed. In the column, Sanders says he would bar financial industry executives from serving on the boards of regional Fed banks altogether, make Fed assistance to banks contingent on concrete measures of service to the public, such as lending to low-income workers, and preclude the Fed from raising its benchmark interest rate until unemployment is below 4 percent.
Ady Barkan, Fed Up’s campaign director, said that the coalition had invited all five presidential candidates to join the press call, but only Sanders’ campaign had agreed to participate.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not respond to a HuffPost request for comment on Fed Up’s proposal, nor did the remaining Republican presidential candidates Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and Donald Trump.
Getting Democratic politicians, in particular, to make the Fed a policy cause could prove a difficult task for a number of reasons.
In recent years, Fed reform has tended to be the province of conservative lawmakers eager to rein in the Fed’s unprecedented efforts to aid financial institutions and stimulate economic demand in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Democrats have cast themselves as defenders of the Fed in those circumstances, since the central bank’s actions were viewed as crucial to the recovery.
It doesn’t help matters that the Fed is an issue that’s simply not on the public’s radar.
And there is also the risk of being seen as breaching protocol by commenting on an independent, nonpartisan institution.
“I don’t think many voters understand enough to care about it,” Ari Rabin-Havt, a progressive radio host and onetime aide to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said in an interview earlier this month. “The people who do care about it somewhat, view it as a ‘temple.’”
But economists and policy experts argue that it would be a mistake for Democrats to ignore the Fed. “Central banks became and still are the only game in town” when governments want to boost economic demand and employment, according a column by New York University economist Nouriel Roubini. That’s partly as a result of the ideological backlash across the developed world against using public spending as a fiscal stimulus, and the delayed effect of other reforms.
And the Fed is especially important in the American context, because the government is likely to remain divided regardless of who wins the presidency, narrowing the possibilities of ameliorative fiscal measures.
“If the economy starts to weaken again, we cannot trust Congress to act,” Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, said earlier this month. “We will need a Fed that is ahead of the curve.”
Short of embracing reforms to the Federal Reserve’s governance, Democrats could make a bigger issue out of the two empty Fed governor seats. President Barack Obama named nominees for the positions many months ago, but Senate Republicans have failed to give them hearings.
Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon, said he is “wary” of the candidates even articulating what kind of people they would nominate to the Fed Board of Governors lest they jeopardize the central bank’s independence. But he said calling for filling the empty governor seats is fair game.
“I would like [the presidential candidates] to at least say that we should have a Fed at full power, because that’s what makes for effective monetary policy,” Duy said earlier this month. “That should be a priority for Democrats and Republicans.”
By Daniel Marans
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NYT Misses the Story on the Fed and African American Unemployment
CEPR - March 3, 2015 - The NYT...
CEPR - March 3, 2015 - The NYT examined the impact the Fed has on unemployment among African Americans and came up with the bizarre conclusion that the Fed can't do much:
"The Fed has a hammer, and, as the saying goes, not all problems are nails."
This conclusion is bizarre, because the data are very clear; efforts to reduce the overall unemployment rate disproportionately help African Americans and Hispanics. As a rule of thumb, the African American unemployment rate is roughly twice the unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for African American teens is roughly six times the white unemployment rates. (The unemployment rate for Hispanics is generally 1.5 times the white unemployment rate.)
In keeping with this rule of thumb, the unemployment rate for whites in January was 4.9 percent. It was 10.3 percent for African Americans and 29.7 percent for African American teens. Here's what the longer term picture looks like.
If we could get back to 2000 levels of unemployment, when the unemployment rate for whites bottomed out at 3.4 percent, we might see something like the 7.0 percent unemployment rate for blacks overall and 20.0 percent we saw for black teens back in April of 2000.
Alternatively, to flip it over and talk about employment rates, the percentage of black teens that was employed peaked at 31.7 percent in 2000, more than 50 percent higher than the 19.6 percent figure for last month. Does anyone really want to say that increasing the probability that black teens will have a job by 50 percent doesn't make a difference?
There is a separate issue as to whether it would be possible to get down to 4.0 percent unemployment without triggering spiraling inflation. This is an arguable point. But it is worth noting that those who say it is not possible to have 4.0 percent unemployment today also said that it was not possible back in 2000.
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Fed Up group claims Fed behind loss of reservation
A group critical of Federal Reserve policy is crying foul after their reservations for an upcoming meeting of central...
A group critical of Federal Reserve policy is crying foul after their reservations for an upcoming meeting of central bankers at the Jackson Lake Lodge were revoked.
The hotel is claiming a booking error is responsible. The group of labor unions and community organizations isn’t buying it.
The annual Economic Policy Symposium hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, held in Grand Teton National Park, is one of the most high-profile meetings of the country’s central bankers. This year, they are set to discuss frameworks for raising and lowering interest rates. Rates are currently low, and the debate in the Fed is how soon they should rise.
Fed Up is a coalition which argues that Federal Reserve interest rate policy is geared toward corporate and banking interests, leaving out the interests of workers and minorities.
“The impact of higher interest rates is to slow the economy down,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up’s campaign manager. Raising rates pushes down inflation, which is good for lenders, but it does that by increasing unemployment and making it harder for workers to get raises, he said.
At the last two conferences in Jackson Hole, Fed Up has staged protests and an alternative conference focused on the impact that Federal Reserve policy has on wages and unemployment. The group plans a similar event at the meeting this year, despite the loss of their reservations, Haedtler said.
The lodge, which has 385 rooms, revoked 18 reservations in July. Those included all 13 rooms the Fed Up coalition had booked.
The Grand Teton Lodge Company is the National Park Service-authorized concessionaire which operates the Jackson Lake Lodge. Vice president and general manager Alex Klein said in a statement: “This summer we encountered an error with our booking system that resulted in our Jackson Lake Lodge property being oversold by 18 rooms for three peak nights in August.”
Klein said the company worked to move those who lost rooms to Flagg Ranch, 20 miles to the north.
Haedtler thinks his group was specifically targeted.
“We think that the computer glitch strains credulity,” he said “It’s pretty well known that the Kansas City Fed in particular doesn’t welcome our presence, but we think it’s important for the voices of working families and communities of color … to be included.”
Haedtler said his group made its reservations in May, and he was told by hotel officials that some guests who had made their reservations later in the year hadn’t lost their rooms. He said because the lodge is owned by the National Park Service, it has an obligation to protect free speech.
“The National Park Service, more than any other institution, is supposed to be a place of public accommodation,” he said. “We have secured a free speech permit, and we will be at the lodge during the Fed summit.”
The group filed an official complaint with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice on Tuesday.
“What happened here is that, once again, the voices and faces of working class people of color have been marginalized; they have been treated disrespectfully; their opportunity to enjoy our country’s national parks has been subordinated to that of wealthy white guests,” the group wrote.
By Bryan Clark
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Pilot Program to Represent Detainees Facing Deportation
New York Law Journal – September 30, 2013, by Mark Hamblett and Jeff Storey - Aiming to foster the rights of...
New York Law Journal – September 30, 2013, by Mark Hamblett and Jeff Storey -
Aiming to foster the rights of immigrants and to keep their families together, two legal services organizations, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, have been picked for a unique pilot project to represent indigent detainees facing deportation.
The two organizations will form the New York Immigrant Defenders, which will take on 166 cases in the next year at the Varick Street Immigration Court.
The program will be funded by a $500,000 grant made available by the New York City Council in June.
Robin Steinberg, executive director of the Bronx Defenders, said that her organization created an in-house immigration practice more than a decade ago when it realized that nearly one-third of its clients were facing adverse immigration consequences from even minor brushes with the law.
“The Bronx Defenders joining forces with the Brooklyn Defender Services to create NYID is a natural and necessary step in ensuring that all residents of New York City—no matter where they were born—have their day in court with lawyers who will fight for their right to stay here, with their families and in the communities they now call home,” she said in a statement.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Legal Services, agreed that working with immigrants was “very much in line with our mission.”
Schreibersdorf said that she had told her daughter after the group’s selection Thursday that the new program was part of the most groundbreaking public defense development of her generation—the extension of the right to counsel to immigrants.
“This is a groundbreaking program. There is no program of this sort anywhere else in the country. It’s a program that aligns American values with the reality on the ground when it comes to immigrants and due progress,” said Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, one of the groups that advocated for creation of the program.
According to Brittny Saunders, senior staff attorney for the Center for Popular Democracy, another leading advocate for the effort, potential clients will be screened only for economic need, with anyone making under 200 percent of the poverty limit making the cut.
The poverty limit currently is $11,400 for a single person and $23,550 for a family of four.
Other factors, such as the strength of immigrant cases, will not be considered.
Oren Root of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit and nonpartisan center for justice issues, said the program will stress the importance of keeping families together. In many cases, the detainee has lived in the country for years, is the family’s principal wage earner, serves as the caretaker for family members and has children born and raised in the United States.
The one-year pilot project will be administered by Vera, which will coordinate the delivery of legal services and analyze the data that emerges from the effort.
Root said that Vera is “thrilled” to be working with “such high-caliber, innovative organizations as Brooklyn Defender Services and the Bronx Defenders.”
Providing support for the effort to represent immigrant families has been the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Center at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Most immigrants cannot afford representation, and attorneys and bar groups have become increasingly concerned about the dire consequences they face
Schreibersdorf said studies show that detainees with a lawyer are “more likely to identify valid immigration remedies.”
She cited one case of a 17-year-old on a minor offense handled by her agency. His attorney dug into the defendant’s family background and discovered that his parents had been naturalized, and thus he was a citizen himself.
“Without a lawyer, that kid would have been deported,” she said.
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Group Seeks All Drafts of Scaffold Law Report
Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy...
Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York’s controversial Scaffold Law, has filed an appeal of its initial Freedom of Information Law request for all communications between SUNY’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, the business-backed anti-Scaffold Law group that paid almost $83,000 for an analysis of the law’s economic impacts.
That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — concerning the details of the Institute’s report as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version of Scaffold Law.
Scaffold Law, which places “absolute liability” on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a “comparative negligence” standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.
The initial FOIL request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY’s release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.
On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The TU last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions.
The Center is now requesting to see all subsequent drafts of the report. “Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York’s safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist,” said the group’s Josie Duffy. “What we saw in the one draft that SUNY did release was disturbing enough, but we still don’t have a full accounting of how this study was manipulated.”
A SUNY spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment — though it’s unlikely the system would have anything to say about the mere filing of a FOIL request.
Here’s the Center’s FOIL appeal:
Center FOIL appeal
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'Substantial risk' that Fed is about to make a serious mistake, Pimco advisor says
'Substantial risk' that Fed is about to make a serious mistake, Pimco advisor says
For years, the Fed faced criticism that it wasn't being aggressive enough in raising rates. Now that it has started to...
For years, the Fed faced criticism that it wasn't being aggressive enough in raising rates. Now that it has started to hike, the central bank is under increasing fire for moving too soon.
The latest scrutiny comes from Joachim Fels, global economic advisor at Fed bond giant Pimco, who said the Fed shouldn't be tightening policy with the evidence so clear that it is falling well short of its inflation mandate.
Read the full article here.
How to Help Puerto Rico, Even When the President Won't
Donald Trump's idea of humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico is throwing paper towel rolls to a crowd. His callous and...
Donald Trump's idea of humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico is throwing paper towel rolls to a crowd. His callous and grandstanding attitude following Hurricane Maria's devastation is breathtaking, even for a man who uses a golden toilet. His cheap imitation of a T-shirt cannon was enough to make America collectively throw the phones we watched it on into the sea. If you're looking for less expensive ways to channel your rage, consider donating time, money or supplies to organizations and individuals on the ground in Puerto Rico.
Read the full article here.
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