Leah Hughes has big dreams of becoming a community organiser in Appalachia. A rising senior at the California-based Scripps College, Hughes is pursuing a dual degree in International Relations and Studio Art, and is incredibly thankful for her higher education experience thus far.

“As a first generation college student, my experience at a private institution, which specialises in the fields of study that I am interested in, has been the single most transformative experience of my life,” Hughes told IPS.

Araba Hammond of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) says student debts are generally not an issue in Africa. Credit: Julia Hotz/IPS

“It has led me to dedicate my life to public service…and has provided an opportunity for me to help others with the knowledge I have gained.”

Yet before Leah can embark on her community service aspirations, she has one not-so-little thing to worry about.

So far, she has incurred more than 30,000 dollars worth of tuition debt, in addition to more than 15,000 dollars of loans with interest rates.

Though Hughes was offered Scripps’ only merit scholarship, the college’s award will cover only 14,000 dollars worth of her debt, which will continue to grow by accumulating interest for every year she cannot pay.

Leah is certainly not alone in this battle, as she one of more than 40 million Americans who currently holds student debt.  They are collectively responsible for 1.2 trillion dollars of outstanding student loans in the United States.

Overall, student loan debts have doubled since 2007.

“What’s going on is exploitative and wrong,” Hughes told IPS. “If we continue to sell the idea that education is the way students and people from low-and middle-income backgrounds-such as myself are to move up and become productive members of society and supporters of a healthy economy, we are obligated to provide a framework for students to pay off their debt, rather than be crippled by the weight of unpaid loans.”

According to an analysis of the 2011-12 school year conducted by the Centre for American Progress, a think tank here, higher education institutions collected 154 billion dollars in tuition and fees, while families and students financed such costs with 106 billion dollars in loans from federal student-aid programmes.

Regardless of these enormous figures, Olivia Murray, the analysis’ co-author, is enthusiastic about the return on investment that college offers.

“Despite rising college costs and potentially high student debt, college is still the most valuable investment a student can make in their future, and is becoming increasingly important in an ever more specialising economy,” Murray told IPS.

“Unfamiliar” model

This fervent belief in the value of higher education was echoed by fellows from the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), who discussed the topic at the Centre for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), a think tank here, last week.

Yet while Araba Hammond and Regina Agyare, two of the YALI fellows, were similarly enthusiastic about the benefits of college that Hughes and Murray outlined, they said they were “unfamiliar” with the payment model in the U.S.

“The cost of education isn’t something we’ve really had to worry about,” Hammond told IPS. “Even for Africa’s most expensive universities, they are affordable for almost all people, given the amount of scholarships available.”

Adding that she cannot recall any friends who have accumulated student debt, Hammond said that “students [in Africa] wouldn’t graduate with the debts that students here graduate with.”

Agyare seconded Hammond’s remarks, stating that “student loans here are very, very small,” and that workplace compensation is and has been reliable source of debt relief.

“Obscene” government profits

U.S. President Obama has recently recognised this potential, and has announced his plan to expand the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) plan, which would forgive student loans to borrowers who pay 10 percent of their incomes back after a 20-year period.

Yet for a more direct and immediate intervention, prominent U.S. lawmaker Elizabeth Warren has crafted the “Banks on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act,” which would let student loan borrowers refinance their debt at lower interest rates.

“This is obscene,” Warren said of the U.S.’s student loan model. “The government should not be making 66 billion in profits off of the backs of our students.

“It’s time to end the practice of profiting from young people who are trying to get an education and refinance existing loans.”

While partisan opposition has prevented the bill from being enacted, Warren, with an army of students and families from the middle class, are still fighting for its passage.

“Students and parents should be able to refinance their student debt, just like every other loan type in the U.S., especially as student debt becomes the largest form of debt carried by people in this country,” Hughes told IPS.

As the legislative battle for refinanced student loans rages on, students, families and non-profits are mobilising around the issue of student loan debt, calling their cause the “Higher Ed Not Debt” campaign.

The organisation bases its work on providing support to current borrowers, addressing the causes of declining affordability, educating the public about the financial sector’s role in creating student debt,  and engaging the masses through democratic action.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at hotzj@union.edu

Between 2000 and 2012, rents in the U.S. rose by 12 percent while the average renters’ income fell 13 percent. Credit: Bill Lapp/CC-BY-2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

Six years after the financial crisis, Wall Street’s housing alchemy engine is revving up again – only this time it’s coming for your rental.

Right as housing prices bottomed out around January 2012, large institutional investors began buying distressed properties in regions hit hard by the foreclosure crisis; they’ve purchased at least 200,000 to date.

In only a year, private equity giant Blackstone Group went from owning no single-family rental properties (SFRs) to being the U.S.’ single largest landlord.

Now, several companies, including Blackstone, are packaging their SFRs into bonds similar to the mortgage backed securities that fueled the financial crisis.

Like those securities, SFR bonds are backed by homes; but this time rental payments, rather than mortgage payments, pay the interest. Securitisation frees up money, allowing big buyers to purchase more properties with less capital by increasing their leverage – and risk.

“Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place [...] be able to keep up?” -- Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress

Issuances thus far are small – less than three billion dollars. But wary housing advocates are pushing regulators to increase supervision. Wall Street’s role as a proprietor is unprecedented, and no one knows what to expect, least of all the families renting the homes.

Last year, two senior Federal Reserve economists warned institutions could “have difficulties managing such large stocks of rental properties or fail to adequately maintain their homes.”

Indeed, this May, a couple in Sun Valley, California filed suit against Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes for allowing their home to descend into a slum, where they allege toxic mould caused “nose bleeds, headaches, fatigue, memory loss, inability to concentrate, chronic runny nose, respiratory issues and other chronic flu-like symptoms.”

In January, California Congressman Mark Takano called for hearings on the issue, but they have yet to take place.

“Securitisation allows for bad practices to flourish exponentially,” Kevin Stein, associate director of California Reinvestment Coalition, told IPS. “We don’t know what kind of property manager is available, and we don’t know if there will be pressure to raise rents.”

Last October, Deutsche Bank marketed the first ever bond backed by SFRs – 479.1 million dollars in expected rental payments on 3,207 units owned by Invitation Homes.

The deal was only a drop in the bucket of 44,000 homes Blackstone owns nationwide. This summer, they aim to package a billion dollars’ worth of units.

Collectively over the past three years, large investors have spent an estimated 20 billion dollars on homes. The thought of capturing more of the three-trillion-dollar single-family market has Wall Street frothing at the mouth.

Their entrance into the housing market comes amid historic inequality in the U.S., where extracting wealth from the poorest has become normalised.

The financialisation of everyday life means that something as commonplace as the landlord banging on your door for rent now involves thousands of investors, thousands of miles away, all urging that landlord to extract greater profits.

“Single family rental is not new,” Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told IPS. “Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place work – will they be able to keep up?”

Because institutional investors can pay more than the asking price – in cash – for multiple properties, they’ve edged out local would-be homeowners and driven up prices in several hot markets. The percent of all-cash buyers has doubled in only a year, to over 40 percent of all home sales.

Tight credit for personal mortgages – from the same lenders that liberally dished out dangerous subprime loans before 2008 – has only worsened the picture for renters looking to move into a home of their own.

That has resulted in homeownership rates at two-decade lows and rising rents in practically every region.  Income, however, is moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2012, rents rose 12 percent in real dollars; over that same period, the median income of renters fell 13 percent.

SFR-backed securities do theoretically open up funding for an expansion of the rental market. Though there is an immediate need for affordable housing, seeing Wall Street renting out homes that its own malfeasance forced owners to abandon makes for a bitter image.

“Millions of families lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis and now as a result we have millions of families that are looking for homes to rent,” said Edelman. “We do need an increased supply of rental housing, but we also need to make sure those are stable.”

But as SFRs, like seemingly every financial instrument, become increasingly inevitable, housing advocates don’t want regulators to be playing catch up.

“The industry doesn’t have much of a track record – it’s important that the industry establishes best practices and that state and local policy makers revisit their landlord-tenant policies,” said Edelman.

Issuances are picking up. In April, Colony American homes sold bonds totaling 513 billion dollars. The next month, American Homes 4 Rent, the largest publicly traded single-family landlord, sold 481 million dollars’ worth.

More than half of the properties in the American Homes 4 Rent deal were located in Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas, Tampa and Phoenix – some of the cities hit hardest when the housing bubble collapsed.

“Securitisation just provides a mechanism to increase the volume of this activity,” Stein told IPS. “It’s not surprising people have found out a way to make money out of this.”

(END)

Seventeen states currently grant gay couples the right to marry. Credit: Bigstock

By Farangis Abdurazokzoda
WASHINGTON, May 16 2014 (IPS)

Honouring the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Friday emphasised progress in advancing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons, but a new report on criminalisation of LBGT people suggests that there is still a long way to go.

“Today of all days, we are reminded that the cause of justice can and must triumph over hatred and prejudice,” said Kerry said in a statement.“The United States arrests and prosecutes more people on the basis of their HIV status than the rest of the world combined." -- Catherine Hanssens

Undeniably, a number of events over the past week indicate significant advances in LGBT rights.

Michael Sam, the first openly gay U.S. football player, kissed his boyfriend on national TV after being drafted by the National Football League; Arkansas, one U.S. Bible-Belt state lifted a ban on gay marriage; and Conchita Wurst, an Austrian cross-dresser, won Eurovision Song Contest, the televised singing competition watched by tens of millions of viewers across Europe.

Nonetheless, LGBT people and and People Living with HIV (PLWH) experience higher rates of homelessness and poverty, lower levels of education, and high rates of family and community rejection, according to the report.

“Seventy-three percent of LGBT people and PLWH have had run-ins with police in the past five years,” said Aisha Moodie-Mills, co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank considered close to the administration of President Barack Obama.

“Oftentimes these groups also experience police misconduct such as false arrests and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse while in police custody,” she told IPS.

Released late last week by CAP and several civil rights law groups, the report urges relevant U.S. agencies to adopt key reforms that can improve the plight of LGBT people and PLWH. Existing criminal-justice policies, according to the report, perpetuate poor life outcomes of LGBT people and PLWH.

“Police profile transgender women and use possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution-related offenses and grounds for arrest,” Moodie-Mills said. “And, in 36 states there are laws that criminalise HIV exposure. PLWH can be charged with felonies for having consensual sex, biting, and spitting despite the fact that spitting and biting have not been shown to pose significant risks for HIV transmission.”

Further, some states that do not have HIV-specific laws prosecute PLWH under more general criminal laws, including attempted murder, assault, and even bio-terrorism.

According to conservative estimates by the New York-based Center for HIV Law and Policy, nearly 200 PLWH have been prosecuted since 2008. In Texas, for example, a man with HIV is serving 35 years for spitting at a police officer. In New York, a man was sentenced to 10 years for aggravated assault for biting a police officer.

And in Michigan, prosecutors charged an HIV-positive man under the state’s anti-terrorism statute with possession of a “biological weapon,” and equated the HIV infection with possession of a “harmful device.”

“The United States arrests and prosecutes more people on the basis of their HIV status than the rest of the world combined,” noted Catherine Hanssens, the centre’s executive director and a co-author.

“The policies that drive these arrests spring from profoundly phobic misconceptions about the actual routes, risks, and consequences of HIV transmission and federal health officials’ refusal to promote frank, accurate information about sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

The particular needs of LGBT people and PLWH are often overlooked when in jail. For example, discriminatory attitudes toward LGBT people prevent them from reporting sexual assaults. Despite the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) – the first federal law passed that deals with sexual assault of prisoners.

“Justice continues to be elusive and conditional for these populations due to a range of unequal laws and policies that dehumanise, victimise, and criminalise them because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status,” says the report.

The report was generated in collaboration with over 50 activists, policy advocates, lawyers, and grassroots organisations working on LGBT criminalisation and racial justice issues and is the first comprehensive publication to offer policy recommendations to the all levels of government, from local police and state prisons to federal agencies and prosecutors.

They call for more aggressive efforts to curb discrimination in policing and law enforcement, to stop violence and discrimination inside prisons and detention centers, including the federally funded immigrant detention facilities.

The roadmap’s authors stress that existing legislation that oftentimes fail to protect LGBT people.

PREA can be amended to better address specific issues LGBT people face with in prisons, according to the report. This also includes allowing transgender people to specify the gender of the officer they would prefer to conduct searches on their persons and specifically to ban prohibit degrading and invasive genital searches.

Criminalisation and official harassment of LGBT people and PLWH are widespread across the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the governments of Nigeria and Uganda have recently approved laws that impose draconian punishment on homosexual conduct.

On May 19, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Global Health Policy Center will issue a new report on the criminalisation of homosexuality at the Third Atlanta Summit on Health in Africa.

Occupy Wall Street joined the NAACP as thousands marched in midtown Manhattan on Dec. 10, 2011 to defend voting rights. Credit: Michael Fleshman/cc by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

Advocacy groups here are reacting with frustration as several southern U.S. states have moved to enact stricter voting requirements in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision that rolled back key legislation that had safeguarded minority voters for decades.

Following last week’s five-to-four Supreme Court decision overturning a key part of the Voting Rights Act, nine southern states with a history of discriminatory voting requirements are now able to change their election laws without approval from the federal government.“Basically the voter [photo] ID is a solution looking for a problem." -- Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez of the Advancement Project

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating: “Our country has changed. While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation is passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

Yet just 48 hours after the decision, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina announced plans to push through together voting restrictions that critics are warning could disenfranchise minority voters.

“Limiting the voices that can be heard is repugnant to what the country stands for,” Andrew Blotky, director of legal progress the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, told IPS. “We have always expanded the ability of people able to participate fully in our society, not restrict it.”

Just two hours after the Supreme Court decision came out, Texas announced that its voter identification law, requiring the presentation of a government-issued photo ID, would go into immediate effect.

Texas Governor Rick Perry also signed into law a new congressional voting map that is almost identical to the map that was ruled discriminatory last year, according to Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, director of voter protection at the Advancement Project, an advocacy group.

“It’s not really that [southern states] weren’t treated equally; it’s about the fact that they earned this reputation to not be trusted,” Culliton-Gonzalez told IPS. “There is a reason that Texas, Mississippi, Florida and North Carolina were all covered in Section 4 [of the Voting Rights Act].”

Texas does offer free identification certificates for residents who lack other forms of photo ID, but the documents required to obtain these certificates are costly. According to Culliton-Gonzalez, some residents can be forced to drive up to 400 kilometres to apply for the free certificates, which is impractical for many voters, particularly those who are poor.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, another state impacted by the Supreme Court decision, lawmakers are now attempting to eliminate early voting, same-day registration and Sunday voting hours, and are likewise planning to implement new photo identification requirements.

According to Think Progress, an advocacy group associated with the Center for American Progress, about 613,000 North Carolinians currently lack the required photo ID, and nearly one third of these are African American.

Florida, too, is looking to cut the option to vote early, which has been seen as a key tool by which to allow more citizens to vote. Analysts suggest that eliminating early voting will have particularly serious consequences for African-American voters, half of whom cast their ballots during the early voting period in 2008, and made up 22 percent of the early vote in 2012.

“It’s terrible,” Blotky told IPS. “Its not coincidence that these states have already tried to take advantage of the opportunity to enact laws that will restrict the votes of some people who really rely on the ability to have access to polls before the election because they have work or families to take care of.”

Looking for a problem

In Alabama, residents have already been required to show identification at the polls in the form of utility bills, Society Security cards, or a copy of birth certificates. Now, conservatives in the state legislature reportedly hope to have a new photo identification requirement in place by the June 2014 “primary” elections, during which voters will choose candidates for subsequent national races.

In next-door Mississippi, 62 percent of voters have said they approve of requiring photo ID at the polls, and are in favour of a new requirement that is now also aimed to be in place by June of next year.

“Mississippi citizens have earned the right to determine our voting processes,” Secretary of State in Mississippi Delbert Hosemann recently told the press, adding that ne one should have any barriers when casting their ballot. “Our relationship and trust in each other have matured. This chapter is closed.”

Supporters of a requirement for government-issued photo ID at polls say the move will combat a purported voter fraud problem. Opponents, however, claim this issue has been significantly over-exaggerated.

“In case after case last year, we found those allegations of voter fraud were just allegations – that’s all there was to it,” said Culliton-Gonzalez. “Basically the voter [photo] ID is a solution looking for a problem – it doesn’t solve anything at all.”

Photo IDs are intended to cut down solely on in-person fraud. Yet according to a study published in August 2012, there have been just 10 documented cases of in-person voter fraud throughout the United States since 2000. Three of those cases were in a single state, Texas, and there was one conviction.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a legal assistance organisation that fights racial injustice, has stepped up its surveillance of the changes that are being implemented to voting requirements in the southern states that had been covered in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The organisation says it intends to use these findings to show that the previous structure of the legislation was effective.

Importantly, the Supreme Court decision simply stated that the law was functioning off of an outdated formula for figuring out which states required federal oversight. The justices have struck down Section 4 only insofar as they have mandated that the U.S. Congress revisit the issue and come up with a new formula.

In that process, groups such as the NAACP see an opportunity to ensure that this legal cover is re-strengthened and continues as long as it’s required.

“There has been progress nationally and at the state levels, but that does not mean we’ve reached a place where those states are free from racial discrimination,” Leah Aden, assistant council with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told IPS. “The goal is to not only get people to register and turn out, but to make sure their votes are meaningfully counted.”