 Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Sudan's warring factions say they've agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire after four days of violence plunged the Northeast African nation into chaos. A United Nations envoy says the civilian death toll in Sudan has reached at least 185, with more than 1,800 people wounded since fighting between rival wings of the military junta erupted Saturday. The true toll is likely far higher, with emergency crews unable to retrieve bodies from the streets of the capital Khartoum, where tanks, fighter jets and artillery fire struck densely populated urban areas. In a widely-shared social media post, architect and Khartoum resident Tagrid Abdin said Monday civilians were being killed in the crossfire and that the fighting could benefit Islamist groups in Sudan. My only fear is that they come back to power on the back of whoever wins this idiocy, this ridiculous battle that has civilians caught in the middle. And we have nothing to do with this. I don't have a preference. I don't need—you know, it's like just—this is our no normal now. More than a dozen hospitals have been shut down across Sudan, some of them after sustaining bomb damage. Humanitarian aid groups have suspended their operations. U.S. embassy officials have been sheltering in place after a U.S. diplomatic convoy came under attack Monday. Meanwhile, the European Union ambassador to Sudan reports he was assaulted in his residence in Khartoum. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the fighting and appealed to the warring factions to cease hostilities and begin a dialogue to resolve the crisis. In Kansas City, Missouri, a white 84-year-old homeowner was charged with two felonies Monday after he shot and critically injured a black teenager who rang his doorbell by mistake. Police say the homeowner, Andrew Lester, did not exchange words with Ralph Yarl last Thursday before opening fire through a locked glass door with a 32-caliber revolver hitting the 16-year-old twice in the head and the chest. Yarl underwent surgery to remove bullet fragments and released from the hospital Sunday to recover at home. Lester walked free for several days before his arrest. Clay County Prosecutor Zachary Thompson announced the charges Monday before taking questions from reporters. Was there a racial component to this case, however? As the prosecutor clay counted, I can tell you there was a racial component to the case. The 16-year-old Ralph Yarl had simply rung the doorbell of the wrong address to pick up his two younger brothers. A grand jury in Akron, Ohio, has decided not to bring criminal charges against eight police officers who fatally shot Jalen Walker, a 25-year-old black man after a traffic stop last June. Body camera video shows the officers chasing Walker after he got out of his car and was running away unarmed. An autopsy later revealed Walker was struck by 46 police bullets as he fled. Lawyers for the Walker family say that after the officers shot Jalen, they handcuffed him before administering first aid. Elizabeth Page White is an attorney for the Walker family. I don't care what he did, but let's be clear. When Jalen was shot, he was running away. He was unarmed. Those are two things that we know. And for any state official to stand up there and justify what was done to Jalen, shame on you. Shame on each and every one of you. What we saw happen this week in the grand jury was a miscarriage of justice. In Indianapolis, two police officers had been indicted over the killing of Herman Whitfield nearly a year ago. Whitfield was an award-winning African-American piano virtuoso who would have turned 40 last October. Last April, his parents called 911 to ask for help as their son experienced a mental health crisis in their home. Officers responded with deadly force, pinning Herman Whitfield to the ground, cuffing him, tasering him, and continuing to press their weight into him, even though he was crying out he could not breathe. The city of Indianapolis and its police department fought for months to block a judge's order that raw videos of Whitfield's killing be made public. Last Friday, officers Stephen Sanchez and Adam Ahmed pleaded not guilty to charges of manslaughter, reckless homicide and battery. They were released on $15,000 bond. A trial for both officers is scheduled to begin in June. Police in New Mexico have released body camera footage showing how officers shot and killed a Farmington resident in his own home on April 5th. The video shows officers repeatedly knocking on a door before realizing they come to the wrong address. Years later, 52-year-old Robert Dodson appears at his front door holding what appears to be a handgun. Three officers immediately opened fire, killing Dodson. The officers then exchanged gunfire with Dodson's wife, who cried out for help. The officers, who have not been publicly identified, have been placed on paid leave pending a state police investigation. Florida is on the verge of joining Alabama as the only state in the country where a divided jury can impose the death penalty. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign legislation this week that would allow defendants to be sentenced to death even if as many as four members of a 12-person jury oppose the decision. Momentum for the legislation grew after the Parkland School shooter was sentenced to life in prison because the jury did not reach a unanimous decision on the death sentence. In other Florida news, Governor DeSantis is escalating his attacks on Disney as part of an ongoing dispute that began when the company criticized Florida's Don't Say Gay Law. On Monday, DeSantis threatened to build a prison on state-owned land next to Disney World. Well, there's—what should we do with this land? And so, you know, it's like, okay, kids, I mean, people have said, you know, maybe have another—maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks. Someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison. Who knows? Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has proposed increasing the debt ceiling for one year in exchange for sweeping budget cuts that would likely result in less federal money for housing, education, health care, and environment. McCarthy also pushed for tougher work requirements for recipients of SNAP. That's the supplemental nutrition assistance program, and to expand domestic mining and fossil fuel production. McCarthy outlined his plan and a speech at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Before we borrow another dime, we owe it to our children to save money everywhere. Our proposal will examine wasteful Washington spending and executive overreach in all forms. The White House slams Speaker McCarthy's proposal, warning it would impose devastating cuts on families and take health care and food assistance away from millions of people. The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, led by Jim Jordan, held a field hearing in New York City, where Republicans repeatedly attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, claiming the DA pushed, quote, pro-crime anti-victim policies. The hearing came just weeks after Bragg filed criminal charges against Donald Trump. The focus of the hearing was on what Republicans described as violent crime in New York, even though it's one of the safest large cities in the United States. The New York Daily News reports the homicide rate in Ohio, the home state of committee chair Jim Jordan, is 73 percent higher than the homicide rate in Manhattan. This is committee chair Jim Jordan. Their stories are emblematic of a city that's lost its way when it comes to fighting a crime and upholding the law. Democratic Congressmember Jerry Nadler of New York blasted Jim Jordan for holding the hearing in New York and for attacking DA Alvin Bragg. The chairman is doing the bidding of Donald Trump. Committee Republicans designed this hearing to intimidate and deter the duly elected district attorney of Manhattan from doing the work his constituents elected him to do. They have demanded access to the in-workings of an ongoing criminal case, information to which they know they are not entitled. They have perpetuated the anti-Semitic and racist tropes that Mr. Trump has directed at both the prosecutor and the judge in this case. They are using their public offices and the resources of this committee to protect their political patron Donald Trump. It is an outrageous abuse of power. In other congressional news in New York, Republican George Santos has announced he will seek re-election for Congress in 2024, despite growing calls for him to resign over his extensive lies about his background during his successful 2022 campaign. The FBI has arrested two New York residents for allegedly running a covert police station in Manhattan's Chinatown on behalf of the Chinese government. U.S. Attorney Breon Peace announced the indictment Monday, saying the site was operated by China's Ministry of Public Security to target pro-democracy activists and other Chinese dissidents in the U.S. On at least one occasion, an official with the Chinese National Police directed one of the defendants, a U.S. citizen, who worked at the secret police station, to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California. In other words, the Chinese National Police appeared to have been using the station to track a U.S. resident on U.S. soil. China's foreign ministry denied the charges and accused the United States of groundless accusations. A Russian judge in Moscow has denied bail to detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested on espionage charges March 29th. During his first court appearance, Gershkovich was held in a glass, metal enclosure. He was seen smiling at times, but marks from his handcuffs could be seen on his wrists. If convicted, he faces 20 years, up to 20 years in prison. The U.S. ambassador to Russia recently visited him in his Moscow jail, reporting he's in good health and remains strong. And in New Jersey, climate activists held a nonviolent civil disobedience protest Monday at the construction site of a fracked gas expansion project. If completed, the East 300 upgrade project would expand the flow of methane through Kinder Morgan's aging Tennessee gas pipeline. Among those detained by police at Monday's protest was Paula Rogovan, a longtime environmentalist and peace activist, who called on New Jersey's Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, to cancel the project. Governor Murphy promised. You promised environmental justice. You promised clean air, clean water. And what do you do? You allow this lousy compressor station to be built. You allow pipelines. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, a Democracy Now exclusive. We go to Atlanta, where top officials at the Fulton County Jail have resigned amidst growing outrage over the death of a man held in the jail's psychiatric wing. LaShawn Thompson's family said he was eaten alive by insects and bedbugs in his cell. We'll be joined by the lawyer and the sister and brother of the dead man. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now's Juan Gonzales in Chicago. Hi, Juan. Hi, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. We begin today's show in Atlanta, Georgia, where over 600 prisoners are being transferred from the Fulton County Jail after the family of a black prisoner said he was eaten alive by insects and bedbugs in his cell there last year. The family of 35-year-old LaShawn Thompson, who is being held in the jail's psychiatric wing, is demanding a criminal investigation and that the jail should be shut down. On Monday, several of the jail's executive staff resigned, including the chief jailer, assistant chief jailer, and members of the criminal investigative division. Fulton County Sheriff Pat LeBotte said in a statement, quote, it's clear to me that it's time past time to clean house. In an earlier statement, the sheriff said, quote, it's fair to say that this is one of the many cases that illustrate the desperate need for expanded and better mental health services. This Thursday, the family and community members will rally outside the jail as awareness about the conditions there and this case grow. People shared with Democracy Now!, by the lawyer for LaShawn Thompson, show filthy conditions in what's believed to be Thompson's cell where he was found dead on September 19th last year. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's autopsy report said Thompson's cell was in, quote, extremely poor condition with insect infection and other filthiness around him and had a, quote, severe bed bug infestation. The Fulton County's autopsy noted, quote, the body is infested with an enormous number of small insects that are two millimeters in length. Thompson's cause of death is listed as undetermined. Perhaps most shocking is a graphic image released by the family's lawyer that shows Thompson's face at the time of his death. His family has asked that the world see it. And with a warning to our viewers, we are showing it briefly now. LaShawn Thompson's death came after he'd been held for three months on a misdemeanor charge and was put in the jail's psychiatric wing after officials determined he was mentally ill. The corrections officer who wrote the incident report about his death noted, quote, I have communicated with mental health staff about the living conditions of inmate Thompson on previous dates. For more, we're joined in a global TV radio podcast broadcast exclusive by Three Guests. In Atlanta, Michael Harper is a lawyer representing LaShawn Thompson's family. In Florida, we're joined by LaShawn's sister, Shanita Thompson. And LaShawn's brother, Brad McCrae, is in Montgomery, Alabama. We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Brad, I want to start with you. You are LaShawn's brother. We really wade whether to show that photograph that your family wants the world to see of your brother's head. And I'm wondering if you can talk about why you felt it was critical that the world see it. Yes, ma'am. First off, I want to say good morning and thanks for having me on. As far as with the photo, my personal feelings and emotions about the photos was Emmett Till. I thought about Emmett Till. It broke my heart. You see those photos. And we wanted the world to see it so the world can feel it and the world can wake up and see what's going on out here and get behind it and make a change. Make a change. We want the world to wake up and make a change. I'd like to ask Shanita Thompson, the sister of LaShawn Thompson, when you first heard of what had happened to your brother and your reaction when you realized the conditions that he was in? When I first found out what happened to my brother, it just broke my heart. Just to see the conditions that he was in and especially the photos, just to see all the bugs in his face, his eyes, his nose. It really, really broke my heart just to see him like that and where he went through. Yeah. And also, I'd like to ask Brad McCray, the fact that the sheriff of Fulton County is now saying he vows to clean house. What's your reaction to the actions of the law enforcement subsequent to your brother's death? Well, I want to thank the sheriff for trying to clean house and do everything that he feels like he could do. I wish it was done earlier. I wish it would have been done so my brother might still be here. But I want to thank the sheriff for what he's trying to do and he's trying to make it right on his behalf. But we've got a long way to go and I hope it keeps going forward. I want to point out, Brad, that for our listeners, you are wearing a T-shirt that says in loving memory and there's a beautiful picture of your brother, LaShawn, on your shirt. Were you—and I also want to ask Shanita, if you both were in communication with him, if you were able to talk to him when he was in the jail? Shanita, let's start with you. And did he talk to you about the bedbugs, the insects, the infestation, the conditions of the jail? But my brother had previously said we didn't even know he was in jail, so. So the horror of this, a report by the Southern Center for Human Rights found at least ten people died at the Fulton County Jail last year. And said, quote, the Fulton County Jail has been understaffed and mismanaged for decades leading to multiple lawsuits and consent decrees, but the problems have been particularly acute in recent months as Fulton County Sheriff LeBotte has failed to maintain even existing staff. On September 21st, LeBotte stated he'd lost more staff than he was able to hire and as of October 10th there were at least 155 staff vacancies. The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report on how to quickly depopulate the jail that said, quote, Fulton County's failure to count for people's ability to pay when setting bail is a significant factor in the number of people held in jail and found at least 12 percent of the people were held there due to inability to pay bail, meaning a wealthier individual with the same charges in bail amount would be released. Some were held for over two years, which brings us to Michael Harper, the attorney for LeSean's family. Michael, can you talk about why we are just learning about this case now and the significance, the impact it has had, I mean, removing 600 prisoners? Talk about what you understand happened, how LeSean was in that mental health unit of the jail, if you can call it that. What the autopsy means, the photographs that you have that are so horrific? Yeah, good morning. Let me start with the photographs, because there is some talk from the sheriff about the authenticity of those photographs and where they came from. Those horrific photographs came directly from the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Jail Death Investigation that was provided to the family from the county medical examiner's office. They are the exact photos of the cell that LeSean Thompson was housed in when he died. They are horrible. But what happened here, as you noted, the jail knew that LeSean Thompson had mental health issues in June of 2022. They put him in the psychiatric wing of that jail and neglected him. He was there for three months. There are reports and the incident report from the death that the officers, as you alluded to, were aware that he was declining. He was in a filthy cell. They complained to their superiors and nothing happened. He was there until he died and his body was found infested with those horrible bedbug bites and lice and insects. It is just beyond tragic what happened to him. He's mentally ill. He was not able, we believe, to contact his family. He was not able to speak for himself. They held him there. It was their responsibility to make sure he was safe and to make sure that his cell was clean. And remember, LeSean Thompson was a pre-child detainee. He had not been convicted of any crime. He was being held there until he got his day in court. So they had an obligation to make sure that he was safe. The new information about the sheriff cleaning house and moving inmates, that's a wonderful thing to happen. But LeSean Thompson died in September of last year. The sheriff was well aware of this case then. We believe the measures that he's taken now are solely based on the international outrage of LeSean Thompson's death. We appreciate any change to keep inmates safe. But it should have happened before LeSean Thompson died and certainly after he died before the media attention. Well, Michael Harper, you've represented others who died in the same facility, including a William Barnett, a man charged with stealing a lawnmower, and also Antonio May in 2018 who was beaten to death by six detention officers. Talk about these two related cases and what it indicates about how law enforcement has been dealing with this jail now for years. Yeah, there's certainly a systemic issue of abuse and neglect at the Fulton County Jail here in Atlanta. Antonio May's case was horrific. This is a man who also went into the jail with mental health issues. They were well aware, well documented. He had mental health issues. He was in a holding cell when he first came in to be processed. He began removing his clothing, and he allegedly would not put his clothing back on when instructed to by the detention officers. For that small infraction, the dart team, the specialized team at the jail, direct action response team, went into his holding cell, tased him nine times in a minute and a half, beat him, put him in a restraint chair, took him to a shower area to wash the pepper spray off his face, and his heart went out. And they literally watched him tied down to a restraint chair, and it had extra restraints. The evidence in that case showed that not just the restraints on a restraint chair, but they used additional restraints against jail policy and why he was restraining that matter. His heart went out in front of them, and he died restrained in that chair. Just a horrific case for such a small, minor infraction. William Barnett, another tragic case, went to the jail on a misdemeanor. The jail was aware that he had a chemical imbalance. He had low potassium. They sent him out because he had some health issues, sent him out to the hospital. When he came back to the jail, the instructions from the hospital was for the jail to monitor William Barnett, check his potassium level to make sure that he did not decline. They did nothing. They never gave him more potassium. They never monitored him, and he was found unresponsive, went into cardiac arrest in his cell and died. I mean, these are just inexcusable, horrific deaths. And let me also say this about the sheriff who wanted a new jail. We applaud that, and we agree that we probably need a new jail in Fulton County. But these cases are about neglect. A new jail is not going to stop neglectful detention officers from not caring for mentally ill people. They have to do more training. They have to make sure that the officers are following policy to help those who are least served. We wanted to end, again, with the family of LaShawn. Brad, you're in Montgomery, in a studio in Alabama, a historic place where Rosa Parks led the Montgomery bus boycott. You're not far from Bryan Stevenson's lynching museum. And Shanita, I want to begin with your description of your brother. You're in Winterhaven, Florida. Isn't that where LaShawn grew up? Can you talk about LaShawn and also, was he able to get help for his schizophrenia? Yes, he grew up in Winterhaven, Florida. He went to Winterhaven High School. He was, he loved music. He loved listening to his headphones. And he was always staying with his headphones. He loved just music and stuff. Getting help for his mental health. Yes, he was. But, you know, with mental health, it is hard. It's just hard breaking what happened. I'm sorry. And Brad, how do you want us to remember your brother, LaShawn? Yes, ma'am. I want the world to remember him as I do, as a loving person, a playful person. He loved music. He loved to cook. I want the world to remember him as their cousin, their brother, their uncle, or wherever the case may be, because it could happen to their family, just like it happened to mine. And finally, Mako Harper, there's going to be a major protest outside the Fulton County Jail on Thursday. Can you talk about what you are demanding, and if you have filed suit on behalf of LaShawn? We have not filed any civil suit yet. Right now, we're just trying to raise awareness and bring attention to this horrific case. The rally will be to call for a criminal investigation into the death of LaShawn Thompson. It's fine to clean house. It is fine to make changes. But someone needs to be held responsible for the horrible neglect that LaShawn Thompson underwent. We want a criminal investigation into this case. We will also demand that the jail is closed down and that Fulton County builds a new jail. We're calling on the Department of Justice in Washington to launch a civil rights investigation into the jail as well. And there will be other community leaders there, the Georgia NAACP will be there, a lot of community leaders will be there. This is our jail in Fulton County, and we have to make change. Well, we want to thank you all so much for being with us. Michael Harper, the lawyer for LaShawn Thompson's family and LaShawn Thompson's family. Sister Shanita Thompson, speaking to us from Winterhaven, Florida, and LaShawn's brother Brad McCrae, speaking to us from Montgomery, Alabama. Thank you so much, our condolences to you both. Next up, as a new study finds poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. We speak to the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Matthew Desmond, his new book Poverty by America. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan Gonzalez in Chicago. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has proposed increasing the debt ceiling for a year in exchange for sweeping budget cuts that would likely result in less federal money for housing, education, health care, and the environment. McCarthy also pushed for tougher work requirements for recipients of SNAP. That's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and to expand domestic mining and fossil fuel production. McCarthy outlined his plan in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Before we borrow another dime, we owe it to our children to save money everywhere. Our proposal will examine wasteful Washington spending and executive overreach in all forms. The White House Slam Speaker McCarthy's proposal warning it would impose devastating cuts on families and take health care and food assistance away from millions of people. This comes as a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, published on Monday, found that poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, just behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking. The study linked 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 directly to poverty. That's an average 500 deaths from poverty every day. Well, today we spend the rest of the hour looking at how there can be so much poverty in the richest country in the world. We're joined by Matthew Desmond. He's author of the new book, Poverty by America. It's Matthew Desmond's first book, since he won the Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking 2013 book, Evicted, Poverty and Profit in the American City. Evicted, something he knew well as his family was evicted. Matthew Desmond is a sociologist now at Princeton University, where he's director of the Eviction Lab. Professor Desmond, Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. This book is a bombshell. It is epic. The title of your book, Poverty by America, doesn't talk about how is it possible that the richest country in the world can have so much poverty, but you say that it's because of its wealth there are so many poor. Lay out the scope of the problem and why you took this on. Because there is so much poverty in this land of dollars. If you just look at the official poverty line, there's 38 million of us living below it. That means that if the American poor founded a country, that country would be bigger than Australia. But the poverty line is incredibly low. One in three folks in America live in homes bringing in $55,000 or less. Many aren't officially counted as poor. But what else do you call living on 55K and trying to raise two young kids in Miami or Portland? There is an incredible amount of unnecessary scarcity in this land of abundance. This book is about why and this is a book about how we can finally abolish it. And if you could summarize some of the main reasons why, especially given how other wealthy countries don't have nearly the level of poverty that the United States does. It's an important point. Our child poverty rate, for example, is double, double that of South Korea, Germany, many other of our pure nations. So why? And in a nutshell, there's so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it, some lives are made small so that others may grow. And many of us, those of us who have found some privilege and prosperity in America, we contribute to this. We consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce. We benefit when the stock market goes up because labor costs are pushed down. Many of us get tax breaks from the government, which is an enormous part of government spending, and we protect those tax breaks, which starves anti-poverty programs. And then we continue to be segregationists in America, building walls around affluent communities and concentrating not only wealth and privilege, but also concentrating poverty. Many of us are connected to the problem and the solution. And we often hear conservatives in the United States talk about the welfare state, but you make the point that our country actually is subsidizing the affluent, and give some specifics about how that happens. So every year, we spend about $1.8 trillion on tax breaks. That's about double what we spend on the military. It's a colossal sum. And look, many of us who receive those tax breaks, we have a hard time seeing those as the same thing as food stamps or housing assistance, but both housing assistance and, say, the mortgage interest reduction, they both cost the government money, they both put money in a family's pocket, and they both increased the deficit. And so if you add up all the tax breaks that are going to families and all the means tested programs for the poorest families and all the social insurance programs, basically everything the government does for its people, you learn that every year families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receive about $25,000 a year from the government, but every year families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution are richest families receive about $36,000 from the government. That's almost a 40 percent difference. That's crazy to me. And our country does a much better job helping folks that have plenty already than it does eliminating and fighting poverty. This is an absolutely critical figure that you're saying, Matthew Desmond, because so often the argument about against helping the poorest, why should they get free money when no one else does? And you're pointing out, actually it's the opposite, that wealthier people get more money from the government than poorer people do. But I'd like you to continue on that point and talk about why, in fact, already in this country, there are millions of dollars available to people who are in the lowest economic bracket that they can't or don't take advantage of. Explain what are the obstacles in the way. One obstacle is we do a very bad job connecting families to programs that they need and deserve. Sometimes we literally just don't spend the money on fighting poverty. So if you look at a program like the temporary assistance to needy families program or TANF, this is cash welfare. For every dollar budgeted for TANF, only $0.22 ends up in the family's pocket. What's going on here? Well, states have a lot of discretion about how to spend the money, and they spend it in really creative ways. Some states use those dollars to fund Christian summer camps or abstinence-only education, marriage initiatives, things that have nothing to do with alleviating poverty. Many states don't even spend the money. Last time I checked, Tennessee was sitting on over $700 million on unspent welfare dollars. And so this is one way that that money doesn't reach the families that need it the most. And another way is that many families are just leaving a lot of money on the table. One in five folks that are poorly paid workers that could receive something called the Ernicum tax credit, this wage bump, they don't take it. Most elderly Americans that could receive food stamps, they don't take it. And so if you add all that up, you learn that every year, over $140 billion, billion with a B, of unspent aid is left on the table. This is not a picture of welfare dependency. This is a picture of welfare avoidance, the fact that we as a nation need to do a much better job connecting families to those programs. And what did the crisis of the pandemic teach us about the ability of government to make a significant dent in poverty? And then of course, once the worst of the pandemic was over, we've seen now a take back of those policies. Exactly. So there's two resounding lessons from the pandemic when it comes to poverty alleviation. One, organizing works. Social movements pushed for bold relief from the government, and they won. And that relief came. And the second big lesson is that relief makes a world of difference. During the pandemic, we rolled out something called the extended child tax credit, which was basically a subsidy to low and moderate income families with kids. And that simple program cut child poverty by 46 percent in six months, in six months. It was the most historic thing we've done to fight poverty since the war on poverty increase society in 1964. Another thing that we did was we rolled out emergency rental relief. We helped the renters that had fallen behind because they had lost their jobs during the pandemic. And that initiative made evictions fall to record lows. We've never seen evictions this low on record. And those evictions stayed low for months and months and months, even after the federal moratorium on evictions was lifted. These programs were transformative. But you're right, Juan, they are lifting. They're expiring. And frankly, I want to live in a country where a Congress should have been terrified of taking those benefits away. I want to live in a country where more of us said, no, I want this to be the new normal. So, Professor Matthew Desmond, you just talked about evictions. You won the Pulitzer Prize for your book, Evicted. Talk about your own life experience and what eviction means. So, I grew up in a little town in Northern Arizona, a railroad town. And my family, money was tight. And when my dad lost his job as a minister, we lost our home. And I helped my parents move into a small rental unit. And I think that experience worked its way inside of me, probably provoked me to study evictions later on in life. And I moved to Milwaukee, and I moved into a mobile home park and a rooming house in the inner city of Milwaukee, and followed families getting evicted. And what I saw was eviction causes tremendous loss. Families lose their homes, of course, but they often lose their stuff, which is piled on the street or taken by movers. Kids lose their school. Eviction comes with this mark, a blemish, which can prevent you from moving into good neighborhood and good housing, because many landlords see that mark, that court record, and they say, no, thanks. And so we push those families into worse housing, and we push those families into high crime neighborhoods. Eviction causes job loss. And if any of you listening or watching today have been evicted, you know exactly why that is. It's such a consuming, stressful event. It can cause you to make mistakes at work and lose your footing in the labor market. And then there's the eviction mark on your soul, your mental health. And when you add all that up, I think we have to conclude that evictions, which used to be rare in this country, which used to draw crowds, evictions are not just a condition of poverty, they're a cause of it. They're making things worse, and they're leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation. I wanted to ask you the political impacts of this debate. Donald Trump is often talked about as having enormous appeal in rural, white America, and some of the poorest states in the union have delivered the biggest votes for Trump, places like West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi. Wondering your sense of this account of why Trump appeals to poor white Americans? I think it's hard to answer that question without recognizing the racial element of the appeal. When Trump started his presidential run famously, he was disparaging Mexicans and immigrants. There's very little evidence that immigrants dragged down wages for Native workers or contributing to poverty in America at all, but it really has a deep cultural resonance with a lot of Americans who are white and who are in struggling economic areas. There is a connection here on the ground, though, that I think is often overlooked in the politics, which is on basic issues of economic fairness and justice. There's a lot less polarization than we often see in Washington. Most Americans want a higher minimum wage. Most Americans think that the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes. Most Americans, Democrat and Republican, believe now that poverty isn't caused by immoral failing, that it's caused by unfair circumstances. The electeds are very polarized, but on the ground, I think there's a lot of Americans that want more opportunity, they want less poverty, and they want less inequality on both sides of the aisle. Professor Desmond, I wanted to ask you about your comment that many well-off Americans, quote, are unwitting enemies of the poor. And this goes to the issue of solutions. Explain how. So if we just look at tax breaks, for example, so many of us who are homeowners who receive something called the mortgage interest deduction, we can just deduct the interest of our mortgage every year at tax time. And if you look at that deduction and you look at everything that homeowner subsidies amount to, you know, in 2021, we as a nation spent $193 billion on those benefits and only $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy, public housing section eight. So it's a big imbalance. Most of those property owner deductions, they went to families with six-figure incomes. And we also have to face the fact that most white Americans today are homeowners, and they benefit from one of the sweetest cutouts in the tax code, but most Black and Latinx families are not because of our systematic dispossession of people of color from the land. And so it's really hard to think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying racial and economic inequalities than that system does. And many of us are protective of those tax breaks. And so this book is a call to reevaluate our values. It's not a call for redistribution, I don't think. It is a call for rebalancing our safety net. I want a country that does a lot more to fight poverty than it does to guard fortunes. Could you talk about the changing nature of work and the job market over the years and how that's affected definitions or how people see themselves as poor or not? You've said that your grandparents had careers, but this generation has gigs. How does that relate to poverty? It's huge. It's a huge part of the story. So after World War II, the job market really delivered for many Americans for decades. In the 1970s, one in three of us belonged to a union. Worker pay was climbing. Real wages, inflation adjusted wages increased by 2% every year. If you had a job for Ford, you worked for Ford. And you could advance in that company. You got some benefits. You got some pride. But as workers started to lose power, as unions started to be destroyed and dismantled, our jobs got a lot worse. And if you look at the real pay, the inflation adjusted wages for men without college degrees today, it's actually lower than it was 50 years ago. Benefits have gone away. And many of us who are working for Ford now or Apple or Google, those companies don't sign our checks. We're independent contractors without a lot of benefits and without a lot of room for advancement. The deterioration of the American job means that the government has to do more to fight poverty. When the War on Poverty and Great Society were launched, the job market was strong. And it was kind of a one-two punch, deep government investments along with the job market that was delivering. That massively cut poverty in America. Today, the job market just isn't pulling its way. And this is one of the reasons that we don't just need deeper investments. We need different ones. And one of those investments is finding ways to empower more American workers. You've called for poverty abolition. And this goes right to your previous point. Lay out the ways poverty can be abolished. And again, that point you made earlier, that the pandemic taught us so much. For example, cutting in half child poverty within six months, and then the U.S. Congress votes to do away with that program, throwing millions more children into poverty? Right. Exactly. A study came out a few years ago that showed that if the top 1% just paid the taxes they owed, not paid more taxes, just stopped evading taxes, that we as a nation could raise an additional $175 billion. That's more than enough money to reestablish that child tax credit. That's enough money to double our investment in affordable housing and still have money left over. That's basically enough money to lift everyone under the official poverty line above the line. We have the resources. We know how to do it. So when we're met with this kind of question about how could we afford this? How could we afford to cut child poverty half or make sure every family in America has a decent affordable home? I feel like those questions are sinful and dishonest. The answer is staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if the richest among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed a welfare estate to do less to subsidize affluence and more to eradicate poverty. So how do we get there? We need deeper investments in the issue, which is funded by tax fairness and enforcement. We can go deeper. We also need different programs, programs that attack the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor market and then the housing market, especially. And then finally, our walls, they have to go. We have to end segregation in America and strive for broad open prosperity. Now, this sounds like a policy discussion, right? But it's also a personal commitment. So a call for poverty abolitionism is not just about voting the right way or signing up to join a social movement. It's also about ways that we need to interrogate our everyday lives and commit ourselves to divesting from poverty in our consumer choices, our neighborhood choices, and all the little ways that we go about our lives that unwittingly contributes to this issue. You mentioned the housing market and affordable housing. But the reality is that for most Americans, their main source of wealth is whatever equity they have in a home they've purchased pay a mortgage on over the years. But increasingly, we've seen these private equity firms come in, especially after the housing crash of 2008 and buy up all of this housing. And so now we have this unusual situation of private equity having an enormous say over affordability in housing in the United States. What can be done about that? I think one thing that can be done is for us to get serious about expanding home ownership opportunity for first time homeowners and for working families. Last year, 27% of homes sold in America were for under $100,000. Affordable homes, but only 23% of those were financed with a mortgage. The rest were kind of bought up in cash by landlords or real estate speculators. So what's going on? And the thing that's happening is that many banks just aren't interested in these small dollar mortgages. And it's not because those small dollar mortgages are riskier, they're just less profitable. So if I'm a bank, I have an incentive to give you a mortgage on a $5 million home, but I'm not really interested in funding that $75,000 home. So this is where the government could step in. It could help down payment assistants and ensure those kind of mortgages in a different way to incentivize that low income families have that opportunity to step into home ownership. You know, I remember a meeting with a woman named Laquie Higley in Cleveland a few years ago, and she was renting a four bedroom home for $950 a month. But if she bought that home under conventional mortgage standards, her mortgage payment and insurance would be about $570 a month, $4,500 more in her pocket every year. That's real money and without rent hikes. And so I think that's one way we can kind of step in and make sure those homes go to more people and not just to go to private equity. Matthew Desmond, you talk about labor unions promoting worker empowerment, which ultimately works to fight poverty. And you say also that poverty is so expensive. You have this beautiful quote of James Baldwin, anyone who's ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. Put those two together. So if you look at just the financial exploitation of the poor, you know, you learn that every year overdraft fees pull about $11 billion a year. In fees, only 9% of bank customers pay most of those fees. Who are those 9%? They're the poor made to pay for their poverty. And if you add that up to the $1.6 billion in check cashing fees and almost $11 billion in payday loan fees, you learn that every day, every single day, $61 million in fees are pulled from the pockets of the poor. So when Baldwin wrote that, he couldn't even imagined these receipts. So this is one way that we need to address poverty because poverty isn't just a lack of income. It's a lack of choice. And we need to expand the choices folks have in terms of where to work, where to live and how to access money and credit. And the issue of unions fighting poverty. So unions have an incredibly impressive track record in striving for worker empowerment. The problem in America today is organizing workplace is incredibly difficult. And so let's make it easier. So one idea in the book is something called sectorial bargaining, which is pretty wonky name. But the idea is pretty simple. Instead of organizing one Starbucks, then this Starbucks, then another Starbucks, what if everyone in food and beverage in America, every single worker took a vote? And if that vote cleared 50%, 60%, whatever we'd like, it would activate the secretary of labor who would form a bargaining panel made up of worker and business representatives who could come to an agreement for unions or protective rights that would protect all folks in that industry, every single barista, every single Starbucks. We have five seconds. So I think unions and worker power is essential to ending poverty in America. Matthew Desmond, we thank you so much for being with us and for your book, Poverty by America. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.