From Other Sources: News for and About Amherst.  This Week, Area News Roundup, The National Housing Crisis, and The Growing Threats to Democracy

On the same day that the US senate rejected legislation that guaranteed women’s right to birth control, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), admittedly not the sharpest knife in the senate drawer, suggested getting rid of elections altogether because they are rigged.  With each passing day, the far right makes their vision of the tyranny they hope to impose on all of us all the more clear and frighteningly, there is no bottom to what they can imagine.  Human rights long taken for granted are on the chopping block.  New draconian punishments for women and queers are imagined with each passing week.  Perceived enemies of the regime will be imprisoned. Millions will be deported. The government will be purged of all who are not vetted as loyal to the new order. The plan, a vision for a fascist America, is spelled out in a nearly thousand page document originally conceived at the Heritage Foundation called Project 2025. The project is summarized and analyzed in this month’s issue of The Nation, the introduction to which I provide below. Or check out Andra Watkins’ brief primer for a quick introduction.

Are Paywalls An Obstacle?”
Here at the Indy we support several other publications with our personal subscriptions and we encourage our readers to do the same as they are able. And for this feature, we try to post articles that are not hiding behind a paywall. But sometimes an article worth reading is hiding behind a paywall, and subscription to the source is just not feasible. For such instances there are workarounds. Check out some possibilities here and here and here.

Share The Good Stuff That You Are Reading
Have you read something that you think is worth sharing? Share the link in the comments section below and tell us why you are sharing it.

LOCAL NEWS ROUNDUP
Mayor Boosts Northampton School Spending After Public Outcry by Alexander MacDougall (6/5/24). A day before an expected final vote Thursday on the city’s budget for the coming fiscal year, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra has submitted a new budget that increases school funding by twice her originally planned 4% hike, after more than a month of public pressure and protests over proposed job cuts. The mayor’s new budget for fiscal 2025 increases school funding by 8% from the current year’s spending by adding an additional $737,556 from the city’s fiscal stability fund, up from a 5% increase the mayor presented to the council earlier this month. According to the mayor’s office, this represents the largest annual increase to the school budget over the last 30 years.Sciarra presented her revised budget to the Finance Committee on Wednesday evening,  “It’s been a moving experience to see such a dedicated and such an involved school community,” she told the committee, referring to the public response that has greeted her previous spending plans. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Federal Funds Heading to Amherst, Holyoke for Purchase of More Than Two Dozen Electric School Buses by Alexa Lewis (6/5/24). School districts in Amherst and Holyoke are well on their way to transporting students to and from school in buses that run entirely on clean energy. The two districts were among 17 in Massachusetts to secure portions of $42 million in federal funding late last month to replace school buses that run on fossil fuels with electric vehicles, reducing harmful emissions and combating climate change.Holyoke is getting a little more than $7.2 million and Amherst-Pelham Regional Public Schools will receive $600,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus program. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Pro-Palestinian Protestors Shut Down Amherst College Alumni Weekend Keynote by Scott Mezbech (6/4/24). Alumni Weekend at Amherst College, typically a celebratory occasion for members of classes marking milestone anniversaries, featured two pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including one that shut down the annual Conversation with the President at Johnson Chapel on Saturday morning. With hundreds of people gathered on campus for the traditional reunions a week after the college’s commencement, with large tents set up outside dormitories and residence halls, protesters disrupted a signature event meeting of the Alumni Council & Society of Alumni. That event was have included a vote on placing $10 million into the Amherst Fund, along with a conversation between President Michael A. Elliott and Chantal Kordula, who serves on the board of trustees.The protesters calling for divestment from corporations that support Israel caused the program to end prematurely when people took the stage and chanted “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” and held a sign and a Palestinian flag. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Youth-Led Sunrise Amherst Making Their Voices Heard on School Budget and Climate Issues by Scott Merzbach (5/31/24). Potential staffing cuts at the Amherst-Pelham Regional schools and ongoing pressures on municipal spending recently prompted six members of the youth-led Sunrise Amherst group to seek and receive an audience with Amherst College President Michael A. Elliott. Dressing in formal attire for the occasion, the students made a direct appeal for the college to offer financial help to Amherst, impressing on the college leader the consequences for student education should layoffs occur, and pushing the case that if the college provided $700,000 for the fiscal year 2025 budget, such a contribution would compare to what other similar institutions of higher education give their host communities. While the students got no resolution on their request and are worried that a $355,000 deficit in the regional schools budget remains, they say they were pleased to get an opportunity to outline their concerns, in a similar fashion to how school and town officials have also approached the college. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Amtrak Expands Valley Flyer Service with Evening Runs to and from Valley and NYC by Alexander MacDougall (5/29/24). Residents in the Pioneer Valley looking to get away to New York City for the weekend now have more of a means to do so, thanks to additional Amtrak Valley Flyer trains running between Greenfield and New Haven, Connecticut, that can transfer to the Big Apple’s Penn Station. The new northbound afternoon train No. 486 reaches its terminus in Greenfield at 5:30 p.m. after starting in New Haven at 2:50 p.m. The schedule would allow a passenger to board the train after transferring from a New York City train departing at 12:37 p.m. Stops along the way are made in Springfield, Holyoke and Northampton.The southbound evening train No. 479, meanwhile, leaves Greenfield at 6:05 p.m. and reaches New Haven at 9 p.m. Passengers can reach New York City at 10:57 p.m. after transferring. Stops along the way are made in Northampton, Holyoke and Springfield. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

HOUSING
Feds Raid Corporate Landlord Escalating Nationwide Criminal Probe of Rent Increases by Judd Legum (6/4/24). Over the last four years, rents have skyrocketed by an average of over 30% nationwide and are a major factor in the overall inflation rate. There are a variety of factors behind the increases, including an overall housing shortage. But the Department of Justice is investigating another potential cause: a massive criminal conspiracy among large landlords.  Last month, the FBI reportedly conducted an unannounced raid of Cortland Management, a major corporate landlord based in Atlanta. The surprise search appears to be part of a Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported by Politico in March, into an alleged scheme among many corporate landlords to artificially increase rents through collusion. The investigation centers around the use of RealPage, advanced property management software used by many corporate landlords. Following a 2022 exposé by ProPublica, RealPage and landlords that use the software have been named defendants in multiple class action lawsuits, as well as actions filed by the Attorneys General of Arizona and Washington, DC. (Popular Information)

When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord by Heather Vogell  (2/27/22). During the past decade, private equity-backed firms such as Greystar have stormed into the multifamily apartment market, snapping up rentals by the thousands and becoming major landlords in American cities, according to ProPublica’s analysis of National Multifamily Housing Council data on the nation’s biggest owners of apartment buildings with five or more units.Private equity is now the dominant form of financial backing among the 35 largest owners of multifamily buildings, the analysis showed. In 2011, about a third of the apartment units held by the top owners were backed by private equity. A decade later, half of them were. (ProPublica)

Is There a Way out of American’s Impossible Housing Mess? (an interview with Fixer-Upper author Jenny Scheutz) by Henry Grabar (2/18/22). What do we talk about when we talk about the “housing crisis”? As Noah Kim observed in a recent article in Mother Jones, that term has meant so many things to so many different people that it sometimes seems to have no fixed meaning at all. Just in the past 10 or so years, “housing crisis” has referred to the fact that home prices have plummeted—and more recently, the fact that they have skyrocketed. Confusing, isn’t it? Better to say that the American housing market is broken in many different ways, across different kinds of places, that require different and sometimes contradictory solutions. Fortunately, the economist Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has some of the answers. In a recent interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, we discussed the contents of her new book, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.(Slate)

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY
Why Trump’s Second Victory Would Be Worse. There’s Now a Real, Organized Effort to Transform His Resentments and Impulses into Policy. It’s Called Project 2025. by Robert Borosge (June 2024). Kim Phillips-Fein outlines how Heritage’s new Mandate is far more extreme than the original 1980 plan that guided Reagan’s administration. An immediate priority, as Chris Lehmann details, will be to bring the permanent bureaucracy to heel. Schedule F—an executive order that Trump released in the last weeks of his presidency—will be revived, empowering the president to turn the civil service into a spoils system, creating 20,000 to 50,000 political appointees instead of the normal 4,000. In his second term, Trump will open not just the White House for business but the entire government. Central to this, as Elie Mystal explains, will be squelching any independence in the Department of Justice while continuing to pack the courts with reactionary partisans. Once ensconced in office, MAGA operatives will push to turn Trump’s threats into action. In year one, as Gaby Del Valle reports, his poisonous xenophobia will lead to an unprecedented roundup of millions of the undocumented, employing the National Guard and building detention camps as way stations to deportation. Sasha Abramsky reveals how part of Trump’s planned assault on public housing will aim at dispossessing US citizens born to noncitizen parents. (The Nation)

Under Trump The DOJ Will Become the Legal Wing of the MAGA Movement by.Eli Mystal (June 2024).
Project 2025 is telling us exactly how the conservatives plan to take away the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I beg the American people to believe them. This dystopian future isn’t a threat, it’s a certainty, should we give these people power again. (The Nation)

Senate Republicans Block Bill To Recognize Legal Right to Contraception by Carter Sherman (6/5/24).
Republicans argued that the legislation was unnecessary because, they say, contraceptives are not at political risk. In a Senate speech Wednesday, the Republican Iowa senator Joni Ernst accused Democrats of “fear-mongering in the name of politics”. Several Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Katie Britt of Alabama, JD Vance of Ohio and Mitt Romney of Utah, did not vote. Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have previously broken with their party to support abortion rights, voted in favor of the Right to Contraception act. The Wednesday vote was part of an offensive broadside by Democrats to spotlight their work around reproductive rights, a vital issue in the upcoming 2024 elections, nearly two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, including a sweeping package of legislation. (The Guardian)

American Autocracy Threat Tracker by by Norman L. Eisen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Siven Watt, Andrew Warren, Jacob Kovacs-Goodman and Francois Barrilleaux (6/5/24)
Former President Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on “day one.” He and his advisors and associates have publicly discussed hundreds of further actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security. These vary from Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups and energy extraction; to summarily firing tens of thousands of civil servants whom he perceives as adversaries; to prosecuting his political opponents for personal gain; to pardoning convicted January 6th rioters he views as “great patriots” and “hostages.” We track all of the specific promises, plans, and pronouncements here and we will continue to update them. (Justsecurity.org)

How To Tell Your Friends About Project 2025 by Andra Watkins (4/9/24). In today’s newsletter, I give readers tools to combat the vacuum of information on Project 2025. Most Americans are far more familiar with Project 2025 than they think. They’re learning what’s in it after the fact.What do I mean by “after-the-fact?” If you live in a red state, you’re already closer to living in the America envisioned by the framers of Project 2025. States like Florida and Texas haven’t adopted Project 2025 completely, but they are well on their way. An incremental chipping at rights and freedoms is a longstanding Republican tactic. They attack reproductive rights by making it harder to get an abortion. Then, they ban abortion. Next, they go after IVF. Finally, they use the Comstock Act to ban shipment of all contraception. And voila! They have implemented their Christo-fascist Project 2025 vision for controlling uteri. If Republicans are given unfettered power, they won’t need to care about subtlety. They can implement much of Project 2025’s policy proposals with ruthless confidence on Day 1 of a new Republican administration. Who will stop them? That’s why it is crucial to talk to everyone we know about Project 2025. They may roll their eyes and say, “That can’t happen in America.” But so much is ALREADY happening. (Project 2025 is Theorcracy on Substack)