Archives for March 2021

Deep freeze just latest disaster to befall Houston’s needy

HOUSTON (AP) — Ernest and Hester Collins already faced their share of hardships before last month’s deadly winter storm plunged much of Texas into a deep freeze and knocked out power to millions of homes, including their modest rental in one of Houston’s historically Black neighborhoods, Fifth Ward.

The brother and sister were getting by on a fixed income without a car when the storm left them and many neighbors without light or heat for days. The storm caused their pipes to burst, leaving some in the nation’s fourth-largest city without running water three weeks on because many couldn’t afford repairs. Their dire circumstances left them unable to bathe and forced to use buckets as toilets.

The storm, which experts say may have caused billions of dollars in damage, is just the latest disaster in recent years to disproportionately affect Houston’s communities of color and its poorest residents. These include major floods in 2015 and 2016, devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and, to a lesser degree, Tropical Storm Imelda two years later, a series of plant and refinery fires and explosions, and of course the coronavirus pandemic.

Not surprisingly, many in these communities are beyond frustrated by what they feel is a lack of assistance each time a disaster strikes.

“For some reason, we are not getting (help). They put us on the back burner,” Ernest Collins, 56, said.

“Because we poor,” a female neighbor added.

Local officials, including Mayor Sylvester Turner, say they’ve focused recent recovery efforts on helping the underserved, but their work is far from complete. Community advocates worry that residents will continue having trouble accessing help and that this will exacerbate the ills afflicting their communities, including income inequality and a lack of health care.

Last month’s storm caused blackouts in much of Texas and left more than 1.4 million Houston-area customers without power. The outages also forced millions of people in Texas and elsewhere, including Mississippi, to have to boil their water because treatment plants lost power. About 25% of all Houston water customers experienced some kind of leak from busted pipes. Of the 25 people killed by the storm in the Houston area, 17 were Black or Latino.

Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, said neighborhoods with predominantly Black and Latino populations, such as the Fifth Ward, have faced challenges from the start caused by residential segregation and racially discriminatory practices that denied such individuals mortgages and loans.

“This is life in a lot of those neighborhoods … struggle, having to live on a modest income, just barely,” Bullard said.

As she stood outside her home, Hester Collins, 67, said the helplessness of her situation fueled her depression. The only momentary solace she took was listening to R&B music coming from her neighbor’s home.

“So, I just have to deal with what God blessed me to have,” she said.

A block away, a group of friends who had informally formed a relief effort stood outside a U-Haul truck, giving away water and other supplies.

“It’s just us as Texans taking care of one another,” said Jacqueline Westman, who had previously lived in Houston but now resides in Austin and whose group raised thousands of dollars to pay for multiple supply giveaways in Fifth Ward.

About 6 miles (10 kilometers) to the northeast in another historically Black neighborhood, Trinity-Houston Gardens, running water was restored to Marie Johnson’s home after she went nearly two weeks without it.

West Street Recovery, a nonprofit created after Hurricane Harvey to help fix flood-damaged homes, was working with plumbers to repair broken pipes for residents like Johnson, who can’t afford to do so.

Johnson, 71, whose home was damaged during Harvey, said she was grateful for West Street’s help as “the government doesn’t do anything.” The group was also fixing the plumbing in the adjacent homes of Johnson’s two sisters and her niece.

Trinity-Houston Gardens and similar neighborhoods have also had to contend with pollution from industrial facilities and refineries, and a lack of flood mitigation. In 2019, state officials announced that a cancer cluster had been identified in Fifth Ward and a nearby predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood, Kashmere Gardens, and that it may be tied to a rail yard.

“We have to invest in extreme systematic changes that … protect people from disaster as it comes and retroactively go back and help people care for the disaster that they’ve already endured,” said Becky Selle, a co-founder of West Street Recovery.

Some residents who were still waiting to have their homes fixed after Harvey are now dealing with additional damage from last month’s storm, said Keith Downey, president of the Kashmere Gardens Super Neighborhood, a community group that works with the city to set priorities and address local needs.

A city and county relief fund that has raised more than $11 million will offer repair help. But residents were also encouraged to apply for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA aid is limited, though, as the agency had awarded only $56 million in storm disaster assistance to the entire state of Texas as of Friday.

An analysis by Texas Housers, a nonprofit that works on housing issues, found that of individuals who had applied for FEMA assistance after Harvey, Black and Latino applicants were denied at higher rates than white applicants. The analysis also found that the poorer an applicant was, the more likely he or she would be denied FEMA assistance, said Zoe Middleton, Texas Housers’ Southeast Texas co-director.

A FEMA spokesman, Alberto Pillot, said the agency wants “everyone who was affected by the winter storm to recover as quickly as possible.”

And Houston’s mayor said the city was doing everything it could to help residents and “stabilize the situation.”

But not surprisingly after the repeated disappointments of past recovery efforts, some of Houston’s Black and Latino residents remain skeptical.

“In recent memory, there is nothing that tells (residents) the system will work for them,” said Huey German-Wilson, president of Trinity-Houston Gardens Super Neighborhood.

German-Wilson said that despite being exhausted and at times disheartened by the efforts to get her neighbors help, she will push forward.

“We continue to work with our communities to say, ‘No we’re not going to be overwhelmed and we’re not going to give in to this.’”

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

USPS early outs and you: Good deal, or return to sender?

The Postal Service’s early retirement offer has given new (probably false) hope to feds in other agencies who would love to retire early on an immediate but reduced annuity. That’s because many people think that buyouts (VSIPs in government lingo) and VERAs (early retirement) go hand in hand. That’s usually true, but not in the case of the Postal Service, which is offering the early retirement option through April and only to non-bargaining unit workers at headquarter and area and district offices. The vast majority of the Service’s 645,000 workers are represented by unions (most are also actually dues-paying members) and aren’t eligible for the early out.

It’s also likely that, under the Biden administration and with Democratic control of Congress, many if any other federal operations will be downsizing and need to offer buyouts or early outs. While private sector jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate because of the COVID-19 pandemic the government has been growing. The Transportation Security Administration is looking to hire up to 6,000 more people in anticipation that air travel will be going up, big time, in the coming months and years. Many other agencies with health and safety roles will be hiring more people. The Postal Service is the exception.

Since the Post Office Department left the Cabinet and because it’s a semi-government owned corporation, many politicians and private companies have sought to limit its role. The idea was and is to let private companies handle high-end, high-revenue shipments leaving the USPS with less profitable options: Like the requirement to deliver a letter from Florida to Alaska for 55 cents (not a profit-making move) while letting non-postal delivery firms take-on more lucrative delivery options, sometimes using the USPS to deliver their goods. During the Trump years the Postal Service took heat because of the flap over voting by mail. Many thought it was under orders to self-destruct or slow deliveries to ‘prove’ it was unreliable. Bottom line is that whatever the future holds for the USPS, it isn’t likely to impact feds in other agencies—except when their mail is delayed too.

Many feds have been dreaming of buyouts since they were first launched during the Clinton years. The President wanted to reduce government to its size during the Kennedy administrations. Buyouts linked with early retirement was the answer. The first buyouts were authorized by Defense (primarily at naval shipyards) and were worth a maximum of $25,000. Later VSiPS and VERAs were expanded to other agencies. But the $25,000 maximum payment has remain unchanged except for Defense which can offer up to $40,000. Also, agencies offering early outs without a buyout usually got few takers! Also in most cases that $25,000 shrinks to $17,000 or $18,000 after deductions.

VERAs without a cash payment can be useful to select workers. They can allow eligible employees to retire years early on a reduced annuity partially protected from inflation. But those annual cost of living adjustments don’t begin until age 62 for anyone under age 62. So an employee under the FERS retirement system might be able to retire in his or her 50s but wouldn’t have any COLA (cost of living adjustment) protection until age 62. Feds considering early retirement should also check to be sure they don’t run afoul of the 5-year rule for health plan coverage. Government employees and retirees now qualify for anywhere from 20 to 40 health plans and options. They can change plans every year if they like and can’t be turned down for any reason. Workers and retirees pay the same premiums in the same plan. And the government pays more than 70% of the average premium. Few private companies offer such a benefit, so many options or, in many cases, any health insurance at all.

A Washington area financial planner says she warns all her fed clients to think carefully before leaving government early if higher pay is the primary reason. “When you consider the TSP match, the government health insurance options and things like vacation time and holidays in government I tell people they better get A LOT more money” before trading their federal job for other work.

So while the USPS offer is interesting, it won’t have any impact on most feds much less most postal workers. But for those still dreaming of retiring early with buyout consider this: There are times when the numbers tell you that the only thing worse than taking early retirement with a buyout is taking early retirement without one.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By David Thornton

When Big Ben is running slow, workers add an old penny to pendulum to cause it to speed up. Adding one penny causes the clock to gain two-fifths of a second in 24 hours.

Source: Reuters

Emails: FBI was looking for gold at Pennsylvania dig site

Go for the gold? The U.S. government went for it.

FBI agents were looking for an extremely valuable cache of fabled Civil War-era gold — possibly tons of it — when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago this month, according to government emails and other recently released documents in the case.

On March 13, 2018, treasure hunters led the FBI to Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend has it an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.

The FBI has long refused to confirm why exactly it went digging, saying only in written statements over the years that agents were there for a court-authorized excavation of “what evidence suggested may have been a cultural heritage site.”

In any event, the FBI says, the dig came up empty.

But the father-son duo who brought a small army of federal agents to the site remain convinced the FBI uncovered something there — and their lawyer, Bill Cluck, is still pressing the case, successfully suing for access to government emails about the dig.

Those documents, which Cluck provided to The Associated Press, show that federal law enforcement was indeed after buried treasure.

“We believe the cache itself is in the neighborhood of 3x5x8 (feet) to 5x5x8,” wrote K.T. Newton, an assistant U.S attorney in Philadelphia, in a 2018 email marked “Confidential.”

Since the Elk County site was on state-owned land, the FBI had to secure a federal court order to gain access. The legal maneuvering generated emails between Newton and Audrey Miner, chief lawyer for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

On March 13, as FBI agents clambered up a hill to the target, Miner bluntly asked Newton: “Can you please provide the basis upon which the Office of the United States Attorney asserts that the gold, if found, belongs to the federal government?”

Newton replied that a federal affidavit in the case was sealed. She instead offered to “discuss this generally with you on the phone,” according to email records released by the state under court order.

The federal government followed a well-worn path to the woods of northwestern Pennsylvania, where legendary tales of buried Civil War gold had inspired generations of treasure hunters — including Dennis and Kem Parada.

The Paradas, who co-own the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers, had spent years looking for the long-lost booty before going to the FBI with their evidence in January 2018, saying their sophisticated detector had registered a hunk of metal they suspected was the gold of lore.

Within weeks, the FBI hired geophysical consulting firm Enviroscan to survey the hilltop site. Enviroscan’s gravimeter also indicated a large metallic mass with the density of gold, according to Warren Getler, who worked closely with the Paradas and the FBI.

An FBI agent told them the location of the mass was “one or two feet off Denny’s sweet spot,” recalled Getler, author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver. “Then I went to ask how big is it. And he said, ‘7 to 9 tons.’ And I literally said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”

That much gold would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today — and, assuming it was there, would almost certainly touch off a legal fight over how to divvy up the spoils.

Enviroscan co-founder Timothy Bechtel declined comment to the AP about what his instruments detected, citing client confidentiality. Bechtel said the FBI has asked him to keep quiet about his findings.

John Louie, a geophysics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, unconnected to the dig, said the gravimeter is a powerful tool that can yield important clues about what’s underground.

“But it doesn’t prove it,” he said. “It doesn’t make any elemental analysis. It’s indicative, it’s suggestive, but it can’t prove it.”

To prove it, the FBI needed to dig.

The Paradas and Getler have previously said they had an agreement with the FBI to watch the excavation. Officers instead confined them to their car for most of the dig, then, at the end of the second and final day, escorted them to the site — by that time a large, empty hole.

The FBI has long been adamant that whatever the agents were looking for, they didn’t find it.

“The FBI unequivocally rejects any claims or speculation to the contrary,” a spokesperson said last week.

On March 16, 2018, two days after the dig ended, Newton emailed Miner that “we are all disappointed and scratching our heads over the several scientific test results.”

It’s unclear what she meant, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia said last week it considers the matter to be closed.

The dig drew plenty of media attention at the time. On March 28, Miner asked Newton for an update on the federal investigation, telling her “the gold story still has legs, and the DCNR is now getting a lot of ‘gold-diggers’ interested in Dent’s Run.”

In her reply, Newton told Miner: “For your knowledge only … we have no other scientific evidence, other than what the excavation had been based on, that any gold is hidden in that area.”

Miner emailed back: “I guess you can’t come right out and state there is no gold to be found at Dent’s Run?”

“Unfortunately, we cannot,” the prosecutor replied.

Through a spokesperson, Miner declined comment.

Three years later, the Dent’s Run story is not likely to go away, government denials notwithstanding. The Paradas and Getler are planning a news conference on Wednesday to keep the spotlight on their claims. Residents have told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight — when the excavation was supposed to have been paused — and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks.

“I gotta find out what happened to all that gold,” Dennis Parada said in a phone interview last week.

The FBI assertion of an empty hole is “insulting all the credible people who did this kind of work,” he said. “It was a slap in the face, really, to think all these people could make that kind of mistake.”

Cluck, meanwhile, is still pursuing government material on the case — nearly 2,400 pages, as well as video files, that the FBI has promised to turn over in response to his Freedom of Information Act request.

All documents in the federal court case about the dig remain sealed. For that reason, a state appeals judge recently declined to order the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to give Cluck the federal writ of entry and seizure warrant that the FBI agents relied on to gain access to the site.

In rejecting Cluck’s petition, though, state Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson left a tantalizing clue. In a footnote of his Jan. 28 opinion, Brobson revealed, for the first time, the name of the sealed federal case:

“In the Matter of: Seizure of One or More Tons of United States Gold.”

Hungary closes stores, schools to curb surge due to variants

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarians on Monday awoke to a new round of strict lockdown measures aimed at slowing a record-breaking wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths that are among the worst in the world.

A rapid rise in pandemic indicators since early February prompted Hungary’s government to announce the new restrictions, including closing most stores for two weeks and kindergartens and primary schools until April 7. Most services are also required to cease operations, and the government urged businesses to allow employees to work from home. Grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations and tobacconists can stay open.

Hungary’s high schools have been remote learning since November and its bars, restaurants and gyms have been closed since then as well.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has warned that the strain on the country’s hospitals will soon surpass any other period in Hungary since the pandemic began, and that failing to impose harsher restrictions now would result in a “tragedy.”

“The next two weeks will be difficult … but if we want to open by Easter, we’ve got to close down,” Orban said Friday on a Facebook video.

The number of patients on ventilators in Hungarian hospitals has more than doubled in the last two weeks, with 806 patients on Monday compared to the previous peak of 674 in early December.

Deaths have also risen sharply. With nearly 16,000 confirmed deaths in a country of fewer than 10 million, Hungary has the 8th worst death rate per 1 million inhabitants in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of COVID-19 patients being treated in hospitals is also likely to break its previous record on Tuesday.

“We can see that the third wave is spreading very forcefully, mainly due to (virus) variants,” Hungary’s chief medical officer Cecilia Muller said Sunday. “We can’t do anything else now but break the chain of infections.”

The new restrictions came as many Hungarian businesses were already struggling to make ends meet as shoppers stayed at home amid the surging cases. Zoltan Suto, the founder and owner of Hungarian fashion brand Griff Collection, said revenues were down 70% through the winter thanks to cautious consumers avoiding crowds at shopping malls.

“I can’t pay rent. I can’t pay salaries or social contributions, not to mention the taxes,” Suto said, adding that a 50% commercial tax break offered by the government meant little in the absence of revenues.

Last year’s pandemic-induced economic recession, which saw a 5.1% decrease in Hungary’s GDP, led to the shuttering of five of Griff Collection’s 10 stores in Hungary, which employ around 80 people. Suto says his business suffered a loss of 200-300 million Hungarian forints ($645,000-$968,000) in 2020, and that the crisis will only deepen if the two-week closure that begins Monday is extended further.

Such economic pain has made Hungary’s government, which is facing an election next year, reluctant until now to introduce restrictions on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases and deaths have skyrocketed since early February.

Many parents scrambled over the weekend to alter work schedules and arrange for childcare, including Gyongyver and Szilard Brasnyo, a couple in Budapest who have two young daughters.

“We are lucky, my parents are coming over to help us out with the kids,” said Gyongyver, adding that her parents live in Serbia, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe, and have already received two vaccine shots.

Szilard, who works from home, said they felt “exhausted” after a year of raising the children during a pandemic. But he was optimistic that Hungary’s ambitious vaccination program – which has given more than 1 million Hungarians a vaccine shot, the second-highest vaccination rate in the 27-nation European Union — would soon bring life back to normal.

Hungary has obtained vaccines from Russia and China as well as those approved by the EU.

“We’re really looking forward to having a much safer environment for all of us,” Szilard said.

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— Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic,https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Wall Street finishes mixed as tech slump offsets other gains

Major U.S. stock indexes closed mostly lower Monday as another rise in bond yields helped set off more heavy selling in technology companies.

The S&P 500 fell 0.5% after having been up 1% earlier. Because of their huge size, drops by Apple, Google’s parent company and other major technology stocks helped drag the S&P 500 into the red, even though more stocks rose than fell in the benchmark index.

The selling, which accelerated toward the end of the day, left the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite down 10.5% from the all-time high it reached on Feb. 12. A drop of 10% or more from a recent peak is known on Wall Street as a “correction.”

Bond yields rose broadly. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbed to 1.60% from 1.55% late Friday.

Yields have been marching higher with rising expectations for the economy’s growth and for the inflation that could accompany it. Higher yields put downward pressure on stocks generally, in part because they can steer away dollars that had been headed for the stock market into bonds instead. That makes investors less willing to pay as high prices for stocks, especially those that look the most expensive, such as technology stocks.

Investors can expect more market volatility as long as bond yields keep rising, said Sylvia Jablonski, chief investment officer at Defiance ETFs. “I do think it’s something that’s going to be temporary.”

Still, she said, the pullback in technology stocks offers an attractive entry point for investors to snap up shares in some big names, like Apple and Amazon, at a better price.

“There are some solid buy-on-the-dip opportunities here,” Jablonski said.

The S&P 500 fell 20.59 points to 3,821.35. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 306.14 points, or 1%, to 31,802.44. The index briefly climbed more than 650 points. The Nasdaq lost 310.99 points, or 2.4%, to 12,609.16.

Smaller company stocks, which have led the market higher this year, notched more gains. The Russell 2000 index added 10.77 points, or 0.5%, to 2,202.98.

Financial stocks had some of the best gains. Wells Fargo rose 3.3% and Citigroup gained 2.8%.

Trading has been choppy in recent weeks as investors fret over the sudden spike in long-term interest rates in the bond market. The S&P 500 is coming off its first weekly gain in three weeks.

Technology companies have been heading lower as investors start to doubt whether the huge gains they made during the pandemic months can continue if inflation surges. Apple fell 4.2%, Google’s parent Alphabet dropped 4.3% and Facebook slid 3.4%.

The latest move higher in bond yields fanned those concerns Monday.

“Interest rates reflect a real economic recovery and they’re not going back down anytime soon,” said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network. “Right now, the market is struggling with that.”

Investors have been betting that trillions of dollars in coming government stimulus will help lift the economy out of its coronavirus-induced malaise. There are also investors who are betting that stimulus and an improving economy will result in some amount of inflation down the road.

The U.S. economic aid package, passed narrowly by the Senate on Saturday, provides direct payments of up to $1,400 for most Americans and extends emergency unemployment benefits. It’s a victory for President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies, and final congressional approval is expected this week.

“That eliminates a major short-term risk and also puts a lot of money into the economy in the short term,” McMillan said.

Rising oil prices are a part of that picture. After plunging with the onset of the pandemic, as demand plummeted, prices have been recovering in the past few months.

Last week, with oil prices rising, some observers were expecting the OPEC cartel and its allies to lift more restrictions and let the oil flow more freely. But OPEC agreed to leave most restrictions in place, despite growing demand.

Benchmark U.S. crude oil for April delivery fell $1.04, or 1.6% to $65.05 a barrel Monday. It’s still up 32.8% so far this year.

Archives for March 2021

Nearly Useless Factoid

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