Diane Yentel on Eviction Crisis, Lisa Graves on USPS Under Attack
CounterSpin
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This week on CounterSpin: One expert, Emily Benfer, put it this way: About 10 million people, over a period of years, were displaced from their homes following the foreclosure crisis in 2008. We’re looking at 20 to 28 million people facing eviction between now and September. People have to fight their evictions "virtually," since housing courts are closed—and if you don't have that fast internet, or don't get on that Zoom call properly—that's "failure to appear," and you lose. The impact of eviction, meanwhile, can be devastating. Making folks homeless in a pandemic is just a flashpoint of this country's affordable housing crisis—and a reminder that, as a new report begins: "Housing is healthcare." The report, called Out of Reach 2020: The High Cost of Housing, comes from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. We talk with Coalition president Diane Yentel.
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 (photo: John H. White/EPA)
Also on the show: An election a public health crisis = voting by mail, which requires not just a functioning postal service, but a well-functioning one. A pandemic in which more people need critical medicines and supplies mailed to them calls for the same. But just as more is being asked of the US Postal Service, decades-old efforts to cut the legs out from under it are gathering force once again—and they're being amplified and abetted by Trump's new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. Listeners may know about Trump's obsession with making the USPS raise prices; seems he mainly he wants costs to go up for his official enemy, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, but he's OK with the public, for whom the Postal Service is the most popular federal agency—the only one named in the Constitution—suffering the consequences. What—and who—is driving the push to privatize the post office—and how have they had managed to shift the conversation? That's the topic of a new brief from Lisa Graves. She's executive director at True North Research, director also of the Koch Docs project—which might be a bit of a tip-off.
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