USA

Omicron closing day care centers in droves as parents are 'just trying to stay afloat'

Alia Wong, USA TODAY

Sun., January 16, 2022, 

If you’re a working parent with young kids, chances are the new year hasn’t been as happy as you’d hoped. Omicron is raging, guidance is constantly changing, vaccines aren't approved for little children and coronavirus test kits are in short supply.

Reliable, affordable child care options are scarce. Centers cancel classes or close altogether as employees call in sick or leave their jobs. COVID-19 cases crop up at day cares, where internal spread used to be somewhat limited.

“You had so many programs that were under the impression that they weathered the worst of the storm,” said Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “Now they're back in program-delivery crisis, and they're back in economic crisis.”

Sammie Boatright, a teacher for 3-year-olds at Small World of Learning day care in Abilene, Texas, assists a student in reading a book Tuesday.

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It's hard to quantify how widespread child care disruptions are. Data is hard to come by because the sector is essentially composed of a bunch of small businesses. The statistics that do exist – supported by mounting complaints on social media, flurries of texts between working parents and interviews from around the country – suggest closures are again on the rise after months of relative stability. They're driven by the surge in COVID-19 cases and staffing issues.

One such statistic comes from Zach Parolin, a professor of social policy at Italy’s Bocconi University. Since the start of the pandemic, he and his co-researcher used anonymized cellphone data from more than 40 million users to track visits to schools and child care centers in the USA. When the total number of monthly visits to a child care center is more than 50% lower than it was in 2019, the researchers count that as a disruption.

Last month, 28% of formal child care centers experienced a decline of at least that much , according to the researchers' dataset. That was the highest rate since June.

‘I have to just put my career on hold'

Monica Cox, mother of a 3-year-old in Ohio, said it feels like she’s running a day care out of her home. She never expected she’d be at this stage in her life – in her 40s, a distinguished professor of engineering, a small-business owner – spending so many workdays caring for a toddler. Her son’s actual day care center is winding down its latest closure in a string of several due to positive cases.

Cox and her husband, a teacher, must coordinate their busy schedules so they can take care of their toddler when he can't be at day care. They often end up taking sick days. Cox, who works from home, has grown accustomed to working in the early mornings and late evenings, so she can tend to her son during the day. She admitted her work performance has suffered.

“Something is telling me not to push myself at a level that I used to push myself because I don't know how long I have to sustain this,” she said.

Taylor Sims’ daughter Eleanor was born prematurely with a heart issue in April 2020 and hadn’t spent much time around other children until last fall. That's when Sims and her husband decided, in consultation with their doctor, that it was safe enough to enroll Eleanor in day care. Sims, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was relieved she’d finally have some time to make progress on her history doctorate – she’d had to postpone its completion.

She and her husband, a pastor and adjunct professor, settled on day care three days a week partly because of the cost. Three days was better than nothing. “Day care is really the only place she goes to protect our work time,” she said.

Looking back, Sims said three days feel like a luxury: Eleanor has spent almost half of those days at home. Some days, she woke up with a runny nose – a typical toddler affliction – which often meant the family had to seek a coronavirus test and await results, per health guidelines and day care rules or out of abundance of caution.

On other days, staffing issues or positive cases forced the day care to cancel classes, including this week and right before Christmas. (The center, like many providers, technically subscribes to a 10-day quarantine period rather than the revised guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but “it’s all a little ad hoc,” Sims said.)

Starla Owens, center, picks up her 11-month-old daughter, Cherish, while Terita Carey, director of Childcare Wonderland in Columbus, Ohio, puts a coat on her nephew on Nov. 19, 2021.

“It's day by day, not knowing if it's going to be open,” Sims said. “If she can't go on Tuesday, it's like, ‘OK, I hope she can go tomorrow.’ Before we know it, the week is over.” The missed class time amounts to lots of wasted money: Their university-subsidized tuition is charged monthly, whether Eleanor attends class or not.

K-12 schools have 'test-to-stay': What about day care centers?

It also amounts to a harsh reality that, Sims has begun to accept, is here to stay.

“I’m definitely not making progress (on my Ph.D.) – I’m just trying to stay afloat,” Sims said. “I have to just put my career on hold. There's no other way to phrase it. My husband is super accommodating, but his job is the one that pays the bills. Mine's not. So I’m trying to triage in that way and be realistic that this isn't ending any time soon.”

Day care disruptions hurt economy

At the height of the pandemic's shutdowns, more than 2 in 3 of the country’s formal child care centers were closed or operating at reduced capacity, according to Parolin’s data. Disruptions lessened, reaching their lowest rates in the pandemic last summer. That continued until December, as the omicron surge took off, though disruption rates are still just a fraction of what they were in April 2020.

All the while, child care's economic crisis continued to brew.

According to data collected last fall by ​​the University of Oregon’s RAPID-EC project, which surveys families about issues such as well-being and child care, 1 in 5 parents said they experienced disruptions to their child care, whether through a home-based provider or a center. More than two-thirds of those disruptions happened because the provider didn’t have enough staff.

Lynne Costic, the retired owner of Myah's Just 4 Kids Learning Center, moves furniture out of the center's location in downtown Peoria, Ill., on Dec. 30, 2021. The day care, which opened in 2007, is closing because of a shortage of teachers. Costic says the extra furniture and supplies will go into storage or be moved to the second Myah's location.

Child care workers have long been overburdened and underpaid, contributing to high turnover in the industry even before the pandemic. Limited public investment in early learning has meant many providers are either in debt or charge tuition rates that are out of reach for middle-income families. Few centers can afford to pay their workers more than minimum wage, let alone give them health insurance.

“Child care was already on incredibly unstable footing well before the pandemic,” said Lily Roberts, the managing director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Some economists argue the “Great Resignation” is a misnomer. Rather, it’s “the Great Upgrade.”

“People are not resigning their jobs, by and large, to sit at home – that's not financially possible for families,” Roberts said. “What they're doing is they're finding work where they feel safer. They're finding work that pays better. They're finding work where they have more control over the hours.”

There's a consequence: “It leads to gaps in the workforces that they're leaving behind,” Roberts said. “And it's a really challenging cycle for people who are on the receiving end of those services” – services such as child care and people such as parents who need it.

Women, who tend to take on the brunt of parenting duties, have left the workforce in droves since the start of the pandemic. Women’s participation in the workforce, according to the latest jobs report, is at the lowest rate it's been since 1991.

Child care problems have skyrocketed during COVID-19: Women have paid the price.

The American Rescue Plan, a federal package of coronavirus relief, allocated $39 billion for child care, most of it in the form of “stabilization funds” that could be used for expenses ranging from payroll to protective masks. That cash infusion, which is running out, wasn’t a permanent answer to instability in the sector, Roberts said. In a survey conducted last summer, nearly half of providers said they would’ve probably closed without help, including the Paycheck Protection Program and COVID-19 relief money.

Disruptions could hit families even harder now that they no longer receive monthly deposits as part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief package, which expanded the child tax credit. The program expired last month after Congress failed to extend it.

You can still get child credit on your tax return: Look out for this IRS letter.

Research suggests those payments helped reduce food insecurity and increased families’ ability to pay down debt. They helped soften the toll of child care disruptions, whether because parents used them to pay for emergency babysitting or offset the lost wages from taking off work.

The child care sector will continue free-falling, experts said, unless there’s a concerted, national effort to elevate early learning and raise the wages of its workers.

“We can't just keep patching over a system that's not working,” Roberts said. “We need to really infuse that system with money and programs that make it a real right in this country to have access to child care.”

Working parents were already scrambling: Then COVID-19 made child care deserts even worse.

 

This one-two punch from China and Russia marks the end of American adventurism

Syria’s inclusion in the Belt and Road Initiative is the final act in a long saga against American imperialism that shows how China and Russia can effectively counter U.S. intervention in the future.

Bradley Blankenship

is a Prague-based American journalist, columnist and political commentator. He has a syndicated column at CGTN and is a freelance reporter for international news agencies including Xinhua News Agency. Follow him on Twitter @BradBlank_

FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images / Gokhan Sahin

Damascus officially joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on Wednesday, which will provide a massive lifeline to the country that has been torn to shreds after more than a decade of war and Western sanctions. But more than this, this development has set a precedent that will fundamentally change the geopolitical landscape. 

This is because the decade-spanning Syrian conflict has hosted several proxy conflicts, which has invariably left the United States and its Western allies the losers. 

READ MORE: Blinken’s blinkered vision of Russia

For starters, while the conflict itself was, at least initially, part of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, numerous sources (including U.S. government sources published by WikiLeaks) suggest that the United States had been seeking regime change in Syria long before then. There are also countless reports by very good journalists, including on RT, that have dug up these connections.

However, this attempt devolved so quickly, and was so futile and messy, that the U.S. had ended up siding with the very terrorists it sought to destroy in the wake of 9/11. Syria was almost completely overrun by the likes of Islamic State (formerly ISIS; the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and was on the verge of becoming a terror nexus – until Russia intervened in September 2015.

This was not a Russian invasion per se, but a legitimate intervention based on an invitation from Syrian President Bashar Assad. I was actually in college when this happened and remember discussing on my radio show how huge of a deal this was. Another major power was cleaning up America’s mess with boots on the ground. 

From then until now, the UN-recognized Syrian government has managed to regain virtually all its territory, and extremist elements like the Islamic State group have been pushed back. There remain a few holdouts, for example, near the Turkish border and in the country’s southeast still occupied by U.S. forces, but the difficulty faced in the country’s attempt to get back to normal has to do with external forces.

There’s the diplomatic side, but, since Syria has continued as a UN member, this has primarily been a regional issue. Syria’s membership in the Arab League was suspended in 2011 as the conflict began, however it’s highly anticipated that it will be readmitted very soon – perhaps even at the group’s next summit in March. 

Other welcoming signs of Syria’s normalization are the fact that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain both reopened their Syrian embassies, Jordan reopened its border with Syria in September and the global law enforcement body Interpol readmitted Syria to its ranks in October. 

But the main problem for a true normalization of Syria on the world stage is its access to international finance and trade, which has been nearly impossible thanks to U.S.-led sanctions, including the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, called the Caesar Act. 

Journalists have reported since the implementation of these latest sanctions that they have actually been more detrimental to the country than the war itself, and this corrosive effect has also extended to the country’s neighbors, like Lebanon. Never mind the intended effects of these sanctions, the reality is that they are artificially placing the country in a position where rebuilding from this devastating war is impossible. 

Enter China. As the second-largest economy in the world and the driving force behind the greatest global infrastructure and development drive in history, the BRI is a natural fit for Syria. It will help the country rebuild, rebound and provide win-win opportunities for both countries while also likely bringing the conflict, finally, to an end. It is the quintessential example of how America bombs and China builds. 

While that is certainly something on its own, in the context of how this U.S.-led foreign intervention was resisted largely thanks to Russia, I believe it shows a sort of one-two punch that can and will be repeated. 

Even if this was not coordinated originally, it is a precedent I believe both Moscow and Beijing should and undoubtedly will apply elsewhere. It goes to show that Washington’s military and economic aggression can both be countered if Russia and China work in tandem as a bulwark against unilateralism. It’s for this reason I believe Syria will be the graveyard of American adventurism. 

Covid kills poor as rich get richer – report

Oxfam says that the poor have died from vaccine inequality and a lack of access to treatment

(FILE PHOTO) Photo by Luke Dray/Getty Images

Oxfam, a charity confederation, has said that while the wealth of the world’s top 10 richest people has doubled during the pandemic, the poor around the globe continue to suffer due to a dearth of vaccines and treatment.

In a report published on Monday, Oxfam claimed that a 99% windfall tax on the pandemic gains of the world’s 10 richest men would raise enough money to pay for vaccines for everyone on the planet. 

“A 99% one-off windfall tax on the Covid-19 wealth gains of the 10 richest men alone would generate $812bn,” the report states, noting these 10 men have six times more money than the poorest 3.1 billion people.

The report, titled ‘Inequality kills’, claims that the rich have profited from structural and systemic policy choices which are skewed in their favor. Meanwhile, the poor have been directedly harmed by these decisions.

“Millions of people would still be alive today if they had had a vaccine – but they are dead, denied a chance while big pharmaceutical corporations continue to hold monopoly control of these technologies,” Oxfam said.

The charity claims that billionaires have thrived through the pandemic and that fiscal and monetary stimulus measures have contributed to their wealth as the stock market boomed. 

“Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening. The consequences of it kill,” Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said in the report.

Oxfam adds that the proportion of those who die from Covid-19 in developing countries is roughly double that in wealthy nations.

The report was released ahead of this week’s virtual World Economic Forum meetings, traditionally held in Davos, where leaders will discuss global challenges.

Pandemic reversing improvements in wealth inequality, World Bank says

Temporary reprieve from surge in inequality erased by Covid-19 policies

Homeless people in Los Angeles' Skid Row © AFP / Apu Gomes\\\\\\\\\\Governments’ responses to Covid-19 are reversing gains made in combating global inequality, according to a World Bank report. It found the virus was disproportionately affecting the poor and warned the fallout would worsen.

World Bank President David Malpass explained that the situation arose from a confluence of negative factors, leading to a perfect storm of economic depression. “The world economy is simultaneously facing Covid-19, inflation, and policy uncertainty, with government spending and monetary policies in uncharted territory,” he said.

Noting that “booming asset prices” are bolstering the bank accounts of the rich even as job losses and massive inflation have torpedoed any growth within the poorest population groups, the Bank warned that such an “increasing divergence of fortunes” was “especially troubling given the possibility of social discontent in developing countries.” Spikes in some commodity prices – such as the fuel hike in Kazakhstan – can trigger popular outrage on such a level that it threatens governments’ control.Government-mandated shutdowns were the primary reason for a spike in poverty rates that has affected populations around the world, the report stated. Government spending, deficits, and debt have soared to “record highs” compared to GDP, and countries are reluctant to raise interest rates lest their populations prove to be unable to withstand the economic shock.

Worse, the effects of the Covid-19 shutdowns are likely to echo through multiple generations, as children’s educational development has suffered due to school closures – especially those in low-income families who particularly struggled to access remote learning, the Bank’s report warns.

Malpass insisted that mass vaccination and “concerted international action and a comprehensive set of national policy responses” were the only ways for his institution to correct the problems it helped cause. Chief among his recommendations was a call for accelerated debt relief efforts, and while he stressed the importance of carbon taxes and other climate-change policies, he acknowledged that now was perhaps not the time to raise fuel prices.

Both the Bank and the International Monetary Fund were strong proponents of lockdowns. Echoing a similar offer from the IMF, the World Bank reportedly told Belarus in early 2020 that it could receive a significant amount of relief funding in exchange for modeling its Covid-19 control measures on those of Italy, which at the time was under a strict lockdown. When President Alexander Lukashenko declined to lock down his country, the bank warned Minsk’s economy would “face a severe shock” that year – a carrot/stick approach often seen in that institution's dealings.

 

Lee Camp: The silver bullet to ending poverty that we choose to ignore

Basic income has been tried successfully countless times. So why the hell isn’t the US government implementing it?

Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show Redacted Tonight. 

His new book, ‘Bullet Points and Punch Lines’, is available at 

LeeCampBook.com, 

His stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at

 LeeCampAmerican.com.

FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images / Spencer Platt/

This article was originally published by Scheerpost.

Here’s how the world should operate in simple terms: A certain country or region or city or township or Hobbit hole tries something in order to help their society or group or hovel – if it works, other places then do it. If it doesn’t work, other places don’t do it. It’s like when you were a kid and you saw your brother slide down the banister and rack himself on the newel post – You then thought, “Maybe that activity is not for me.” But if he didn’t nail himself in the jewels, you probably thought, “I think I’ll try that.” 

That’s how the United States government should work, but it doesn’t. For-profit healthcare, corporate personhood, the drug war, funding terrorists overseas that we call “moderate rebels,” etc. – all of these things have been tried, they fu***n’ suck every time, and we keep doing them. The U.S. continually racks itself on the newel post all day long and then responds, “I think I’ll try that again.” 

But the reverse should be true also – if a city or country anywhere in the world tries something and it works great, we should do it.

This brings me to Universal Basic Income: everybody receiving money from a government simply for being a citizen, no questions asked. It’s high time we try it in the US and see whether it works. Oh wait, I just remembered – it’s been tried countless times and worked every damn time. How do I know that? …Reading. 

As Rutger Bregman details in his book “Utopia For Realists,” UBI has been tried many times — in Canada, Alaska, Africa, the US, Europe, and more. Even backwards lawless lands like North Carolina have experimented with it.

There was a study in Britain where 13 men who had lived on the streets for years were given £3,000 each (about $4,500 at the time). Did they use it for hundreds of pricey almond milk lattes, or giant bags of crack, or maybe just wad it up into balls and wipe themselves with them? Nope, turns out they didn’t do any of those things. Eighteen months after receiving the money, over half were no longer homeless, and all of them had improved their lives significantly.

As Bregman noted, “Even The Economist had to conclude that ‘the most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’”

No! We can’t possibly do that! We here in the US have to take the money meant to help the homeless and launder it through all kinds of plans and incentives and bureaucratic digestive tracts that result in one out of every 100 people in extreme poverty receiving a gift certificate for a free basket of breadsticks at Arby’s. 

In another program Bregman describes, everybody in a village in Kenya was given $500, about a year’s wages. Several months later, the village had been completely transformed. People had better jobs, sturdier home structures, and healthier kids. “In Namibia figures for malnutrition took a nosedive (from 42% to 10%), as did those for truancy (from 40% to nothing) and crime (down by 42%),” writes Bregman. 

So, basically there’s almost a silver bullet to ending poverty and decreasing crime. Well, we better avoid it like the plague. Let’s go back to giving homeless people a can of soup and a pair of mismatched socks. If they collect enough cans and socks, they can build a house out of them!

The point is basic income has been tested numerous times. By 2010, there were income transfer programs for 110 million families in 45 different countries. In North Carolina, in 2001 the Cherokee were getting $6,000 a year per family thanks to a casino they had built. When that started, for most of those families that money took them out of extreme poverty, and the Cherokee children saw drastic changes. Their crime rates, behavioral issues, and alcohol abuse went down significantly. The money literally changed their lives. (And sure, all casinos are based on drunk people spending money they don’t have on machines they don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money they will never get. But you can’t get mad at the Cherokee because that’s also the basic definition of capitalism: Drunk people spending money we don’t have on machines we don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money we’ll never get.) 

The University of Manchester summarized many UBI programs in poor African communities. They found, overall, the money was put to good use: Poverty decreased, and while the programs cost less than other so-called solutions, there were myriad long-term benefits that impacted  health and safety. How shocking! The thing we know works seems to work! (Hopefully somebody can study this a little more and find out if it works.)

Bregman then writes of NGO workers, “So why send over to Africa expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor?” Great point. At the very least, let’s give away the SUVs. 

The latest basic income “test” reported-on last month in Fast Company showed that it worked yet again in Hudson, NY. Despite all of these successful trials, people still argue, “We can’t have basic income because the poor will just use it for beer and cigarettes!” Well, first of all – So what? The world’s on fire. Beer and cigarettes sound like just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I think we’re at the point when we can call alcohol and tobacco survival foods. (I am a longtime supporter of Universal Basic Beer and Cigarettes.) 

But perhaps more importantly, as Bregman notes, “A major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.” Declined? Well, then I have to say these poor people have their priorities completely wrong.

Another major argument against UBI is, “It’s not fair. Giving people money for doing nothing simply isn’t fair.” My response to that is twofold. First, it actually is fair because the money would go to literally everyone. Hence the word “universal” in the name. (It would be weird to have something called “Universal Basic Income” that only went to a vintage clothing store clerk named Stanley.) Secondly, who told you fairness mattered in life? Who told you fairness has anything to do with our stupid world? There’s no fairness. In the first three seconds you come out of the womb, life is not fair. You’re covered in blood and mucus, some doctor slaps you on the ass, and you’re told your name is something you’ve never even heard before! Completely unfair. You’re just lying there going, “Chet? My name’s CHET?!” 

Some people are born rich as sh*t.

Some people are born poor as sh*t.

Some people are born hot as sh*t. (I mean, not as a baby but… later. You get the point.) 

Some people are born in wealthy areas with safe streets, good schools and clean water.

Some people are born in poverty with crime-ridden streets, terrible schools, and water that has a crispy film on the top like a cancerous crème brulée.

In our society, on average, men get paid more than women, white people get paid more than Black people and Native people, and most everyone gets paid more than ugly people. (I’m not even kidding – ugly people earn up to 15% less per hour in the workplace.)

Society. Is. Not. Fair. 

So if I say that universal basic income would solve several of society’s problems and someone responds that UBI’s not fair, they’re being completely illogical. It’s like if I said a law against killing endangered species would save the exotic birds, and you retort, “But we can’t do that because it’s not purple.”

Besides, perhaps giving people a better shot at life, a better shot at not struggling day-in and day-out, perhaps that’s actually more fair than this shitstorm we have now.

Another argument against UBI is that it will make people lazy. And I would agree with that except… it’s not true. Studies show it doesn’t make people work less and even if it did, I would say, “GOOD!” Under capitalism you are born free, but then you spend the rest of your existence trying to rent back your life from corporate rulers. So if UBI decreases that slavery by a percentage point, that’s a good thing. 

And the final argument against UBI is that we can’t afford it. Well, as Bregman notes, “Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, less than 1% of the GDP. That’s roughly a quarter of the U.S. military spending.” 

So not only do we have enough money, but we also would be saving hundreds of billions in the form of services we wouldn’t need anymore. We’d have a more physically and mentally healthy population, decreased crime and abuse, etc. All told, we would save so much more than we would lose. And even if we didn’t – I DON’T CARE! I WANT TO END POVERTY! 

Anyway, it’s time for universal basic income. Technology advances exponentially. Most jobs will disappear. And instead of demanding more wage slavery, we should work less and have universal basic income. Will UBI solve all the problems of capitalism? Absolutely not. It’s the first of many steps toward helping people realize the capitalistic market economy is a guaranteed death spiral that we have the power to stop. 

THIRD WORLD USA

‘I have a lot of things to say’: one girl’s life growing up homeless in New York

Dasani gazes out of the window from the one room her family of 10 shared in the Brooklyn homeless shelter where they lived for almost four years.

 Photograph: Ruth Fremson/New York Times

For nine years, New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott followed the fortunes of one family living in poverty. In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter

Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here

Andrea Elliott
Sun 16 Jan 2022 

She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. They have yet to stir. Their sister is always first. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes – the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. Mice scurry across the floor. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe.

A few feet away is the yellow mop bucket they use as a toilet, and the mattress where the mother and father sleep, clutched. Radiating out from them in all directions are the eight children they share: two boys and five girls whose beds zigzag around the baby, her crib warmed by a hairdryer perched on a milk crate.

They have learned to sleep through anything. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. Only their sister Dasani is awake.

The family’s room at the Brooklyn shelter, with Dasani, right, sitting on the bed. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. She has a delicate oval face and luminous eyes that watch everything, owl-like. Her expression veers from mischief to wonder. People often remark on her beauty – the high cheekbones and chestnut skin – but their comments never seem to register. What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. When braces are the stuff of fantasy, straight teeth are a lottery win.

Slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach a hundred floors. This is the type of fact that she recites in a singsong, look-what-I-know way. She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise.
Six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. If danger comes, Dasani will kick them awake, tell them to shut up

“It makes me feel like there’s something going on out there,” she says. “I have a lot of possibility. I do, though. I have a lot of things to say.”

One of the first things Dasani will say is that she was running before she walked. She loves being first – the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honour roll. She is a child of New York City.

Even Dasani’s name speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. Who paid for water in a bottle? Just the sound of it – Dasani – conjured another life. It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun.

By the time Dasani came into the world, on 26 May 2001, the old Brooklyn was vanishing. Entire neighbourhoods would be remade, their families displaced, their businesses shuttered, their histories erased by a gentrification so vast and meteoric that no brand of bottled water could have signalled it. And as prosperity rose for one group of people, poverty deepened for another, leaving Dasani to grow up – true to her name – in a novel kind of place.

Her skyline is filled with luxury towers, the beacons of a new gilded age. The city’s wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. Among them is Dasani’s birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. Just steps away are two housing projects and, tucked among them, a city-run homeless shelter where the heat is off and the food is spoiled.

It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. Nearly a quarter of her childhood has unfolded at the Auburn Family Residence, where Dasani’s family – a total of 10 people – live in one room. Beyond the shelter’s walls, in the fall of 2012, Dasani belongs to an invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children – the highest number ever recorded, in the most unequal metropolis in America. Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.

Dasani’s sisters Hada, left, and Maya. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
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Dasani can get lost looking out her window, until the sounds of Auburn interrupt. Different noises mean different things. She sorts them like laundry. The light noises bring no harm – the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican lady’s chihuahuas, the addicts who wander the projects, hitting some crazy high. They can screech like alley cats, but no one is listening.

The sound that matters has a different pitch. It comes loud and fast, with a staccato rhythm. The popping of gunshots. The pounding of fists. The rap of a security guard’s knuckles on the door. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count.

She counts her siblings in pairs, just like her mother said. The thumb-suckers first: six-year-old Hada and seven-year-old Maya, who share a small mattress. The 10-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and 11-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort.

They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. She will kick them awake. She will tell them to shut up. They will drop to the floor in silence.

Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. Dasani keeps forgetting to count the newest child. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. She could even tell the difference between a cry for hunger and a cry for sleep. Lee-Lee’s cry was something else. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone.

Dasani’s younger sister Nana. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Nearly a year ago, the city’s child protection agency had separated 34-year-old Chanel Sykes from her children after she got addicted to opioids. Her husband also had a drug history. But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment programme.

Now Chanel is back, her custodial rights restored. Still, the baby howls. This is usually the sound that breaks Dasani’s trance, causing her to leave the window and fetch Lee-Lee’s bottle.

Dasani feels her way across the room that she calls “the house” – a 520 sq ft space containing her family and all their possessions. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. Hidden in a box is Dasani’s pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. Taped to the wall is the children’s proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. Every inch of the room is claimed.

“We each got our own spot,” Dasani says.

Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. The mice used to terrorise Dasani, leaving pellets and bite marks. Nowadays, Room 449 is a battleground. On one side are the children, on the other the rodents – their carcasses numbering up to a dozen per week. To kill a mouse is to score a triumph.

“We burn them!” Dasani says with none of the tenderness reserved for her turtle. “We take the sticks and smash they eyes out! We break their necks. We suffocate them with the salt!”
No one can outpace Dasani. She is forever in motion, doing backflips at the bus stop, dancing at the welfare office

In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lee’s formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. Dasani squints to check the date. Now the bottle must be heated. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Over the next year, 911 dispatchers will take some 350 calls from Auburn, logging 24 reports of assault, four reports of child abuse, and one report of rape.

Dasani opens a heavy metal door, stepping into the dark corridor. She is sure the place is haunted. Auburn used to be a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. Dasani’s room was “where they put the crazies”, she says, citing as proof the broken intercom on the wall. Right outside is a communal bathroom with a large industrial tub. A changing table for babies hangs off its hinge. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the building’s predators.

Dasani’s sister Maya. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Dasani slips down three flights of stairs, passing a fire escape where drugs and weapons are smuggled in. She trots into the cafeteria, where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. Tempers explode. Knife fights break out.

Luckily, in this predawn hour, the cafeteria is still empty. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. If she cries, others answer. Her body is still small enough to warm with a hairdryer. She is the least of Dasani’s worries.

“I have a lot on my plate,” she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. “I got a fork and a spoon. I got rice, chicken, macaroni.” The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni her siblings - except for Baby Lee-Lee, who is a plump chicken breast.

“So that’s a lot on my plate – with some cornbread. That’s a lot on my plate.”

Dasani races back upstairs, handing her mother the bottle. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. Her siblings will soon be scrambling to get dressed and make their beds before running to the cafeteria to beat the line.

Then they will head outside, into the bright light of morning.

Dasani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the “shelter boogies”. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasani’s secret. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day – the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. She hopes to slip by them all unseen.

Sleek braids fall to one side of Dasani’s face, clipped by yellow bows. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. This is the type of fact that nobody can know. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener.

As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. She will focus in class and mind her manners in the schoolyard. All she has to do is climb the school steps.

“Come on,” says her mother, Chanel, who stands next to Dasani. “There’s nothing to be scared about.”

New York’s homeless children are seen only in glimpses, pulling an overstuffed suitcase in the shadow of a tired parent

On a good day, Dasani walks like she is tall, her chin held high. More often she is running – to the monkey bars, to the library, to the A train that her grandmother cleaned for a living. No one on the block can outpace Dasani. She is forever in motion, doing backflips at the bus stop, dancing at the welfare office.

She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the baby’s creaky stroller.

Dasani tells herself that brand names don’t matter. She knows such yearnings will go unanswered. But every once in a while, when by some miracle she scores a pair of Michael Jordans, she finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: she wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. It never works.

Best to try to blend in while not caring when you don’t. She likes being small because “I can slip through things.” She imagines herself with supergirl powers.

She would blink and turn invisible.

Dasani hugs her mother Chanel, with her sister Nana on the left, 2013. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
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Sometimes she doesn’t have to blink. In the blur of the city’s streets, Dasani is just another face. Strangers do not see the opioid addiction that chases her mother, or the prisons that swallowed her uncles, or the cousins who have died from gang shootings and Aids.

“That’s not gonna be me,” she says. “Nuh-uh. Nope.”

Nor do strangers see where Dasani lives.

Children are not the face of New York’s homeless. They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. If they are seen at all, it is only in glimpses – pulling an overstuffed suitcase in the shadow of a tired parent, passing for a tourist rather than a local without a home.

Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. There was no sign announcing the shelter, which rises over the neighbouring projects like an accidental fortress. Its stately neo-Georgian exterior dates back nearly a century, to when the building opened as a public hospital serving the poor.

Two sweeping sycamores shade the entrance, where smokers linger under brick arches. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. She is among 432 homeless children and parents living at Auburn. Day after day, they step through a metal detector as security guards search their bags, taking anything that could be used as a weapon – a bottle of bleach, a can of Campbell’s soup.

This harsh routine gives Auburn the feel of a rootless, transient place. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. It is a private landmark – the very place where her beloved grandmother Joanie Sykes was born, back when this was Cumberland Hospital.

Every morning, Dasani leaves her grandmother’s birthplace to wander the same streets where Joanie grew up, playing double Dutch in the same parks, seeking shade in the same library. And now, on this bright September morning, Dasani will take her grandmother’s path once again, to the promising middle school two blocks away.

To know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates – to follow this child’s life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood – is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality.

It is also a story that reaches back in time to one Black family making its way through history, from slavery to the Jim Crow South and then the Great Migration’s passage north.

Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. She is currently a student at LaGuardia Community College in New York. Photograph: Ruth Fremson/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

There is no separating Dasani’s childhood from that of her matriarchs: her grandmother Joanie and her mother, Chanel. Their fleeting triumphs and deepest sorrows are, in Dasani’s words, “my heart”. The ground beneath her feet once belonged to them. Her city is paved over theirs. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named after a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. Back then, from the ghetto’s isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. Today, Dasani lives surrounded by wealth, whether she is peering into the boho chic shops near her shelter or surfing the internet on Auburn’s shared computer. She sees out to a world that rarely sees her.

To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare. Some places are more felt than seen – the place of homelessness, the place of sisterhood, the place of a mother-child bond that nothing can break. They dwell within Dasani wherever she goes.

To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. Whether they are riding the bus, switching trains, climbing steps or jumping puddles, they always move as one. Only together have they learned to navigate poverty’s systems – ones with names suggesting help. Child protection. Public assistance. Criminal justice. Homeless services.

To watch these systems play out in Dasani’s life is to glimpse not only their flaws, but the threat they pose to Dasani’s system of survival. Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation her greatest fear. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control – hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child.

As Dasani grows up, she must contend with them all.

This is an extract from Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott (Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99).

Subtle ecological changes in Oregon tide pools could signal bigger problems, OSU researchers find

UPDATED: Sun., Jan. 16, 2022

A sea star is wedged beneath a rock in the sand, exposed during low tide at Harris Beach State Park on the south Oregon coast. (Jamie Hale | The Oregonian)


By Kale WilliamsOregonian


Even in the gray days of Oregon’s winter, vivid pops of color can be found on the Oregon coast.

The rocky intertidal zone, commonly known as tide pools, is home to a rainbow of species – from orange sea stars to bright blue sea anemones to multicolored varieties of seaweed that undulate with the comings and goings of the tides.

Tide pools are also among the most resilient ecosystems on Earth, able to quickly recover from natural disturbances and bounce back on timescales not seen in many other parts of nature. That’s what led Brunce Menge, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, to start observing Oregon’s tide pools more than a decade ago, watching to see how some of the state’s most dynamic organisms responded to climate change and warming ocean waters.

The findings of Menge and his team, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are troubling.

“Climate change is threatening to destabilize ecological communities,” he said. “A possibility is that they’ll stop being persistently occupied, what we call basins of attraction, and move into other states.”

Intertidal ecosystems can be tricky things to study, Menge said, because they often appear to be healthy, even thriving, while nearly imperceptible changes can be indicative of larger problems. They need to be studied over years, not months, so Menge and a team of researchers set out to do just that in 2011.

They selected sites at three locations on the Oregon coast – Cape Foulweather, south of Depoe Bay; Cape Perpetua, near Yachats; and Cape Blanco, on the state’s southern coast. At each location, they plotted out five areas, each a half-meter square, and cleared them of all organisms observable to the naked eye to mimic an environmental disturbance.

They also cordoned off plots that were left undisturbed for comparison to the disturbed plots. Menge and his team returned to each site once a month to take pictures of how the intertidal species were repopulating the cleared plots. Between 2011 and 2019, the plots were cleared on a yearly basis to see how their responses changed over time.

During the period of study, Oregon’s oceans saw plenty of natural disruption. In 2013 and 2014, the West Coast saw a mysterious illness among sea stars that caused a massive die-off. A marine heat wave, which came to be known as “the blob,” warmed the waters of the Pacific Northwest, causing less nutrient-dense water and sending ripple effects throughout the food chain. The heat wave was believed to be behind the deaths of young sea lions in southern California and die-offs of starving sea birds along the Oregon and Washington coasts.

“In all cases, over time the rates of recovery slowed and also became more variable,” said Sarah Gravem, an Oregon State research scientist who helped lead the study. “Increasing variation in key ecological processes can be a signal that an ecosystem is on the verge of a state shift. On the Oregon coast, the factors behind that increasing variation appear to be coming from changes in ocean currents and thermal disruptions like marine heat waves, which can alter growth, decrease colonization rates and kill organisms.”

Gravem likened the tidal pool ecosystem to a forest going through a drought, where all the same species of trees and plants might be present, but the environmental stress they are under causes changes to growth rates or seed production.

“For the first handful of years, they bounced back almost all the way. We could hardly tell the difference,” Gravem said. “Over time, the ability to bounce back slowed down and was more variable. Variability is one of the hallmarks of a system that is not as healthy as it could be.”

When animals and plants did return to the cleared plots, they did so in smaller numbers, often failed to reproduce and were, in some cases, dominated by a few species like barnacles or algae. One of the species that appeared particularly vulnerable were mussels, Gravem said, of special importance because the bivalves are prey for other important species and mussel beds act as habitat for many others.

Menge and Gravem said more research was needed to know if Oregon’s tide pools were nearing a tipping point, after which some kind of irreversible change would take hold, but both agreed the data they analyzed indicated a move in that direction as climate continues to cause warming of the world’s oceans.

“It’s possible the system could go the other way and start recovering more quickly, but we know climate change is getting worse and worse,” Menge said. “The longer term prospect is not great. We can’t say when a tipping point will happen, but there’s a good chance that it will.”