Do you have funds for the unexpected?

Owners would have to pay assessments ranging from $80,190 for one-bedroom units to $336,135 for the owner of the building’s four-bedroom penthouse, a document sent to the building’s residents said. The deadline to pay upfront or choose paying a monthly fee lasting 15 years was July 1. The association had just $800,000 in reserves.

The building was in a desirable location. Owners pocketed impressive returns when sold. All, except one apartment, sold for more than double the purchase price. Unit 508, a 1,683-square-foot condo sold for $800,000 in February, more than doubling its 2012 sale price of $370,000.

An HOA commonly maintains a type of savings account called the cash reserves or a reserve account for significant, infrequent, or unexpected common area costs.

When a development’s homeowner’s’ association (HOA) encounters large or unexpected expenses, the HOA needs money to repair or replace the damage. For example, what if a clubhouse roof starts leaking, the pool needs resealing, or a piece of equipment in the fitness room breaks down? At times like these, it is wise for HOAs to have a reserve account.

House in my neighborhood, asking price $800,000. Similar to the price of a condo.

Reserves for single family homes isn’t a bad idea either. When the bathroom tub backed up in my home the plumber said he needed to install a drain cleaning opening under the house. After he crawled under the house he reported that the main sewer line was leaking in many places. Cost for replacing the sewer system under the house was $5,000. There was no reserve fund. There was the retirement investments and that paid the bill. A similar situation resulted in installing new copper plumbing for another $5,500. Termites are lurking and the roof is 30 years old.

Owning a house is expensive but it provides us a place for both privacy and fun.

The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

This is all about keeping Americans in the dark about America’s history of bad behavior of things our leaders don’t want us to know about.

My education was in public schools. Philadelphia, Inglewood California, and Los Angeles. I wasn’t the smartest student but I wasn’t the dumbest. History and geography were the subjects I liked most but teachers provided scant facts.

We learned there was slavery but no one explained what that meant. One person owning another person. Counting slaves as 3/5 of a person in the census but the reason was never explained. Jim Crow laws were never even mentioned in school.

In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its “separate but equal” legal doctrine for facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War in 1861–65.

Black Wall Street, former byname of the Greenwood neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in the early 20th century African Americans had created a self-sufficient prosperous business district. The entire community was burned to the ground in 1921. I never learned of this until this year.

I was taught that American Indians were savages and they had no right to anything. Custer’s Last Stand was part of the fight against those savages. the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears. President Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.”

The group of settlers known as the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism while snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains, for the winter of 1846–1847. Schools I attended never spoke one word of the event. When I learned of this there was one line in Britannica Encyclopedia, “cannibalism, necessity of” but no explanation. Britannica Encyclopedia has corrected that error.

There are people who deny the Holocaust ever happened despite the stories and photographs.

Today we have members of the Republican Party claiming that the January 6 insurrection at our Capitol never happened.

The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth? Probably not going to happen.

Juneteenth

By EUGENE DANIELS of Politico Playbook

For 156 years , June 19th has been celebrated by millions of Black folks in the U.S. to mark the real day that many of our ancestors were actually freed from slavery — when 2,000 Union troops went to Galveston, Texas, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed to make clear that Texas’ 250,000 enslaved people were free.

It’s been called by many names over the years: “Emancipation Day,” “Jubilee Day,” “Freedom Day.” And now, following a ceremony on Thursday when President JOE BIDEN signed a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support, it’s a federal holiday for everyone.

Which makes it an appropriate time to check in on Biden’s promises to put issues of equity, civil rights and social justice at the forefront of his administration.

How are civil rights leaders grading Biden’s record so far? I reached out to a few to ask. They were pleased by the progress on the easy lifts (like having the most diverse cabinet in history, from Vice President KAMALA HARRIS on down) and optimistic about the tonal shifts (like the way Biden has spoken out about racism with language about as forceful as anyone to ever occupy the office).

But they are growing tired of Biden’s penchant for bipartisanship in Congress, which they see as getting in the way of making real legislative strides on issues like voting rights and police reform.

Here’s what they said.

— Rev. AL SHARPTON told me that while he understands and respects that Biden wants to reach out to Republicans in the name of bipartisanship, “when you keep seeing that [the other side] is not going to reach back, you can’t continue to [try and win over Republicans] at the sacrifices of those that reached up and put you in office. … I think that the time has come for us now to say, ‘Let’s go on to Plan B, and that is to do what we need to do to get these bills passed.’”

“Can we change the access and the oratory into legislative results?” Sharpton asked. “To remember Tulsa is heartening, to finally get the Juneteenth holiday is great. But we are still, in both cases, talking about what people in the past did.”

— “When you talk about compromise, you can only sit down and compromise with people who believe there’s a problem,” said Reverend WILLIAM BARBER , co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, sounding a similar note. “Some people don’t believe there’s a problem with poverty or a problem with voting rights. So you can’t compromise with people like that. You have to use the power that you have and let the chips fall where they may.”

“What politics [dictates that] he can do is fundamentally different than what he should do,” said Barber. “The pain of Covid has opened up the possibility of him being an FDR or Lincoln. [He] can’t allow the people who just want to play politics [stop] him from being the president that does the things we need.”

— “He says he wants to be bipartisan. However y’all do it, we need to have real bold changes,” said MELANIE CAMPBELL , president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. “On social justice, on the racial justice, those were the things that got Black people, Black women, young people out to vote. So we need to see those things come to fruition because a lot of this is about life and death. I would say that they have the building blocks. They’ve got to keep building those blocks.”

Still, Campbell said that while she “would like to see more, but we’re not living in a perfect political reality.”

There are NO Poor People in America

This is a shocking reality reported in the April-May AARP magazine. The median retirement nest egg among retired people in the United States is $50,000 reports the Federal Reserve. Just to review median is not average. In statistics the median is the mid-point separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample. In other words half the retired population has less than is $50,000 in their retirement account. This data goes along with the frequently reported fact that many people do not have enough money to pay a $400 unexpected expense tells me how poor most Americans are. In the AARP article titled “Protecting Your Nest Egg” the author goes on to offer suggestions on how to save money.

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew by $99 billion from 2014 to 2018. Bezos is not the only super wealthy citizen of the United States. Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zukerberg, and Elon Musk have wealth in the billions.

This is not the first Guilded Age. The industrialists of the later 19^th century and early 20^th century Gilded Age lived high on the hog, but most of the working class lived below poverty level. As time went on, the income inequality between wealthy and poor became more and more glaring. Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie were all part of that early 1900s world of super wealthy and 12 hour starvation wage working class.

It was that glaring difference between the super wealthy and the rest of us that gave rise to communism.

What is “middle class?” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich suggests that the middle class should be defined as households making between 50% below and 50% above the median. Pew Research Center, a non-political organization, on line posting says “About half of U.S. adults (52%) lived in middle-income households in 2018, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Roughly three-in-ten (29%) were in lower-income households and 19% were in upper-income households.”

My own opinion is that the idea of the words “middle class” are the wealthy’s definition of everyone who is isn’t part of the super wealthy. No one is poor. Peasant in an unacceptable word. Too demeaning. We are all part of the upper middle class or the lower middle class. So the janitors and house cleaning people are lower middle class. In other words there are no “poor people” in America.

The 2021 federal poverty level (FPL) for a single person residing in the 48 contiguous states or Washington, D.C. is $12,880. Today’s $7.25 an hour minimum wage is below poverty level and low pay for the so called middle class of today is the motivation that results in revolutions.

America’s Oligarchs

America’s super wealthy are oligarchs.

Let’s start by defining the word oligarch.

Oligarch | Definition of Oligarch by Merriam-Webster

A person who belongs to a small group of people who govern or control a country Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may or may not be distinguished by one or several characteristics, such as nobility, fame, wealth, education, corporate, religious, political, or military control.

Now let’s look at the super wealthy and powerful in the United States. The nonprofit news organization ProPublica has just performed a significant public service by publishing federal tax records of some of America’s leading billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zukerberg, Geroge Soros, and Elon Musk. Actually we all already know who they are. Forbes magazine publishes an annual list of the 400 richest people in the United States.

Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew by $99 billion from 2014 to 2018, but he paid only about 1% of that growth in federal taxes. Elon Musk’s fortune grew by about $14 billion in that time frame, but he paid only about 3.27% of that increase in federal taxes.

The fact is they get away with paying little or no taxes. And it’s all legal. They pay lobbyists to influence our legislators to sustain the system.

ProPublica’s publication of the taxes paid by our oligarchs will not change this situation.

Senator Elizabeth Warren Tweet:

The rich & powerful run Washington. Here’s one benefit they wrote for themselves: After making a killing from the economy they’ve rigged, they don’t pay taxes on that accumulated wealth. It’s a system that’s rigged for the top if I ever saw one. 1:10 PM · Jan 24, 2019

Warren is correct and calling those super wealthy oligarchs won’t change a thing.