Hey everybody, it's Kai. Listen, is it time to upgrade your car? Give it new life by donating it to Marketplace. We'll use the proceeds to bring you more news about finance and the economy and how they affect you. Let us turn your old car into a donation to power the journalism you rely on. Go to Marketplace.org slash vehicle to donate your car today. Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart.
We make today make sense as if that's painful these days. Yeah, we're gonna try. I made me Scott in for Kai. Thanks so much for joining us everybody. It is Monday, July 15th, quite a weekend to come back from. Yeah, quite a weekend. We are gonna do some news. We're gonna get to some smiles starting with the news. I don't think we need to spend too much time unpacking what we've all been watching all weekend, the attempted assassination of President, Foreign President Trump.
But I just feel like this is gonna be one of those moments where we all kind of look back and it's like, where were you when? Yeah, what was interesting to me is where I was specifically was sitting on the couch playing with my new cat and my mother texted me about what was happening.
And she also is the person who notified me about January 6th as it was happening, which is funny because my mother is not a super news junkie, but in these critical moments in American politics, she seems to be the one notifying me of crises as they are unfolding. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's kind of amazing given that you and I are in the news. But yeah, you never, I mean, especially on a weekend, you could be doing any number of things and not looking at the headlines.
Yeah, it must have been quite a weekend in Washington, I would imagine. It really was and as some folks will know, I do some other work for other news organizations on the weekend and on C-SPAN yesterday, just listening to people call in from all over the country with their feelings on it was really interesting.
And I think that's a great word. People really trying to process and conspiracy theories trying to take root and just it's a really challenging time each size sort of blaming the other for the rhetoric and the violence. You know, there's there's not a lot more for us to say I think right now because we're still trying to get more information trying to learn more and with the RNC starting this week, it will be very interesting to see how the party chooses to carry this forward.
Yeah, we're going to learn a lot in the next couple of days about the what what the rest of the campaign is going to look like. So what else have you been looking at today? Yeah, I mean, there's so much news, including this other huge piece of news relative to the former president, which is that Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida has dismissed his classifieds classified documents case.
And this is pretty wild because it was a long shot legal argument from conservatives about basically trying to throw out the case because of the way that the special counsel was appointed and a lot of legal scholars just felt that held no water whatsoever. But it worked for Judge Cannon, who was of course appointed by former president Trump and this on and she relied pretty heavily on Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the Supreme Court immunity case in, you know, making her decisions.
And I think that one of the consistent one of the things that came up a lot this weekend was whether or not Democrats had gone too far in their rhetoric calling Trump a threat to democracy or an existential threat to democracy and a danger to the rule of law, right?
And was that language to incendiary and possibly something to motivate this shooter. And there were what I think are false equivalencies to some of the other violent rhetoric that's come out of the Trump campaign and some other, you know, Trump supporters. I here's why I don't think those things are the same because calling immigrants vermin or talking about people trying to like dilute the blood of the country is a very different set of information and facts.
And then saying someone is a threat to the rule of law and democracy when they, you know, allegedly were keeping boxes and boxes of classified documents in an unsecure place in their home. And when you do have a legal system that seems to be going out of its way to create spaces for that, it is a challenge to where we stand as a country in terms of rule of law.
And so I think that, you know, as we are sort of having these discussions about rhetoric in this country and what is too much and what is, you know, acceptable. I think, A, we can recognize that just about anyone with the vendetta and potentially some, you know, emotional or mental health issues can take whatever information they want and take it entirely too far.
But I do not think that it is incendiary or aggressive or, you know, kind of out of line to say the truth that when there are, you know, all of these felony indictments and there is a lot of evidence showing that laws may have been broken. And say that out loud and we can say out loud that the system does not seem to be working the same for some people as much as others without that being an incitement of violence.
Yeah. Well, I was reading Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter. Folks probably have heard us talk about her in the past. And, you know, she has a political point of view, but she pointed out many instances of real incitement of violence
from the Republican side Trump's campaign in 2016. He suggested that, quote, second amendment people could solve the problem of Hillary Clinton picking judges, you know, his attacks on Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of a kidnapping plot, you know, many instances of really violent rhetoric.
And, you know, if anything comes out of this weekend, there's been calls on both sides to turn down the temperature. We'll see if that actually happens, but it would be great if we could not. But the temperature was not the same. Exactly. Exactly. It may have farther to go. Yeah, on one side. But I think that's a really good point.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. But let's go somewhere else. What's your news? Okay. Well, yeah, this is on my beat. So I thought maybe folks might not see it in the mix today. But this was a troubling story. I read in the Wall Street Journal that evictions have surged in many parts of the country. They're up more than 35% or 35% or more in some cities since before the pandemic. And this is according to the eviction lab at Princeton University.
This was a really stark example in Phoenix landlords filed more than 8,000 eviction notices in the month of January. And that was the highest ever in a single month. Eviction filings are also way up in Las Vegas and Houston. And for 10 of the 33 cities that the lab tracks evictions were up 15% or more. And you know, this follows, of course, the sharp increase in rents during the pandemic as there was more demand for housing. A lot of people moving.
According to Zillow rents overall rose 30% in the four years between 2020 and 23. And the main cause of eviction is, of course, unpaid rent. And you know, people who rent are just facing higher and higher costs according to the joint center for housing studies at Harvard about a quarter of rent or households now are spending at least 50% of their income on rent.
And you know, the kind of standard thinking is that about 30% is considered affordable. And another thing I thought was really interesting about this story is the journal points to property management software that has made it easier to evict people by automating parts of the process. So in a way, you know, technology may play a role here. I think that would be worth looking into more. And why this matters, of course, is the effect on families research shows evictions can cause long term harm.
It becomes much harder to find a place to rent, especially in a safe place. It causes job losses, affects mental health and the well-being of children. So this is a troubling trend and something I think we need to take seriously. Yeah, I haven't looked in a while, but you know, the voucher programs, which I know that you've covered in the past, have such long waiting lists.
When I was in New York, briefly last month, I remember there's a big news, it was all over the news that the waiting list for housing vouchers was like opening up for the first time in a long time. And people were trying to get their, you know, their sort of paperwork together just to get a chance at potential housing support. And in many places, those lists are like years long.
Yeah, it's really so hard to get help. And there was, of course, a lot of relief during the pandemic, eviction moratorium, but also financial assistance. And as a lot of that has gone away, it's just, you know, left us even worse off in some cases than before the pandemic. What a lovely start to a Monday. Let's get to the news.
Okay, some good news from the world of science. We've talked about this a bit before on the show about, you know, these up and coming malaria vaccines that could make such a difference in the lives of families all over the world. So headline here from Bloomberg, the first malaria shots from the biggest max vaccine maker deployed in Africa.
Children in Abijand, the ivory coast are going to be the first to get shots. And this is a shot malaria shots, it's only about $4 vaccine, which is cheaper than some of the previously available ones. And I'm going to read it here, the vaccine was recommended in 2023 by the World Health Organization for use in Africa for children under five years old.
The age group there that bears the brunt of a disease that kills more than 600,000 people per year in the ivory coast alone for people a day, died from the disease according to the country's health ministry. And 95% of cases and 96% of the deaths from malaria occur in Africa. So this company serum that makes it has already produced 25 million doses of this vaccine and has undertaken to scale up to $100 million, $100 million doses annually at less than $4 a shot.
And the vaccine's efficacy, it was shown in a clinical trial to be as high as 80% a year after the fourth dose was administrative. So good news there. What you got for a smile? Okay, I've got a good smile. Well, it makes me smile. If you've ever wondered what to do with your old cell phone or any devices or the batteries of quit working, this is some good news.
And thanks to Courtney for sharing this one with me. It was in wired and it's soon going to be easier to recycle your old cell phone or other rechargeable devices. Billions of phones just end up discarded every year. But this month, the US Department of Energy announced a $14 million program that will fund more than 1,000 consumer battery collection sites at staples and battery plus stores.
So you'll be able to drop off these old batteries and what that does is prevent these toxic chemicals from leaking into the environment or blowing up in some cases, lithium ion batteries in particular can catch fire. And also many of the materials that are used in rechargeable batteries are extremely valuable for the energy transition, things like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite. So if we do a better job of recycling those things, we won't have to produce as much.
And US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Wired that US battery recycling capacity has been very underutilized. So apparently we have capacity. We just need to do a better job of actually recycling these things. Oh, good. I have like this mystery bag of old electronics that I kind of like I feel like everybody has that bag of like old electronics and wires. And it's like you don't want to put them in the garbage, but you don't really know what to do with them.
And so yeah, now I can hopefully find a way to recycle them. I know. Now we just have to find the time. I know, right? I can't help you with that. Although there's a delivery service here in DC that will actually like pick up your electronics recycling for you, of course, for a fee and take it to be recycled. Man, big cities have everything. I feel like this is the third time recently. Like, well, in DC, we have a service for that. We do.
And the other hand drive to staples. Yeah, but I mean, you also don't have to pay for the same for parking or there is parking. But you know, that also opens a whole other thing of like it feels, you know, we've talked about this bifurcated economy, the K shaped economy and everything like that and how it really does feel sometimes like we are dividing our society into the groups of people who are like using all of these services.
And the groups of people who are providing all of these services and never the train shall meet. But you know, that's a combo for another day. All right. Okay, that is it for us today. Look, I know it was a hard weekend. Everybody, but I encourage folks to take that energy and even if it's negative energy and try to route it towards something that benefits your community. Go volunteer, go help check on an elderly person in this heat.
Go to read a book to some kids at the library or something or, you know, put out a dish of water for the squirrels in your backyard. Something nice to make you feel like you're doing something because it's a hard time. It's a really hard time for the country.
And I would also encourage everybody to go and listen to an interview that David Broncoccio did this morning with the president of the Society for Human Resource Management about, you know, kind of being civil to each other, especially at work. Because emotions are high. And I think we all have to put a little bit more effort into at least speaking kindly to each other and listening to each other. So, yes, try to do something good. It will make you feel better.
Meanwhile, that is it for us today. You can join us tomorrow for our weekly deep dive. We are going to be talking with Emily Amick, a lawyer and co-author of the new book, Democracy in Retrograde, perfect timing, about how to take those feelings of hopelessness and turn them into action that can have a real impact on the health of our democracy from the local to the federal level. And that's a great way to put those feelings of action oriented stuff. Stay tuned.
Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Today's program was engineered by Charlton Thorpe, Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer, Bridget Baudner, is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital. Put out water for squirrels. That is so sweet. I never thought about how the squirrels must be suffering. The planet is heating up, sea levels are rising. And if you're feeling overwhelmed by it all, you're not alone.
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