Debates That Matter

Newtown Victim’s Sister: ‘It Only Takes 90 Seconds’ To Do A Background Check

2013-12-15T19:37:00.001-05:00

One year ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a 27-year-old teacher, Victoria Leigh Soto, threw herself between her first graders and Adam Lanza, taking the bullets he meant for them. A photograph of her younger sister, Carlee, receiving the news of Vicki’s death on her cell phone quickly became a symbol of national heartbreak over the shooting.

On this week’s Fox News Sunday, Carlee Soto, 21, spoke with host Chris Wallace about that day and her newfound advocacy on gun violence. Soto expressed her frustration with the Senate’s failure to pass bipartisan background check legislation in April:

WALLACE: How do you explain the fact that a year later, nothing has happened?

SOTO: It was extremely hard to watch these members of Congress come in and vote no on something so sensible. It’s a background check and it only takes 90 seconds. It’s not preventing anyone that should not have a gun. It was hard for that to happen and to see that happen. But like President Barack Obama told me, and Vice President Biden, that no one ever thought slavery would be abolished, no one ever thought that women would have rights. And I believe that we will have sensible gun laws in the future.

Watch it:

Soto had trouble returning to school after the shooting, but recently joined the gun control advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns to speak out for stronger gun laws. “It is hard. There [are] definitely days when I don’t want to do this,” she told Wallace. “I don’t want to speak on camera, I don’t want to talk in front of a group of people. But my sister can’t do that. There are so many people that can’t be advocates for this, and I know I can.”

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1 in 5 Africans forced to pay bribes for police, health care, education

2013-11-17T19:50:00.000-05:00

Almost one in five Africans were forced to pay a bribe in the past year just to get basic public services, a major survey said Thursday.

In Sierra Leone -- the worst affected country -- almost two thirds of people said they had given money to public officials for permits, access to health care and school, according to the "Let the People Have Their Say" report by Afrobarometer. Morocco, Guinea and Kenya were close behind.

To compile the report, Afrobarometer surveyed 51,000 Africans across 34 countries.

The institution rated most corrupt across the whole continent was the police. Alex Vines, head of the Africa Program at Chatham House, said the figures displayed a policing "crisis" in Africa. Nigeria, Kenya and Sierra Leone rated the worst for police corruption.

“If you were to take a group of young people in Africa and say, ‘Someone has burgled your house,’ the majority would not phone the police," he said. "They would rather go to someone else they might know who could sort it out.

“Policing across much of Africa is in crisis. So you get informal police forces in place of the official ones which aren’t doing their job. Vigilante policing provides the protection that the police fail to do.”

In terms of dealing with corruption, the Nigerian and Egyptian governments came out worst in the survey, with 82 percent of people saying it was doing a "fairly bad, or very bad" job tackling the problem.

Bribery was said to be least problematic in Namibia, Mauritius, Cape Verde and Botswana, with between just 4 and 6 percent of people in those countries reporting paying a bribe in the past year.

Although market economies are booming in countries such as Kenya, prompted by oil and gas finds, according to the report endemic corruption has a crippling effect on wealth equality and the poor.

It also said that corruption appeared to be bad for democracy, with people who said their country was corrupt also reporting their governments were undemocratic.

"The research suggests African governments need to step up their efforts to curb corruption, in the interests of both reducing poverty and advancing democracy," the report said.

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10 things you should know about slavery

2013-11-17T19:34:00.002-05:00

As it expands into wider release, 12 Years a Slave seems to have accomplished an improbable feat. It’s sparking conversations on African-American history and slavery in a month other than February.

The movie centers on Solomon Northrup, a free man who is lured from New York to Washington, where he is abducted, sold into bondage and taken to Louisiana. His struggle to survive and regain his freedom reveals the depth of the oppressive system that pervaded American life.

For example, the United States Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. That definition gave Southern states more Congressional seats and more power in determining the course of the nation.

“Counting slaves as three-fifths of a person would bring a state’s representation higher,” says Ed Pennell, a park ranger at the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. “When you look at from that perspective, you get the idea of how interwoven slavery was into the United States system of governing.”

That constitutional compromise is an important fact about slavery. Here are 10 more things to know about the institution that brought millions of people into the western hemisphere.

The North Atlantic slave trade spanned almost four centuries and encompassed the New World.

Say slavery, and most folks think of the Southern plantations in the mid-19th century. Influential books like “Gone with the Wind,” and “Jubilee” by Margaret Walker are certainly centered on that region and era. But the slaves were imported from Africa into the New World from the 1500s to the 1800s. The trade peaked from 1750 to 1850, according to historian Philip Curtin.

Source: The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census by Philip Curtin

Most slaves were not brought to North America

Scholars now estimate about 13 million Africans were kidnapped, enslaved and shipped to the Americas; about 10.6 million survived the journey. The bulk of the captives – almost 90 percent – went to Brazil, other parts of South America and the Caribbean. Although estimates vary, scholars believe roughly 475,000 enslaved Africans were bound for North America during the entire slave trade. That’s why Curtin calls this country a “marginal recipient of slaves from Africa.”

Sources: The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census by Philip Curtin and “The U.S. Slave Trade”

Two major regions in Africa sent captives to the United States

About half the Africans brought to the United States came from Senegambia and west-central Africa. Senegambia includes modern Senegal, Gambia, Mali and Guinea-Bisseau. West-Central Africa includes modern Congo, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon. Some regions that contributed heavily to the overall slave trade sent relatively few people to the United States. Africans who were transported from the Bight of Benin, such as the Yoruba, Ewe and Fon, wound up in Cuba, Trinidad, Brazil and the French Caribbean.

Source: “The U.S. Slave Trade”

Africans contributed brains and brawn to the New World economies.

In colonial South Carolina, for example, slaveowners valued slaves from Gambia because they were familiar with cultivating cash crops like rice and indigo. Historian Daniel Littlefield claims the rice economy wouldn’t have existed without the slaves’ expertise. “Carolinians may well have gone to Gambia as students, and brought back Africans as teachers, making the African influence on the development of rice cultivation a decisive one,” Littlefield writes.

Source: Rice and Slaves by Daniel Littlefield

Not all slaveowners were white

James Pendarvis was a black slave owner who lived near Colleton, SC. He was the oldest child of Joseph Pendarvis, who was white, and Parthena, who was black. James inherited his father’s plantations and slaves. When he died in 1798, he owned three plantations and 155 slaves. He left his property to his grandchildren. Some of Pendarvis’ slaves are listed here.

Source : Lowcountry Africana, www.lowcountryafricana.com

Slaves had respites and holidays.

Slaves did have time off – usually Saturday afternoon and Sunday. While Saturday was often reserved for personal chores like laundry and gardening – slaves were responsible for growing much of their food – Sundays were time to play music, sing or dance. Slaveowners threw parties for slaves, as well.

One of the more common events was cornshucking. Slaves from several plantations would gather to shuck the corn of a specific slaveowner. In return, that slaveowner would provide food and liquor. “The corn-shucking was a combination of labor and recreation,” says historian John Blassingame. “The slaves enjoyed the evening away from the quarters, meeting friends and sweethearts…telling tall stories and singing hilarious songs.”

Source: The Slave Community by John Blassingame

But slave singing wasn’t merely entertainment

A scene in 12 Years a Slave features a white overseer singing “Run ni**a Run, the Padder-Roller Catch You.” In fact, scholars claim slaves used that song – as well as others - to warn comrades that the slaves patrollers were roaming. Folklorist Roger Abrahams says the song has many versions, but they start with the same line, “Run ni**a run, the padder-roller catch you.”

“The rest of the stanzas tend to report comic scenes that emerge as part of the need to escape,” he writes.

Source: Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South by Roger Abrahams

Slave were slaveowners’ personal property

In the movie, an overseer saves Northrup from a lynching. But the overseer acts from practicality: the plantation owner is still paying the mortgage on his property – the man being fitted with the noose. Even though human, slaves could be mortgaged, assessed, taxed and inherited. The slave owner further benefited because slaves had children. He could bequeath future generations to his heirs and their descendants.

Thus Micah Mixon, a South Carolina slaveholder, left the following property to two of his daughters in 1805: “One Negro man called LITTLE SAM & one Negro woman called BELL. Each of them (the daughters) to have an equal right to the use and profit and increase of the said two Negroes to them & the heirs of their bodys (cq) forever.”

Source: Will of Micah Mixon, Afrigeneas Slave Data Collection.

Runaway slaves posed a constant problem for plantation owners and overseers

“It was a rare owner, large or small, who could boast that he had never had a slave abscond from his farm or plantation,” writes historian John Hope Franklin. Dealing with runaways consumed time and money, so slaveowners relied on harsh punishments. Penalties included lashings of 50 to 100 stripes, paddling, shackling or revoking privileges. Some overseers punished non-runaways by working them harder in hopes those left behind would tattle on the escapee. Nothing seemed to end the problem, though. “Few overseers were able to solve the problem of slaves running away, whatever the method of correction,” Franklin says.

Source: Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation 1790-1860 by John Hope Franklin

Slaves often ran away to reunite with family members – or to keep from being separated from them.

“[Slaves] ran to neighboring plantations to be with husbands or wives, ran away to search for mothers or fathers, and all too often in vain for their children,” Franklin writes. News of an impending sale could spark spontaneous escape attempts. Franklin tells the story of Sophia, who grabbed her children and ran from Maryland to Washington D.C. The family was captured and sold; the money went to care for Sophia’s mistress who “suffered great imbecility of mind,” according court records of the case.

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Homeowner Who Shot Girl Seeking Help At His Door Charged With Murder

2013-11-17T19:10:00.001-05:00

A Detroit-area homeowner who shot in the face a 19-year-old girl at his door will be charged with murder, Wayne County prosecutors announced Thursday. The charges include murder in the second degree, which carries a term of up to life in prison; a manslaughter charge with a maximum term of 15 years in prison; and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony or attempted commission, which carries a term of two years in prison.

In the two weeks since Renisha McBride was shot dead outside the Dearborn Heights home, protests have escalated around the country to charge the homeowner, suggesting comparisons to the killing of Trayvon Martin. The shooter was white and McBride is African American. While the homeowner, now identified as Theodore P. Wafer, age 54, initially told police he discharged the gun by accident, his lawyer since told the press the shooting was “justified” and “reasonable,” invoking language from Michigan’s “Shoot First” laws that allow immunity for some self-defense shootings. At a press conference Friday, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said her office determined that Wafer “did not act in lawful self-defense.”

It is now clear that Michigan’s Stand Your Ground-like laws did not stop prosecutors from charging Wafer. Wafer may, however, still seek immunity from charges at trial.

Here’s what we know:

Police believe McBride was in a car accident and knocked on the door of the home for help. Worthy reported Friday that McBride, was bloodied, confused, and disoriented. Toxicology reports also show that her blood alcohol level was above the legal limit.

The shooter didn’t know McBride. In audio released by the police, the homeowner told the dispatcher he shot someone he didn’t know.

The homeowner’s lawyer is calling the shooting “justified.” The homeowner initially said he accidentally discharged the gun, but when his lawyer, Cheryl Carpenter, spoke to the press, she said the shooting was “justified” and invoked the language of Michigan’s “Shoot First” laws that could immunize the homeowner from prosecution if he was acting in self-defense. Carpenter also told NPR that the knocking sounded like a lot of banging, rather than a knock.

There were no signs forced entry into the home. Prosecutor Worthy said during the press conference Friday that McBride had not attempted to forcibly enter the home. For Wafer to successfully invoke immunity under what is known as the “Castle Doctrine,” which authorizes deadly force without a duty to retreat in one’s home, he would have to show that McBride was “in the process of breaking and entering a dwelling.” He could also use the state’s Stand Your Ground law to show that he reasonably believed force was necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm.

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Here’s How Occupy Wall Street Freed Americans From Millions In Debt

2013-11-17T19:01:00.001-05:00

Occupy Wall Street activists have canceled nearly $15 million in consumer debt in the first year of a program called Rolling Jubilee that uses crowd funding to buy up and then void consumers’ debt. The program spent just $400,000 of the roughly $620,000 it has raised to date to buy up medical debts that were far enough past due that they were being resold for pennies on the dollar, marking a first-ever incursion by populist activists into an industry dominated by unscrupulous private debt collectors.

The program works by taking advantage of the same business dynamics that fuel debt collection companies. When the firm that originally sought to collect a debt — a hospital, a bank, or a private education lending firm, for example — decides to cut its losses by selling debt on which the borrower has defaulted to a collector, it usually does so at alarmingly low rates. A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study published in January found that consumer debt sells for about four cents on the dollar in this secondary market. While debt collectors pay that price and then try to force at least partial repayment by the borrower in order to turn a profit, Rolling Jubilee simply cancels the debt and hopes the beneficiaries might pay the kindness forward by helping to fund the program — that’s the “rolling” part of Rolling Jubilee.

The Occupy program, which kicked off in November of 2012, is paying an even lower rate than what the FTC report found to be typical. A spokesman told Reuters it was paying about two cents on the dollar for debt.

The group defines its success not in terms of the topline dollar figure of debt it has eliminated — $15 million is a very small amount compared to the total secondary debt market, which measures in the tens of billions of dollars each year — but in terms of public awareness of how debt works in the modern economy. “Our purpose in doing this, aside from helping some people along the way…was to spread information about the workings of this secondary debt market,” spokesman Andrew Ross told the Guardian. “Very few people know how cheaply their debts have been bought by collectors. It changes the psychology of the debtor,” he added. “And that gives you moral ammunition to have a different conversation with the debt collector.”

On top of that moral ammunition, distressed borrowers may finally see regulators come to their aid. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced last week that it is writing rules for how private debt collectors can pursue repayment from individuals. The move continues a push the agency began late last winter to give borrowers tools for dealing with aggressive debt collection efforts. The agency fields consumer complaints and provides template letters to help borrowers assert their legal rights in debt disputes. Complaints against collection agencies tripled from 2002 to 2010, and one out of every seven Americans now faces third-party debt collection efforts.

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The People Who Care For Our Children Are Paid Terribly

2013-11-17T18:57:00.003-05:00

While it’s become little secret that in-home nannies are paid poorly, those who work in childcare centers are also paid poverty wages.

According to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services, the median hourly wage for those who work in centers for children ages zero to five is $10.60 an hour. “If they were employed full-time, for the standard 2,080 hours a year, that would translate to about $22,000 a year,” the report notes. That’s below the poverty line for a family of four. And it turns out that three-quarters of these workers are showing up to their jobs full time.

Those who care for the very youngest are also paid less than those who care for slightly older children. Workers who look after kids ages zero to three make a median wage of $9.30, while those caring for children three to five make $11.90.

Meanwhile, these workers are highly experienced, with a median of 10 years for center-based workers and about 14 years for those who run daycare out of their homes. More than half of both reported having 10 years of experience or more. And more than half also have a college degree. Yet even more highly educated workers still don’t make much. Workers with a Bachelor’s degree make a median wage of $14.70 an hour, which comes to $30,576 a year for full-time work. “[W]ages for college-educated ECE [early childhood education] teachers and caregivers are much lower than for comparably educated workers in the overall economy,” the report notes.

The low pay for those who work in childcare centers reflects low wages for other types of caregivers. A third of nannies make less than minimum wage. Home health and personal care aides make a median wage of $9.70. This means that those who care for our children, elderly parents, and disabled loved ones are often barely scraping by.

Yet while teachers aren’t paid lavishly, they can still live more comfortable middle class lives. They make more than $50,000 a year at the median.

Source

In Somalia, The Other Natural Disaster That Nobody Is Talking About

2013-11-17T18:55:00.000-05:00

A deadly cyclone slammed the Puntland region of Somalia last weekend to little international notice, wreaking havoc on an already impoverished population.

The most recent death toll estimates at least 300 people dead, and the United Nations believes 30,000 people desperately require extensive aid — a number local authorities put closer to 50,000. Hundreds of people are still missing.

With winds blowing up to 46 miles per hour, the cyclone — which tied for the deadliest in the history of Somalia — caused extreme flooding throughout the region. Villages were destroyed, 100,000 livestock perished, and fishing boats were lost. A full 65 percent of Somalis depend on livestock for sustenance, while many other rely on fishing for steady income, leveling even more pain on an already near non-existent economy.

Due to the heavy impact of wind and flooding, the region’s already shaky infrastructure is now heavily damaged — for example, a major bridge connecting the region’s capital, Garowe, to other cities was demolished by the storm. The lack of infrastructure has hampered much-needed assistance, as deliveries must happen by air or foot. The Somali government is calling for “clean water, non-perishable foods, medicines, shelter materials and blankets.”

Complicating matters further is the awkward political relationship the region has with the rest of the country. While the Somali government in Mogadishu, the country’s capital, insists that all of Somalia is still one country, not everyone agrees. Puntland declared itself an autonomous state in 1998, wishing to have more control over its own destiny while still remaining in a federal Somalia. This has led to tensions with both Mogadishu and the neighboring Somaliland, which proclaimed itself an independent state in 1991.

When compared to coverage of Typhoon Haiyan, the cyclone in Somalia received very little attention either in the media or among the international community, which already struggles to prop up the Somali government and economy. The Philippines in the days since Haiyan has received millions of dollars in donations — the U.S. promised $20 million, the U.K. $10 million, and the United Nations $25 million in assistance. In contrast, there has been no comparable outpouring of aid to Somalia in proportion to the damage inflicted. Local agencies currently bear the blunt of assistance. Hampered by infrastructure concerns, the United Nations as of Nov. 12 had been unable to verify the needs on the ground in Puntland, the first step in providing assistance.

Recently, the Climate Change Vulnerabiltity Index reported that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are among those in “extreme risk,” due to climate change. The index takes into account the ability to recover from major disasters. In recent years, Somalia has been considered one of the most vulnerable nations, an assessment that appears to be borne out in this instance.

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Hurricane Katrina, The Obamacare Rollout, And Allowing Privilege To Shape Our Politics

2013-11-17T18:52:00.001-05:00

On Friday, the media got swept up in an unhelpful comparison between the rocky Obamacare rollout and the botched clean-up efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was probably simply inevitable; likening political fumbles to Katrina has become an increasingly common trope in the years following the 2005 tragedy. In response, commentators were quick to point out that, although the technical glitches plaguing HealthCare.gov are undoubtedly a huge problem, they won’t actually have the same impact as a deadly natural disaster.

But as Republican lawmakers continue to stoke outrage over the people who have been harmed by Obamacare’s troubled rollout — the people who are still struggling to sign up for coverage on the exchange websites, and more recently, the people who are receiving cancellation notices from their insurance companies — there is one obvious point of comparison. It doesn’t have anything to do with the political career of the sitting president, though. It has to do with the privilege that continues to dominate the United States’ political priorities.

It’s about who is worth rescuing.

After the embarrassingly slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina left thousands of people stranded on rooftops and in overcrowded shelters, the victims pointed out that it might have had something to do with race. The people in power may not have prioritized the needs of the poor, black people in New Orleans above all the other things that demanded their attention. That lack of attention may reveal itself not just in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but also in the decades of policy that shaped New Orleans’ urban infrastructure and safety net system. Kanye West distilled this attitude into one infamous line that sparked a widespread conversation about enduring racial tensions in America: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Obviously, the issues spawned by Katrina aren’t really about one man’s personal feelings about African Americans. But they do speak to some version of that concept writ large. At the heart of Kanye’s outburst is a legitimate question about the collective group of men who set the political priorities in our country, and whether those privileged people are using their power to serve historically disadvantaged communities with relatively little political capital.

If we return to Obamacare’s rollout, the current political environment suggests the answer to that question is no.

The beginning of the open enrollment period for Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges has been decried as an absolute disaster. HealthCare.gov, the national website intended to allow Americans to sign up for plans offered in the new state-level insurance exchanges, has been so glitchy that it’s prevented many people from completing the enrollment process. It’s not exactly a great start for the roll-out of a new policy that aims to expand access to health care to millions of people who don’t currently have it.

To make matters worse, Obamacare isn’t being fully implemented across every state. The law was designed to extend coverage to the uninsured in two major ways: Through the new state-level exchanges, which will offer federal subsidies to help Americans buy private insurance, and through an expansion of the Medicaid program, which will increase the number of Americans eligible for public insurance. But the Supreme Court ruled that the Medicaid expansion should be optional. All of a sudden, the policy intended to insure some of the most economically disadvantaged people in the nation was transformed into a political tool. Intent on resisting Obamacare at every turn, Republican legislators in over 20 states have refused to expand Medicaid, leaving many of their low-income residents with no good options. Just this Friday, Alaska became the latest state to turn it down.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about five million poor Americans will have no access to basic health benefits under Obamacare because they fall into a “coverage gap” created by this fight over Medicaid. Without expansion, they make too much money to qualify for their state’s Medicaid program, but too little money to qualify for subsidies on the individual market. They’re left out of Obamacare altogether. A New York Times analysis estimated that number to be a little higher, concluding that 8 million low-income people will be locked out of health reform.

This group includes much of America’s working poor who struggle to make ends meet with their jobs in the service sector. It consists of thousands of cooks, janitors, nurses’ aides, truck drivers, and waiters. And just like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many of the people left behind are the poor, black Americans who live in the South.

“Blacks are disproportionately affected, largely because more of them are poor and living in Southern states,” the New York Times reported last month. “In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid.”

Millions of people locked out of Obamacare? Hardworking Americans struggling to get by who can’t realize the promise of affordable health coverage? That seems like a political scandal. But the main focus of the political and media outrage over Obamacare’s troubled rollout hasn’t really focused on those people. As a whole, the political system isn’t incredibly worried about the fact that low-income and uninsured Americans — the people without much political influence to begin with — are victims of a partisan divide over the health law.

Instead, the current discussion is centered on a relatively small group of people who do currently have insurance, but whose plans don’t meet the minimum standard for benefit requirements put forth by the health reform law. Those people are receiving notices that their insurance plans are being canceled and they must purchase a new plan under Obamacare, one that will include the full range of consumer protections that the law now requires insurers to provide. If the United States is poised to shift to a system that doesn’t put insurance profits above all else — and therefore leave behind an old system that charged sicker Americans more than healthier ones, locked out people with pre-existing conditions, and offered no guarantees that coverage would be affordable or comprehensive — it’s an unavoidable aspect of reform.

Nonetheless, the people receiving cancellation notices aren’t exactly pleased about this development. They want to keep their current insurance, and they feel like the president misled them when he repeatedly assured Americans that Obamacare won’t force people to switch plans. Republicans, who have staunchly opposed the effort to extend insurance coverage to millions of underprivileged and uninsured Americans for the past three years, are all too happy to take up their cause.

GOP lawmakers are outraged about the “Obamacare victims,” the people who are supposedly being penalized by a health law that doesn’t take their needs into account. In a dramatic video uploaded by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Friday, Republicans aren’t mincing words about the moral obligation to protect these Americans. “This is about real people in our districts who are being harmed by Obamacare,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) said. Cantor urged his colleagues to “put their constituents above politics.”

These victims look very different than the cooks and cashiers who don’t qualify for Medicaid in red states. In Cantor’s video, as lawmakers hold up photos of these families on the House floor to illustrate their point, it’s a sea of white faces. These people aren’t the working poor; they’re small business owners, architects, psychotherapists, even members of Congress. And many times, even though they’re labeled as “victims,” they’re not actually upset about the new coverage they can get under Obamacare. They still have some good options available to them under health reform.

At the beginning of this month, the New York Times’ editorial board published an exasperated piece pointing out that the “overblown controversy” has “obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do.”

Nonetheless, the political scandal over the Americans losing their current health plans reached a fever pitch this week. Republican lawmakers rushed to come up with several different policy “fixes” to preserve those people’s access to their existing coverage, and their proposals are winning the support of a growing number of Democrats. The Obama administration released a new administrative rule to slightly tweak the health law, essentially a concession to the growing concerns on both sides of the aisle.

Meanwhile, the low-income Americans who are arguably the real victims of Obamacare’s rollout, the people who will continue to live in a country that does not provide any path to health coverage, haven’t gotten congressional hearings and several pieces of legislation in their names. They haven’t gotten a “fix.” No one is clamoring to rescue them. The administration did work to exempt them from the individual mandate — but that move didn’t actually address the fact that they don’t have access to affordable insurance. It simply ensured they won’t be dealt an additional financial blow because of their lawmakers’ decision to deny them Medicaid coverage.

President Obama, who is not blind to many of the aspects of privilege that Kanye West accused his predecessor of overlooking, does talk about these people a lot. He has consistently urged Republican lawmakers to accept the generous federal funding to expand Medicaid. He has criticized them for failing to do so. He continues to press them on the issue; last week, Obama asked Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who heads a state with one of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, to “not deny people healthcare because of ideology.”

But the political outrage machine — driven by powerful players with access to media platforms, as well as the lawmakers elected mainly by people who are privileged enough to avoid being disenfranchised by our voting system — hasn’t really listened. It’s perhaps not very surprising. When it comes to civic participation and political voice, our country has a long history of inequality. It’s easier for economically advantaged people to enter into our systems and make their voices heard, therefore driving the country in the direction that most benefits them. It’s much more difficult, on the other hand, for underprivileged populations to organize, vote, and exert the same kind of influence in the political sphere. That’s what allows less fortunate people to be left behind.

At a very basic level, the middle-class small business owner who received a cancellation letter from his insurer is likely to have some media savvy, and he’ll be able to leverage his skills to contact reporters to tell his story. He’ll believe his story is worth telling. But the single mother who’s working two part-time jobs in Louisiana and still doesn’t qualify for Medicaid probably hasn’t had enough time to keep up with the raging Obamacare debate, let alone feel like she has a voice in it. She’s not launching a campaign to get on Fox News, and they’re not calling her, either.

If we must draw comparisons between Obamacare and previous national disasters, consider this one. As a collective society, we still haven’t really learned the lessons of Hurricane Katrina — but not because of a broken website or a broken promise about keeping your plan. We haven’t figured out how to prioritize that Louisiana mother’s life.

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REPORT: Apple CEO Saves Thanksgiving For The Company’s Workers

2013-11-17T18:43:00.000-05:00

On the heels of rumors that some Apple retail locations would open on Thanksgiving Day, joining a growing number of stores that are denying workers the ability to stay home with their families and celebrate, the Apple news site ifoAppleStore reports that CEO Tim Cook cancelled those plans. The site notes, “Cook’s specific objection was that it’s important for Apple retail employees to be with their families on the holiday.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Rather than waiting to open for the holiday shopping rush on the morning of Black Friday, more and more stores have decided to open on Thanksgiving Day this year, including Walmart, Toys R Us, Target, Best Buy, and Kmart. Kmart is the most aggressive, opening at 6 a.m. that day.

But other stores have decided to preserve the holiday for their employees. Nordstrom, Burlington Coat Factory, Patagonia, REI, American Girl, Costco, and Radio Shack will all stay closed. Radio Shack went so far as to say that it had opened on the holiday in the past but decided it was better for both customers and for workers to wait until Friday.

While the stores that will be opening claim that employees are “excited” to work that day, there are reports that employees at Kmart, for example, are being denied requests to take that day off. Even if they volunteer, it may be because retail has become notorious for denying workers enough hours to make a living and they need the extra pay to get by. More than 8 million people in the country are working part time but want to be working full time. And many American workers may struggle to take the holidays off, as the U.S. is the only advanced country that doesn’t guarantee paid vacation days.

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California’s Online Sales Tax Is Bringing In Millions Of Dollars

2013-11-03T14:42:00.005-05:00

California’s controversial online sales tax has reaped more than $260 million dollars in just one year of collection, according to newly released data from the California Board of Equalization. While brick-and-mortar businesses collect sales tax, online retailers with offices in California were exempt for years until 2011, costing the state billions in lost revenue. Capital Public Radio reports that 40 percent of the new revenue has gone to the state’s general fund, which is spent on education, Medicaid, prisons, and transportation, among other public programs.

These numbers are in line with forecasts by state budget experts. Still, the BOE estimates that about $1 billion in sales taxes were lost in the last fiscal year, perhaps because Californians are under-reporting their online purchases on their tax forms.

Conservatives fighting similar measures in other states argue that the tax will drive businesses away. Indeed, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed the online tax into law in 2011, online retail behemoth Amazon threw a minor tantrum, abruptly severing ties with thousands of websites in the state. But two years later, Amazon is opening four new California distribution centers and adding 10,000 jobs in low-income regions hit hard by the recession — part of a deal that delayed the company’s tax collection requirement until September 2012. The retail giant is also expanding offices for research and development in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Closing the “Amazon loophole” has become an attractive option for cash-strapped states. Amazon will start collecting sales tax on Friday in Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Besides these, Amazon collects taxes from 13 other states.

The company also now supports the Marketplace Fairness Act, a federal online sales tax initiative that has stalled in Congress. The bill, which would give states the option to require online companies to collect taxes, could generate $23 billion a year — a windfall for struggling state economies. It would also make the tax code slightly more progressive, as poorer families who lack Internet access are currently shouldering more of the sales tax than wealthier people who shop online.

What You Need To Know About The Severely Conservative Judge Who Just Ruled Against Birth Control

2013-11-03T14:28:00.001-05:00

Nine years ago, the California Supreme Court upheld a state law similar to the Affordable Care Act’s rules requiring most employers to include birth control coverage in their employee health plans. The sole dissent in that case was Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Nearly a decade later, Brown got her revenge. Though no longer a member of California’s highest court — President George W. Bush appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit over the strenuous objections of Democrats — Judge Brown is now the author of a 2-1 opinion holding that religious employers can ignore the federal birth control rules. What was once a fringe view held by a lone holdout is now the law in the second most powerful court in the country.

Judge Brown’s opinion barely conceals her contempt for progressive legislation. Prior to her nomination to the D.C. Circuit, Brown labeled the New Deal a “socialist revolution,” and she likened Social Security to a kind of intergenerational cannibalism — “[t]oday’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.” Since joining the federal bench, she authored a concurring opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect. The very first sentence of her birth control opinion labels the Affordable Care Act a “behemoth.”

So there was never any doubt how Brown would vote on this particular challenge to women’s access to birth control. Her opinion was joined by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative George H.W. Bush appointee. Carter-appointed Judge Harry Edwards dissented.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown

Coincidentally, Brown’s opinion comes just one day after Senate Republicans reignited the filibuster wars by filibustering the first of three Obama nominees to her court. Currently, the D.C. Circuit is evenly divided between Democratic and Republican active judges, but a large number of Republican judges in partial retirement allow the GOP to dominate the court. Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn wrote in a Fox News op-ed that Republicans should prevent any of Obama’s nominees from being confirmed to this court to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority. Although federal appeals courts typically hear cases via randomly drawn three-judge panels, the court’s rules permit a majority of the court’s active judges to displace any decision reached by a three-judge panel.

Senate Democrats waged an unsuccessful effort to filibuster Judge Brown’s nomination during the Bush Administration — largely because of her strident opposition to programs such as Social Security — but that filibuster was eventually defeated after Republicans threatened to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees. The deal that allowed Judge Brown to be confirmed also paved the way for Judge Priscilla Owen’s nomination. Yesterday evening, Judge Owen authored an opinion reinstating a Texas anti-abortion law blocked by a lower court judge.

There is a lesson here for Democrats trying to decide whether to invoke the nuclear opinion in the D.C. Circuit fight that Senate Republicans started this week. When Republicans had the courage to demand what they wanted and put a serious threat behind it, they got two of the most conservative judges in the country. If Senate Democrats follow suit — either by forcing Republicans to cave or by carrying through on a threat to nuke the filibuster — they will also win their fight to get President Obama’s nominees confirmed.

How The NRA Made It Easier To Bring Guns Into Airports

2013-11-03T13:35:00.000-05:00

On Friday, a gunman “pulled a Smith & Wesson .223-caliber assault rifle from his duffel bag” and opened fire on an airport. Officials have arrested the alleged shooter, 23-year-old Paul Ciancia, who killed a TSA agent and wounded six others at a security checkpoint. The incident is the second airport shooting in six months.

The National Rifle Association has not yet said a word on the tragedy (the day before, the NRA tweeted a story about the so-called “exploitation” of Sandy Hook). But in the past, the NRA has vigorously campaigned to make it easier to bring firearms into airports and criticized TSA agents for their aggressive efforts to ensure guns don’t make it onto a plane. Federal law prevents all travelers from transporting firearms beyond checkpoints (they must be unloaded, checked, and declared in luggage), but the NRA has been a force in weakening state law to permit guns before the security checkpoint.

Advance laws that allow guns in airport terminals.
Over the last decade, the NRA has repeatedly lobbied against airport firearm restrictions. According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, states including Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin either expressly allow firearms in specific sections or only prohibit firearms in airports beyond checkpoints.

And in California in 2012, the NRA formally opposed Assembly Bill 2182, which would have required a person be arrested if they brought a firearm into the airport and ban them from entering in the future. The bill never moved from committee. More recently, bills introduced in Virginia, Georgia, and Ohio would allow people to carry their weapons inside.

Intimidate TSA agents for aggressively screening for guns.
When the TSA subjected a girl carrying a firearm-shaped purse to extra questioning, the NRA responded that this extra precaution constituted harassment. “We shouldn’t be surprised that security personnel who see nothing wrong with humiliating 85-year-old women at our nation’s airports might see a teenage girl sporting a purse with a firearm motif as a potential danger,” NRA President David Keene said said at the time. “But it should upset us as much as it did her and her parents.” The extra scrutiny may be needed: TSA agents have confiscated 30 percent more guns from passengers, many of them loaded, in 2013 compared to last year. Most travelers say they “forgot” they had the firearm, which has made sociologists think the trend is a result of people being permitted to carry their guns virtually anywhere.

Endorse candidates who oppose limiting guns at airports.
The NRA’s “A-rated” allies are trying to make it even easier to access guns in airports. Virginia Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli (R) and Virginia Attorney General candidate Mark Obenshain voted against a 2004 bill banning guns in airport terminals (it passed anyway). The NRA has spent more than $500,000 to make Cuccinelli Virginia’s next governor.

The NRA will likely argue that this shooting is more proof guns restrictions should be weakened, not strengthened in public areas, since a bystander could intervene in a shooting. All the best research points to this being even more dangerous.

Nearly 300 Oil Spills Went Unreported In North Dakota In Less Than Two Years

2013-10-27T19:05:00.001-04:00

Nearly 300 oil spills and 750 “oil field incidents” have occurred in North Dakota since January 2012 and none were reported to the public, according to a report released Friday by the Associated Press.

The investigation was spurred by a pipeline that spewed over 20,000 barrels of crude oil into a North Dakota wheat field earlier this month and went unreported for 11 days until it was discovered by a farmer harvesting his wheat.

In the wake of the report, the state’s Health Department announced it is testing a website to disseminate information about oil spills to the public but the AP notes that in the nation’s second-largest oil producing state, that only addresses part of the problem.

North Dakota regulators, like in many other oil-producing states, are not obliged to tell the public about oil spills under state law. But in a state that’s producing a million barrels a day and saw nearly 2,500 miles of new pipelines last year, many believe the risk of spills will increase, posing a bigger threat to farmland and water.

Rapidly increasing production from oil and gas fields in Canada and several U.S. states is putting increasing pressure on the industry to expand its network of pipelines that transport the product to refineries. In the wake of this unprecedented expansion, spill detection and reporting are just two of many concerns.

Carl Weimer, head of the Pipeline Safety Trust, told Climate Progress in an earlier interview that much of the process, from determining the route of new pipelines to oversight and compliance of existing ones, is left up to the companies themselves. And at the end of the day, “each company is just trying to capitalize and make money.” To make matters worse, he says “state and local government really hasn’t thought about it much — is unprepared — and pipelines will go into place before there are policies to guide the construction. It can really affect the way local communities may develop and often happens before the community has any sense of what they can do about it.”

In September, Jeffrey Weise, head of the Office of Pipeline Safety at the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), spoke candidly about his agency’s difficulty in enforcing regulations. “Do I think I can hurt a major international corporation with a $2 million civil penalty?,” he asked the crowd of oil and gas pipeline compliance officers. “No.”

In addition to the obstacles regulators face in enforcing existing rules, creating new ones can take up to three years. Inside Climate News reported that as a result, Wiese announced that the agency was taking to YouTube — creating a channel it hopes will persuade the industry to voluntarily improve its safety operations.

More Men Go Grocery Shopping And Do The Cooking

2013-10-26T07:50:00.000-04:00

Of 900 men surveyed by Midan Marketing, nearly half say they do at least half of their household’s grocery shopping. Of that group, more than half do all of the shopping and 46 percent say they are responsible for cooking all of their house’s food.

Calling these men “Manfluencers,” the report notes that about half of this group generally enjoys doing the grocery shopping. More than three-quarters make the grocery list and 74 percent clip coupons.

Midan also ran the numbers for Quartz and found that the same percentage of women surveyed do the majority of grocery shopping and cooking as men, confirming the idea that there is much more gender equality in these activities than there used to be. Writing the list, buying the food, and preparing it for her family was once the sole domain of a wife.

But even if there is increasing gender parity when it comes to buying and preparing food, women are still responsible for the majority of household duties. Mothers spend nearly double the time that fathers do on unpaid work each week. On a given day, more than 80 percent of women spend time doing household chores such as cooking, cleaning, or household management, compared to 65 percent of men. Women also spend more time on chores when they do them. Mothers also report being more exhausted than fathers, part of which may be due to the fact that men are able to get three more hours of leisure time each week.

Over 10 Percent Of America’s Largest Companies Pay Zero Percent Tax Rates

2013-10-26T07:44:00.001-04:00

Among companies listed on the S&P 500, almost one in nine paid an effective tax rate of zero percent — or even lower — over the past year, according to an analysis by USA Today.

There are 57 separate companies listed on the index that paid a zero percent rate from the past year. Those companies include both household names like Verizon and News Corp. and lesser-known corporate giants like the data storage manufacturer Seagate (market value $15.9 billion) and Public Storage (market value $29.5 billion). Many of the companies USA Today identified in its analysis as paying negative rates make the list because they lost money, but several were profitable. Previous analyses have shown that the typical corporation pays a lower effective tax rate than most middle-class families, and a far lower one than the statutory corporate tax rate against which business interests disingenuously rail.

Getting to a zero percent tax rate despite turning a profit requires creative accounting, but not lawbreaking. The corporate tax code allows companies to avoid tax liability even in years when they turn a profit. Some of the profitable companies on the newspaper’s list, such as General Motors, achieved a zero percent rate by banking tax credits from previous years when business was bad. But the more common gambit involves moving revenues from parent companies to offshore subsidiaries based in tax haven countries in the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere.

Such offshoring of profits has caught the attention of policymakers in the United States and Europe this year, with the focus predominantly on Apple Inc. The U.S. tech giant not only avoided the American tax system, but managed to shelter about $100 billion in revenues from any taxes at all. That scheme relied upon a loophole in Irish law which that country’s government says it intends to fix, but the narrow change proposed by Ireland’s finance minister will not address the larger problem of corporate tax avoidance.

Tax dodging costs the U.S. about $300 billion per year. Much of that lost revenue is from individuals, rather than corporations. The country is cracking down on individual tax dodgers and striking deals with countries like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that will help identify tax cheats starting in 2014. The corporate tax avoidance problem is thornier, as it is generally done through entirely legal methods. Coordinating international tax law in a way that would minimize corporate tax trickery is very difficult under the current approach, and a paradigm shift in business tax law may be necessary to end the accounting practices that rob countries of tax revenue.

GOP Official Resigns After Saying Purpose Of Voter ID Is To Suppress Votes Of Democrats, ‘Lazy Blacks’

2013-10-26T07:41:00.000-04:00

Until Thursday, Don Yelton was a precinct chair in the Buncombe County, North Carolina Republican Party. That ended after a Daily Show interview riddled with racism and candid admissions about the purpose of a voter suppression bill enacted by Republican lawmakers in his state. Over the course of the interview Yelton admitted that he supports requiring voters to show ID, in addition to the other, many voter suppression provisions included in the North Carolina law, because “the law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also denied that the law is racist during the course of an interview where he both used a particular racial slur that begins with the letter “n” and claimed that he is not racist because he “one my best friends is black.” Watch it:

The Daily Show
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Yelton also offered several other reasons why he supports the voter suppression law. Among them, “[i]f it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus [sic] and get a photo ID, so be it,” and “if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.”

In the wake of Yelton’s confession that a Republican voter suppression law will suppress Democratic votes, the Buncombe County Republican Party asked him to resign his position within the party, and the country GOP chair says Yelton did so. The party also claims that Yelton was “recently reprimanded and removed from his position as a precinct chair in Buncombe County for a period of time in 2012 through 2013,” though he was reelected at a very sparsely attended party convention.

Saudi Arabia Surprises World In Turning Down U.N. Security Council Seat

2013-10-20T17:56:00.002-04:00

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia made the unprecedented decision to boycott the seat it had less than twenty-four hours ago won on the United Nations Security Council, blaming the body’s ineffectiveness in handling weapons of mass destruction and Syria.

Saudi Arabia on Thursday was elected as one of five U.N. members to take up seats among the ten non-permanent members of the Council, beginning in 2014. The two-year term is usually heavily lobbied for among the regional groupings that determine the number of seats available and Saudi Arabia was no exception. Gift bags to members of the General Assembly from the Saudi Mission showed the gratitude for the 176 votes out of 192 countries who make up the body — despite the fact that Saudi Arabia ran unopposed — illustrate the desire of the mission to take over a seat for the first time since it joined the United Nations in 1945.

On Friday, however, a different tune was being sung in Riyadh. According to a statement out on the official Saudi media Friday morning, the Foreign Ministry had determined “the manner, the mechanisms of action and double standards existing in the Security Council prevent it from performing its duties and assuming its responsibilities toward preserving international peace and security as required.” The statement went on to say that Saudi Arabia “announces its apology for not accepting membership of the Security Council until the Council is reformed and enabled, effectively and practically, to carry out its duties and responsibilities in maintaining international peace and security.”

In turning down the seat, the kingdom took swipes not only at the Council’s actions on Syria, saying it had allowed “the ruling regime in Syria to kill and burn its people by the chemical weapons, while the world stands idly, without applying deterrent sanctions against the Damascus regime,” but also for failing to find a “just and lasting solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Riyadh had expressed its displeasure with the U.N. last month when it turned down the opportunity to speak at the General Assembly, again citing Syria. Saudi Arabia has also reportedly been angered by its ally — and permanent UNSC member — the United States’ choice to not attack Syria for allegedly using chemical weapons in August and for its recent signs of rapproachment with its arch-rival Iran.

The decision to turn down a Security Council seat though caused many watchers of the Middle East and Turtle Bay alike to scratch their heads. “Saudi refusal of UNSC seat is a ridiculous and ineffectual stunt,” Michael Hanna said on Twitter after the news was announced, “Their diplomats should be very embarrassed.” Riyadh’s decision confused not only observers, but apparently the Saudi mission itself. “Saudi decision to reject Security Council seat came from the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh,” Saudi journalist Ahmed al Omran reported. “Saudi Mission to UN seemed unaware of the decision.”

Further, there is no official mechanism for the Kingdom to turn down its seat on the Council. Nothing within the United Nations Charter says anything about removing a member from the Security Council once they have been elected. Nor is there any clause in the UNSC’s Provisional Rules of Procedure about how to replace a member of the body who declines their seat. There is a section in the rules of the General Assembly, which selects the non-permanent members, that says that a “by-election shall be held separately at the next session of the General Assembly to elect a member for the unexpired term” should Saudi Arabia not change its mind by next September, possibly allowing another country to hold the seat for 2015 only.

More likely, should Saudi Arabia continue on with its decision once the new session starts in January, the seat will remain vacant for the two-year period that the country holds the seat. The last such boycott was back in 1950, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic chose to skip Council meetings in protest, only to find itself unable to veto United Nations intervention in the Korean War.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the press that the choice of Security Council membership was one for member-states to decide. “I have taken note of the media reports regarding the decision of Saudi Arabia,” he said, “But I would like to caution that I have not received any official notification in this regard.” Afaf Konja, a spokesperson for the President of the General Assembly, confirmed with ThinkProgress that the Saudi Arabian Mission to the U.N. had not yet sent a formal note to the U.N. to make clear its intentions. Until then, it isn’t apparent whether Saudi Arabia intends to be sworn-in this January and boycott meetings or whether a new vote will be held in the coming weeks to replace it on the Security Council. If the latter, the Asia-Pacific group will need to meet to determine a new candidate, most likely also hailing from the Middle East.

Morocco, who currently holds the informal “Arab seat” that Saudi Arabia is slated to take over, likewise was unavailable to speak on the matter. Due to a rule that says that non-permanent members are unable to serve consecutive terms on the Council, however, it’s unlikely that Morocco will be able to argue to hold the seat for Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi decision will have an impact on the Council’s operating as well, given the items on its agenda and the way the Council functions. Syria’s ongoing civil war and Iran’s nuclear program are both issues that matter deeply to Riyadh and would have given the country a chance to affect the way the Council approached them. Those two issues alone would have given Saudi Arabia an out-sized voice in drafting the potential binding resolutions that the Security Council is able to pass on the matters. This especially would have been true when it was Saudi Arabia’s time to take up the rotating Presidency of the Security Council, when it would have been able to set the Council’s agenda for the month it held the gavel. Saudi Arabia’s absence will also make it that much harder for the United States and other Western countries to gather nine votes on any given issue, the minimum required for passage on the fifteen-member body.

Update:

This post has been updated from an earlier version.

How Much Will Lawmakers Cut Food Stamps In The Coming Showdown?

2013-10-20T17:53:00.002-04:00

Amid the shutdown clamor, House Republicans finally agreed last Friday to move the farm bill into the final stage of the legislative process: going to conference with the Senate to resolve vast differences between the two chambers’ bills.

Judging by the House leadership’s choice of conferees and the House’s instructions to the members who will represent it in negotiations with the Senate, a showdown over the food stamps program seems likely when the conference begins later this month. Here’s what to expect from that process:

Food stamps will be cut by somewhere between $4 billion and $40 billion. The Senate’s farm bill tightens eligibility processes that link the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) to other low-income programs in order to streamline the application process and lower administrative costs to the states. Those tightened rules cut $4 billion, or about 0.5 percent of the program’s current projected costs, over the next decade. The progressive-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gave cautious approval to the Senate’s eligibility strictures over the summer. The House bill, by contrast, slashes ten times as much from the program and imposes a much harsher set of rule changes on the program. The House cuts would drop as many as 6 million people from the program at a time when hunger is unusually high and food charities are already overstretched.

House leaders broke with precedent to ensure their top anti-food stamps crusader is on the conference committee even though he is not a member of the Agriculture Committee. While Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL)’s arguments are red herrings, his appointment as a conferee signals that House leaders are committed to the cuts he engineered in the bill passed in September. “Usually, only agriculture committee members negotiate the final farm bill; Southerland is on the leadership committee, not the agriculture committee,” Mother Jones’ Erika Eichelberger notes.

Meanwhile, the White House has threatened to veto the House’s steeper food stamp cuts on two occasions. The $39 billion cut passed in September earned a veto threat, and so did the $20 billion cut initially proposed in the House over the summer. The White House said it would veto the $39 billion cut in September. Whatever the size of the cut, it will come on top of an automatic cut to program benefits in November as a Recovery Act provision expires.

The two chambers have fewer differences on farm policy, but price supports are likely to be a sticking point. When the House moved to go to conference, it also approved a measure instructing its conferees to support limits on crop insurance subsidies for wealthy land owners. While Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) reportedly opposed the measure, which makes farmers with adjusted gross incomes above $750,000 per year ineligible for the most generous insurance subsidies, he and other conferees have been officially instructed to support it in negotiations with the Senate, whose farm bill included the same provision. Regardless, the crop insurance program as a whole is likely to expand, as both chambers agree on the general shape of the program despite its well-documented propensity to enrich Wall Street and its relatively high vulnerability to fraud and abuse.

Price supports are another matter. Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) and fellow House Agriculture Committee Democrats decried the price support levels in the House bill as overgenerous. The same bill which would cut food assistance to the poor by billions would also lock in profits for specialty rice growers and other farm owners. The Senate bill sets lower price supports, and establishing consensus on those price levels will be key to the conference committee’s success.

It’s not clear whether or not farm policy and food policy will remain linked. The House nutrition bill is only written to last three years, while its agriculture bill is written to last five years. While the House re-merged the two bills in order to go to conference, the differing timelines will have to be resolved if the traditional coupling of farm and food policy is to continue. Splitting the two exposes the programs that benefit the poor to serious risks in the future, experts told ThinkProgress.

Native-Born Americans More Likely To Commit Crimes Than Immigrants, Study Finds

2013-10-20T17:47:00.000-04:00

A Pew Research Center report released last week found that second generation immigrants have “striking similarities” to their native-born, non-Hispanic white counterparts when it comes to committing crime. In fact, when it comes to crime rates, second-generation offenders are merely “catching up” to the native-born population.

Biance E. Bersani conducted the study using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and found that criminality peaks at the age of 16 for 25 percent of the native-born population and a little less than 25 percent for second-generation immigrants. Meanwhile, 17 percent of 16 year old first-generation immigrants committed crime. Overall, first-generation immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than second-generation and native-born, non-Hispanic whites.

Bersani’s study helps to dispel previous theories that some second-generation immigrants exhibit criminal behavior solely because they live in “two colliding worlds”– they purportedly act out because they are caught between conflicting family and social expectations. Rather, the study shows that second-generation immigrants are subjected to the same influences as their native born counterparts through both positive and negative ways– such as higher incomes and home ownership in the former case and susceptibility to peer pressure in the latter instance.

She also finds that, “having peers in a gang increased the probability that an individual had been arrested in the previous year by 23% for second-generation immigrants and 25% for native-born non-Hispanic whites.”

Amsterdam’s ‘Black Peter’ Tradition Is Racist, Activists Say (Newsone Cover)

2013-10-20T17:41:00.000-04:00

AMSTERDAM – The “Black Peter” tradition in the Netherlands is under fire from opponents who believe the figure is a racist caricature and who asked Amsterdam officials Thursday to revoke the permit for a popular children’s festival because of it.

“Sinterklaas,” the Dutch version of Santa Claus, is portrayed as a tall white man who arrives to great fanfare on Nov. 5, accompanied by dozens of clownish servants called “Zwarte Pieten” – Black Petes. These are typically white people wearing blackface makeup with red lips and curly “Afro” wigs.

Festivities around the country last a month, culminating in a night of poems and gift-giving.

The tradition is an important part of Dutch culture, but in recent years there have been growing complaints that Pete is offensive.

In this photo taken Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012 persons dressed as “Zwarte Piet” or “Black Pete” attend a parade after St. Nicholas, or Sinterklaas, arrived by boat in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Foreigners visiting the Netherlands in winter are often surprised to see that the Dutch version of St. Nicholas’ little helpers resemble a racist caricature of a black person. The overwhelming majority of Dutch, who pride themselves on tolerance, are fiercely devoted to their holiday tradition and say “Zwarte Piet”, whose name means “Black Pete”, is absolutely harmless, a fictional figure who does not represent any race. But now a growing group of Dutch natives are questioning whether this particular part of the tradition should be changed. (AP Photo/ Margriet Faber)

On Thursday, dozens of protesters overflowed a hearing about the permit at Amsterdam City Hall.

One of 21 people who filed formal complaints, Imro Rietveld, described growing up as the only black-skinned child in his class. Every year, he said he was subjected to a month of taunts such as “your whole family is coming over in the boat” and “can you do tricks?”

He said some people are afraid to speak out against Black Pete because they are worried about being ridiculed or even losing their jobs, and he had been warned against coming.

“For the good of all the children,” Rietveld said. “This should actually be changed in the whole country.”

Opponents say the Sinterklaas festival should continue, but Pete’s appearance should be changed. Supporters dismiss opponents as “whiney-Petes.”

Mayor Eberhard van der Laan will rule on the Amsterdam permit by the end of the month.

“The mayor thinks this is a societal debate, not something for politicians to decide,” his spokeswoman Tahira Limon said.

But “if a segment of the population feels hurt, that’s something the city government has to take into account” in its decisions.

Watch a clip on the tradition below:

Source

The Ugly Stereotyping Of Adrian Peterson

2013-10-19T17:29:00.000-04:00

At first it seemed that the death of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson’s two-year-old son would come and pass through the sports world as the tragedy it was, with only a little misplaced criticism about Peterson playing football just two days after the death. Less than a week later, it has already devolved into a discussion about Peterson’s fatherhood, with columnists casting Peterson as the stereotypical black absentee father who, in the words of some, shares some of the responsibility for the child’s death.

That began when it came out that Peterson had only recently found out the child was his — it wasn’t, as early media reports assumed, the oft-photographed Adrian Peterson Jr. — and that Peterson the elder first met him as the child lay on his eventual deathbed. Along with a speeding ticket and a dismissed resisting arrest charge, that gave New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick all the evidence he needed to insinuate that Peterson shared responsibility for the tragedy, and it has only gotten worse since various media reports told the world that Peterson has allegedly fathered seven children with multiple women, none of whom he is married to, though he has two with his current girlfriend.

Since then, the Baltimore Sun‘s Susan Reimer has asked “where is the outrage” about Peterson’s alleged promiscuity, CNN’s Don Lemon has said Peterson “appears to be more MIA, than MVP,” and a whole range of blogs and entertainment types have both implicitly and explicitly cast Peterson as an absentee father who cares nothing about his children or the women who gave birth to them (many of them, at the same time, referring to the women flippantly as “baby mamas”).

Even if it isn’t the columnists’ intention, immediately painting Peterson that way perpetuates convenient stereotypes, which is easy to do in a world where both the black absentee father and the deadbeat professional football-playing dad are well-known tropes. But here’s the irony: in his column, Mushnick criticized the media for painting Peterson as a great person even though we don’t really know him — then characterized him in an entirely opposing way even though he doesn’t know anything about Peterson or his situation either. Neither do any of the other writers casting Peterson as a deadbeat know how involved or uninvolved with his children he is or the specifics of any of these situations. According to media reports, Peterson regularly pays child support. Other reports made it seem that Peterson was working to become a part of Tyrese Ruffin’s life before the child’s tragic death. According to one of the mothers, Peterson visits their child regularly during the offseason but could “do better.” The same, I’d imagine, could be said for a significant number of America’s fathers, absentee or not.

Data, which only Lemon used to try and make a cogent point, indeed suggest that children are safer and better off in two-parent homes. But single-parent homes exist throughout the country — they aren’t unique to African-Americans or whites or football players or any single group — and this child may have ended up in one whether Peterson had seven children or one. We don’t know. We have no way to know. We don’t know what led to Peterson’s circumstances. We don’t know what type of father he is or isn’t. We don’t know why he wasn’t more involved with this child already, or if more involvement would have saved the child’s life. Instead, we’re putting Adrian Peterson into a mold we think we already know, that of the absentee black father — football player or not — who isn’t there for his kids and never will be. And substituting a stereotype for what isn’t known at all misses what is plainly evident: another man beat a 2-year-old to death.

We could focus on that, on why child abuse is so rampant in America in both single- and two-parent homes, why four children die a day due to abuse of some sort, why 80 percent of them are, like Tyrese Ruffin, younger than four, why 30 percent of those who survive will one day abuse their own children. Of course, there isn’t an easy stereotype for that, since according to national statistics, child abuse “occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions and at all levels of education.”

Perhaps Adrian Peterson could do better. Perhaps he could have been more responsible then and can take more responsibility now. I certainly hope he supports his children not only financially but physically and emotionally too. The truth is, though, that both individual situations like this and larger issues surrounding both child abuse and fatherhood — including, yes, black fatherhood — are far more complex than any of the columns or discussions that result out of situations like this ever allow. Instead, they devolve into rants about (mostly) black fathers leaving their “baby mamas” and children behind, deadbeats turning the wheels on a cycle of deadbeats. Far from being productive, it’s lazy perpetuation of stereotypes that aren’t correct.

We don’t always have to run there. Sometimes it’s enough to admit we have no idea, to just mourn the tragic death of a 2-year-old child, and let Adrian Peterson and his family, no matter its size or situation, mourn it too.

KKK Battles With Town Over Renaming School Named For Klan Founder

2013-10-19T15:37:00.002-04:00

Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida, home to the fighting Confederate Rebels, is named after a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and confederate general. It has been since 1959, when administrators changed the name to show their defiance to school integration laws enforced by Brown v Board of Education. But town residents, fed up with kowtowing to racial extremists, are looking to change that.

One Jacksonville resident launched a Change.org petition that has so far garnered over 150,000 signatures, asking the Duval County School Board to change the name. The board members are only people with the power to do so — and, back in 2008, they voted against a name change by a vote of 5 to 2.

“I don’t want my daughter, or any student, going to a school named under those circumstances,” the petition’s author, resident Omotayo Richmond writes, “This is a bad look for Florida — with so much racial division in our state, renaming Forrest High would be a step toward healing.”

Richmond has some high-profile opponents: The KKK is getting involved in the fight.

All seven members of the board received a letter from the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan urging them not to consider a name-change. It calls the school’s namesake a “valiant man of honor,” and justifies the KKK as “a group of vigilance to protect defenseless southerners from criminal activities perpetrated against them by Yankee carpet baggers, scalawags, and many bestial blacks and other criminal elements out for revenge or just taking part in criminal mischief.”

One school board member spoke out against the letter, saying, “At first I thought it might be some sort of a gag or political stunt and then as I looked into it, I found out that it was an actual organization … I was outraged by it.”

The school’s superintendent, Dr. Nikolai Vitti, agrees. “I don’t think it sends the right message to the African-American community. I also don’t think it represents what we want to be as Jacksonville,” he said.

Vitti plans on opening up town hall community discussions this month about the school’s name.

Billionaire Koch Brothers Spending Millions To Deny Health Coverage To Low-Income Americans

2013-10-19T15:34:00.000-04:00

Conservative advocates funded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch have launched a massive campaign pressuring states to deny health care coverage to lower income Americans through the Medicaid expansion contained in the Affordable Care Act.

The effort, orchestrated by the group Americans for Prosperity, is targeting lawmakers in Virginia tasked with deciding whether the state should accept federal dollars to provide insurance to individuals and families below 133 percent of the federal poverty line ($31,321 in income for a family of four). Volunteers with the organization are distributing flyers through door-to-door canvassing, attending committee hearings, and according to one lawmakers who has become a target of the campaign, intimidating constituents.

As many as 400,000 Virginians could qualify for coverage if the state expands the Medicaid program, but AFP is warning Virginians that the system “will cost Virginia taxpayers billions,” require “future tax hikes and budget cuts to vital services like schools, police and fire departments,” undermine the “doctor-patient relationship,” increase wait times and even endanger lives. “Medicaid patients are almost twice as likely to die during surgery than individuals with private insurance,” the group writes on its website.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost of growing the program from 2014 to 2016 and states would contribute 10 percent thereafter. Analysis from the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis in Richmond finds that “net savings from Medicaid expansion would average about $135 million per year in the upcoming budget cycle” since expanding Medicaid “would allow the state to use federal funds instead of state dollars for these programs that already provide care to the uninsured in Virginia.”

Seventy-six percent of Virginia doctors treat new Medicaid patients, and the “share of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients is nearly the same as the share who are accepting new patients with private insurance or Medicare,” the Institute reports. While Medicaid beneficiaries tend to be less healthy than the general uninsured population, people who do enroll in the program “are 25 percent more likely to report that their health is ‘good’ or ‘excellent.’”

The GOP’s refusal to fully implement the Affordable Care Act will leave more than half of the nation’s uninsured working poor, approximately 8 million people, without access to health insurance. The 26 GOP-controlled states not participating in the law’s Medicaid expansion are home to a disproportionate share of low-income Americans who aren’t poor enough to qualify for the existing Medicaid program and make too much to be eligible for subsidies in the ACA’s insurance marketplaces.

Americans for Prosperity has spent millions “in states around the country, including Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania, to run the kind of aggressive campaign that it is now waging here in Virginia, where much will depend on the governor’s race,” the New York Times notes. Democrat Terry McAuliffe favors expansion, while his Republican opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, does not. The Virginia panel weighing in on the matter will decide the question after the Nov. 5 election.

Here Is What Republicans Got For Shutting Down The Government

2013-10-17T17:19:00.000-04:00

After shutting down the government for two weeks, Republicans appear to have secured just one concession from a Senate-crafted deal to raise the debt ceiling and re-open the federal government: an income verification system for individuals who earn less than 400 percent of the federal poverty line and qualify for premium and cost-sharing subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

Under the emerging agreement, when subsidies begin to flow on Jan. 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will have to certify that the department has established an income verification system as part of the eligibility process. Six months later, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Inspector General (OIG) will conduct a more comprehensive audit of the program. It was not immediately clear what changes the Department would have to make before certification.

But health reform advocates tell ThinkProgress that they’re content with the compromise, noting that GOP-backed alternatives would have required the inspector general to certify the process before premiums could go out. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has argued that such an agreement would have effectively prevented families from receiving tax credits, since the OIG “can’t evaluate whether the new marketplaces are ‘successfully and consistently’ verifying this information until after the marketplaces are up and running and there are real cases to audit.”

Republicans began to raise concerns about the income verification provisions in July, after HHS announced that it would rely on applicants’ self-reported income information to verify whether they accurately represented their earnings in 2014. The Department said that it would “only double-check a statistically significant number of these people with large income discrepancies, rather than the entire group” and implement a more robust process in 2015.

In a statement released on Wednesday afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) pledged to seek more changes in Obamacare in the future. “Our drive to stop the train wreck that is the president’s health care law will continue,” he said. “We will rely on aggressive oversight that highlights the law’s massive flaws and smart, targeted strikes that split the legislative coalition the president has relied upon to force his health care law on the American people.”

Update:

Read the full text of the Senate deal here.

Melissa Harris-Perry Somehow Finds Guests Who Aren't All White Guys

2013-10-13T18:09:00.002-04:00

Yet again, a report on the Sunday talk shows finds that they're dominated by white male guests (for instance, fully 75 percent of the people interviewed one-on-one on "Face the Nation" in the past few months were white men.)

And, yet again, there's one lonely show that's bucking the trend: "Melissa Harris-Perry."

From the Media Matters study:

Six of the seven shows analyzed...have hosted white men at a significantly higher rate than their 31 percent portion of the population. Melissa Harris-Perry provided the greatest diversity among guests, providing a much higher rate of white women and African-American guests than the other programs.

Take a look at this chart. Whereas almost 60 percent of the guests on "Meet the Press" were white men, Harris-Perry's bookers managed to put together a show with just under 30 percent of white male guests. Who knew it was possible?!