• 10-Year-Old On Dad’s Deportation: ‘Why Do They Have To Be So Cruel?’ – "My life has changed without my father," Stephanie, an American citizen born in the United States, said to the camera in Spanish. She began to cry. "Since he's been gone, I miss him every day. Every morning when I wake up I wonder why they didn't let him stay here. Why do they have to be so cruel to the families that are here?"
• Friends Remember Mark Carson as a ‘Beautiful, Fabulous Gay Man’ – More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay black man who was shot and killed in Greenwich Village over the weekend. Carson's death is being investigated by police as a hate crime after he was allegedly chased out of a restaurant by a man brandishing a gun and yelling homophobic slurs.

  Carson's friends and family shared their grief with the local press.

• The Long, Sordid History of the American Right and Racism – Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there.
• The Bush Tax-Cut Failure – No hard evidence has ever emerged that the Bush tax cuts stimulated the economy, an economist writes.
• The Right’s Scandal Hypocrisy – When it comes to presidential scandal, conservatives are utter hypocrites, says Michael Tomasky.
• Gay Boy Scouts Employee: I Can’t Live A Lie Any Longer – The Boy Scouts offered me many important life experiences and skills as a scout. These included skills in leadership, communication and conflict resolution. Many experiences and memories were made that still impact my life now. These opportunities need to be made available to all youth, regardless of their sexual orientation. There are dozens of other gay professionals like me in the Scouts. I have met them through scouting training courses and programs for adult leaders and employees. We dedicate ourselves to the scouting program, fully supporting the organization. Yet, we live with apprehension, hiding our personal lives and not knowing if we could be outed and fired at any given moment.
• Inside the Boy Scout Battle to Repeal the Gay Ban – Hundreds of scouts and their leaders will descend on a vacation resort north of Dallas this week to, among other things, take a vote on this new statement: “No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.” The vote, set for Thursday, will steer the course for one of the nation’s largest youth development programs, which currently bans openly gay scouts and scout leaders from joining the decades old organization.
• “Mark Is Not Going To Die In Vain”: New Yorkers Rally After Murder of Gay Man – Blinding afternoon sun lit the biggest gay rights demonstration in years in New York's West Village Monday. The LGBT community and its supporters, including a couple of mayoral candidates, marched in the wake of a murder that has capped a month-long spate of homophobic violence.
• The Jackie Robinson Republicans – That Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey were Republicans when they shattered baseball’s color barrier in 1947 is only surprising if you consider the changed GOP – after its Southern Strategy and unsubtle appeals to racism, leading to demonizing the first black president. But there was this other principled GOP, says Independent Institute’s Jonathan Bean. By Jonathan Bean If history were written without bias, we would mark the beginning of the U.S. civil rights movement as 1947: the year Jackie…
• Will Media Outlets Fall For The Anti-Gay Boy Scout Trap Again? – As the Boy Scouts prepare to vote on whether to change the organization's ban on openly gay members, news outlets should resist the urge to let anti-gay activists frame the debate around concerns about pedophilia and sexual abuse.

For anyone who lives and/or works here, it’s not exact news that the metro-Washington area is an expensive place to live. It’s no accident that some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country are right here. It takes quite money to just to maintain a modest in the metro-Washington area. Even just “getting by” doesn’t come cheap here. (Even living outside of the district and commuting in to work, I can attest, doesn’t make things less expensive. The farther out you live, the longer and more expensive your commute.)

According to folks at the Council for Community and Economic Research, the Washington area traditionally managed to just miss being in the top ten high-cost urban area. For the third year in a row, the Council’s cost-of-living index, places the Washington area in the top ten most expensive places to live.

The areas ranked as the most expensive places to live included most of the usual suspects, with New York’s Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs taking the top two slots on the list. But for the third year in a row, Washington snagged a spot in the top 10, driven by the region’s high-priced housing market and relative immunity from the economic downturn.

“Since the beginning of the Great Recession, Washington has catapulted itself into the top 10 based on the housing market,” said Dean Frutiger, project manager for the Cost of Living Index at the council. Washington – which took ninth place in the first quarter- traditionally remained just shy of the top 10 high-cost urban areas, often swapping places with Boston, Frutiger said.

On average, the Washington area is 41.7 percent more expensive compared with the national average. Housing here is more than twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Groceries are 12.8 percent more expensive, while health care is 1.6 percent more expensive.The region’s cost of living dropped slightly from the same time last year but is higher than 2011.

Washington’s high-priced housing market may have put the Washington in the top ten, but the index is compiled based on the cost of basic essentials – like housing, utilities, transportation, groceries, and health care – that many workers employed by private companies that contract with the federal government can’t afford on what they’re paid.

We find that nearly two million private sector employees working on behalf of America earn wages too low to support a family, making $12 or less per hour. This is more than the number of low-wage workers at Walmart and McDonalds combined.1 Yet, if anything, this figure underestimates the total number of poorly-paid workers funded by our tax dollars. Our analysis encompasses U.S. workers employed by government contractors, paid by federal health care spending, supported by Small Business Administration loans, working on federal construction grants, and maintaining buildings leased by the federal government. This encompasses the largest share of poorly-paid workers funded by our taxes. However, other streams of funding have yet to be analyzed. For example, loans and subsidies from the Department of Agriculture fund giant agribusinesses that employ more than a million farm workers, while grants from the Department of Education fund low-wage assistant teachers, bus monitors and cooks in Head Start and other programs. Due to lack of data, retail and food service workers for concessionaires of the National Parks Service and other federal agencies also fall outside our analysis.

These are employees working on behalf of America, doing jobs that we have decided are worthy of public funding-yet they’re being treated in a very un-American way. Our nation has a history of ensuring our tax dollars provide decent jobs. From the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act to Executive Order 11246 of 1965, and a host of other laws and executive actions, our laws have mandated that companies working on behalf of the American people are upholding high standards of employment practices. Yet as the nature and prevalence of federal contracting, lending and grant-making have changed, and some laws have been weakened, working people have fallen through the cracks.

When our tax dollars underwrite bad jobs, the economy as a whole is weakened and all of us are negatively affected. There is a ripple effect as low-paid workers and their families have little money to spend, hindering economic growth that could be creating more jobs. Poorly-paid workers also contribute less in taxes and are more likely to rely on public benefits to care for their families. In contrast, we would all benefit from an economy where workers earn good wages-and we have a special responsibility to see that the people working on behalf of our nation are paid and treated fairly. Raising standards for people working on behalf of America is one important piece to providing opportunities for workers to reach the middle class.

Behind those numbers are real people, hard-working people, who just want to earn a wage that helps them afford the essentials that don’t come cheap in the Washington area.

• Lucilia Ramirez, who has cleaned Union Station for 21 years spoke of making $8.75 an hour, with no benefits. Struggling to pay their mortgage on her small salary, Ramirez and her husband were forced to rent out bedrooms to strangers just to keep a roof over their heads.
• Katina Washington, who earns $9.65 an hour cleaning offices rented by the Department of Justice, lives with her cousin because she can’t afford her own apartment, and has to rely on food stamps to help with groceries.
• Nelly Garcia, 55, works at the Old Post Office Building, for a company that makes lots of money from federal contracts. But Garcia only earns $9.00 an hour, which isn’t enough to afford food or pay for the subway commute to work. A cancer survivor, Garcia has no health benefits, and must rely on Medicaid as a result.

According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a single adult needs to earn about $28,425 a year to afford the cost of basic necessities like housing, utilities, transportation, groceries, and health care. That requires an hourly wage of at least $13.67 an hour. For a single adult and a child, the annual costs are $54,805 – nearly double the cost-of-living for a single adult – and would require an hourly wage of at least $26.35.

Most private sector employees of federal contracts earn far less than a livable wage in an area as expensive as Washington. Yet everything one needs to live in Washington, from housing to groceries to transportation, is still more expensive than most other places, because Washington is area where lots of people can pay more.

Paying more for food, housing, etc., isn’t a hardship if your the CEO of a company with a federal contract. After all, federal benchmark compensation for CEO Reimbursement for work on a federal contract is over $760,000.00, but the lowest compensation reported by workers on federal contracts is $6.50 an hour. You can earn over $760,000 on a federal contract, while not paying your employees enough to live on. How’s that for inequality? And it’s all supported with your tax dollars and mine.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather Nelly Garcia be able to buy groceries and have benefits than have my tax dollars help a federal contractor CEO redo his Rosslyn, VA penthouse again. If you feel the same way, then stand with these workers tomorrow, and join them in demanding a livable wage. Because nobody can live in Washington on minimum wage. Not in the 9th most expensive city in America.

• Let’s Call Racist School Closings What They Are: Racist – Avoiding calling racism for what it is only prolongs the problem.
• We need to talk about masculinity – The crisis facing men and boys cannot be solved by reviving the tired stereotypes that oppress and constrain them
• PETA: IRS ‘harassment’ not new – The group says the IRS inquiry should include its three audits from the 1990s and 2000s.
• Editorial: The Republicans’ Scandal Machine – Behind their loud condemnations of President Obama, Republicans continue to damage the economy and society.
• Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era – ince market-oriented education reform is producing evidence highlighting the ineffectiveness and even negative outcomes associated with those policies, that the agendas remain robust suggests, again like mass incarceration, education reform fulfills many of the dynamics found in the New Jim Crow.
• Blame Congress For the IRS-Tea Party Mess – One of the biggest revelations in the Treasury Department inspector general report on the unfolding IRS-tea party debacle is this: The IRS staffers vetting hundreds of tea party groups and conservative outfits seeking nonprofit status for potential political activity weren't themselves sure what they were looking for. And who bears the ultimate responsibility for this? The very folks who are getting so worked up about the alleged abuses and the dark-money explosion that made them possible: Congress.
• How to Stop the Next IRS Scandal – The root of the recent scandal at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—in which the agency admitted to singling out Tea Party groups for special scrutiny—is simple: terrible campaign-finance laws.
• Daily Kos: Mormons and Marriage – a sea change in progress? – A couple days ago, I stumbled onto this piece on Mother Jones site. It posits that one of the main reasons that things have moved so very fast on marriage equality in the last year or so is that the Mormon Church has largely abandoned its former role as a main driver of the reactionary forces on the issue. It seems there may well be something going on that is an important subplot to the story of the rapid pace of change on marriage equality.
• Reform physical education: Gym class shouldn’t require team sports. – Slate Magazine – Making kids play team sports in PE is neither healthy nor educational.
• May Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild Rot in Jail – Joe Francis is headed to prison for the second time. May he rot there. The founder of Girls Gone Wild was convicted Monday on misdemeanor charges of assault and false imprisonment. The allegations: In 2011, Francis met three women who went out after college graduation, took them home with him, and then tried to separate one from the other two, in the process grabbing her by the hair and throat and slamming her head to the floor. Charming. Also entirely of a piece with Francis’ long history of bad boy misdeeds. This is a guy who has literally made it his business to use and humiliate women.

With 82 empty seats in our federal district and appellate courts, nearly 10 percent of federal judicial seats are vacant, and have been since President Obama took office. That’s the longest period of judicial vacancies in 35 years. Judicial vacancies have increased 51 percent since President Obama took office, compared to declining by 65 percent and 34 percent under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively.

To make matters worse, 40 percent of those vacancies are in districts that have been declared “judicial emergencies” — where vacancies have persisted for 18 months or more, and the hundreds of backlogged cases wait for someone to rule on them. Businesses and individuals wait longer for their claims to be resolved.

In the 35 circuits/districts declared “judicial emergencies,” people are literally waiting for justice, and often end up settling for something less. Since federal judges must give priority to criminal cases (which have increased by 70% in the past ten years), they’re forced to delay civil cases for years. According to a People for the American Way fact sheet, “Overloaded Courts, Not Enough Judges: The Impact on Real People,” that means longer delays for Americans seeking justice in cases involving:

• discrimination
• civil rights
• predatory lending practices
• consumer fraud
• immigrant rights
• environment
• government benefits
• business contracts
• mergers
• copyright infringement

For Dave Calder, in Utah, it meant a long wait for justice after a faulty gas can exploded in his trailer, killing his daughter and leaving him with severe burns over a third of his body. He sued in 2007. His medical bills reached $200,000 during the 4 1/2 years that passed before the case reached a jury verdict.

For Elizabeth and Nicholas Power, in Illinois, it mean settling for far less, after suing their employer for sex discrimination in 2008. By the time the case finally reached jury selection in 2011, the judge had to halt the trial in order to deal with a growing docket of criminal cases. The Powers settled the case, rather than continue to wait for a trial

It’s not that there aren’t nominees waiting. There are 22 judicial nominees just waiting for Senate confirmation. Their confirmations would fill 1/4 of the vacancies on the bench, and increase diversity of the federal (9 are women.) Of the 22 nominees, 13 were unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and 15 are waiting for Senate floor votes. (The rest are still waiting for hearings.)

Judicial nominees are probably in for a long wait. Some may sail through committee, but just about all them can expect long waits. In fact, President Obama’s judicial nominees have waited much, much longer than those of his predecessors. Obama’s judicial nominees wait an average of 116 days for a floor vote in the Senate, compared to an average wait of 34 days for President George W. Bush’s nominees.

That’s just the average. Some waiting periods are “above average.”

• Richard Taranto waited 484 days to be confirmed to the Federal Circuit Court, by a 91-0 vote.
• William Kayatta waited 300 days to be confirmed for the First Circuit from Maine, 88-12.
• Robert Bacharach waited 263 days to be confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals, 93-0.
• Patty Schwartz waited 18 months to be confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals last month, after the president nominated her in October 2011.

It’s not that the Senate has not confirmed President Obama’s nominees. It’s just confirming fewer than it has under previous administrations; just 160 during Obama’s first term, compared to 200 during Bill Clinton’s fist term and 205 During George W. Bush’s first term. Late last year, the Senate went into recess without any action on 19 non-controversial nominees with support from both parties.

In just four years, judicial vacancies are up, confirmations are down, and delays are longer. What gives?

To hear Republican Senators tell it, the White House is at fault for presenting fewer nominees, due to time-consuming background checks and an incredibly extensive vetting process. But despite those factors, the president isn’t far behind his predecessors. Obama offered 215 nominations in his first term, compared to 247 in Bill Clinton’s first term, and 231 in George W. Bush’s first term.

It’s not up to the president alone to nominate potential judges. Senators have always had a role in the process. Republicans have simply refused to participate in recommending potential nominees.

On its face, the absence of nominees would appear to be a sign that President Barack Obama is slacking. After all, he is responsible for nominating judges, and he did put forward fewer nominees at the end of his first term than his two predecessors. But a closer look at data on judicial nominees, and conversations with people involved in the nomination process, reveals the bigger problem is Republican senators quietly refusing to recommend potential judges in the first place.

The process for moving judicial nominees is simple enough. A president takes the lead on circuit court nominees, while, per longstanding tradition, a senator kickstarts the process for district court nominees, which make up the bulk of the federal court system. Senators make recommendations from their home states, and the president works with them to get at least some of the nominees confirmed — the idea being that senators, regardless of party, are motivated to advocate for nominees from their states. The White House may look at other nominees on its own, but typically won’t move forward without input from the corresponding senators. Once a nominee is submitted to the Senate, he or she receives a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. If approved, the nomination heads to the Senate floor for a full vote.

According to a fact sheet from the Alliance for Justice, the majority of judicial vacancies without nominees are in states with one or more Republican senators (24 in states with two Republican senators, 17 in states with 1 Republican and one Democratic senator). Some of those states, like Texas and Arizona, have judicial vacancies that have been open for more than 1,000 days, without their Republican senators recommending potential nominees.

In total, 25 of the 61 vacancies without nominees are in states with two Republican senators, and another 14 are in states with one Republican senator and one Democratic senator. Seventeen are in states with two Democratic senators, and the remaining five are in other districts. That means many of the vacancies without nominees can be traced back to Senate Republicans who just aren’t participating in the process — a reality that flies in the face of Republicans’ chief complaint that Obama isn’t putting forward enough judicial nominees.

“It’s disingenuous at best for Republicans to complain about the number of judicial vacancies without nominees when Republicans themselves are responsible for the majority of those vacancies,” said Michelle Schwartz, director of Justice Programs for Alliance for Justice. “Nearly two-thirds of the vacancies without nominees are in states with at least one Republican senator, most of whom have consistently refused to work with the White House in good faith to identify qualified candidates.”

It’s not hard to figure out what Senate Republicans are up to here. Some of it’s just good old fashioned “payback,” for Democrats blocking nominations during the George W. Bush administration. But a big part of it is about blocking Obama’s effort to shift the rightward tilt of our courts, starting with powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where four vacancies leave the second-most-powerful court in the country with a Republican majority. Republicans blocked Obama’s previous nominee for 2 1/2 years, before the nomination was finally withdrawn.

President Obama has pressed senators from both parties in recent weeks to confirm a new federal judge for one of the country’s most powerful courts, using an aggressive strategy to campaign for a judicial nominee whom White House officials consider a potentially crucial figure in boosting the president’s second-term agenda.

The effort reflects a new White House effort to tilt in its favor the conservative-dominated U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is one notch below the Supreme Court and considers many challenges to executive actions.

… Giving liberals a greater say on the D.C. Circuit is important for Obama as he looks for ways to circumvent the Republican-led House and a polarized Senate on a number of policy fronts through executive order and other administrative procedures.

The D.C. Circuit, with four Republican and three Democratic appointees, has four vacancies. It proved an obstacle for Obama during his first term – blocking proposed rules, for instance, to curb interstate air pollution and enhance cigarette labeling. The court also has put on hold dozens of cases relating to rules on workers’ rights, and it has challenged the president’s authority to name recess appointees.

For working Americans and their families, vacancies and the conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit Court has serious consequences. In January of this year, the conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were invalid. The president resorted to the recess appointments after Republicans blocked nominations, to keep the NLRB from issuing rulings. In March, the court’s conservative majority overturned an NRLB requirement that employers put up posters explaining to workers that they have a right to unionize, because it violated employers “freedom of speech.”

Naturally, Republicans want to keep the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stacked with conservatives.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is known for its conservative leanings. Republicans like it this way and have filibustered nominations of non-conservative-movement nominees to the court. Now four seats are vacant. An April editorial in the Washington Post, Republicans’ D.C. Circuit barricade, explains,

LAST MONTH Senate Republicans unjustifiably blocked an up-or-down confirmation vote on Caitlin J. Halligan, nominated by President Obama to fill one of four empty spots on one of the country’s top courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Despite her impeccable credentials and the support of conservative legal luminaries, only a single Republican voted to break a GOP filibuster.

Again, Republicans are keeping four seats on this court vacant in order to keep these kinds of rulings coming.

In their continued efforts to block President Obama from doing what voters elected him to do — and what they failed to convince voters to elect them to do — Republicans are courting disaster for million of Americans, by keeping our nations courts and government agencies running on empty.

Yesterday, the movement reached Wisconsin, where fast food workers in Milwaukee took to the streets to demand a $15 minimum wage. You can show your support by signing their petition.

Fast-food and retail workers walked off the job in Milwaukee, Wis., on Wednesday, prompting labor organizers to speak of “spreading unrest” in the service industry.

The strike followed similar one-day walkouts over the last two months in Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, as well as a nationwide walkout by Walmart workers on Black Friday.

Like those who have gone on strike in other cities, the Milwaukee workers are demanding a “living wage” of $15 an hour and the right to form a union.

“I feel that I do so much work and get so little pay,” said Stephanie Sanders, a 33-year-old McDonald’s employee who earns the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour at the Milwaukee restaurant where she works.

Since the recession, low-paying work has comprised more than half the country’s new jobs. Although many corporations are earning more than they did before the downturn, workers’ wages have not improved. Fast-food and retail companies are among the nation’s largest employers of low-wage workers.

Like Detroit, Milwaukee is reeling from the decline in American manufacturing, which has cost Milwaukee 100,00o jobs since the 1980s. And, as in Detroit, the loss of manufacturing jobs hit African Americans particularly hard.

“Milwaukee has a really special history particularly for African Americans,” said Jennifer Epps of the group Wisconsin Citizen Action, which helped organize the strikes. “We had the highest per capita income for black workers in the country, now we have one of the lowest.”

A report from the University of Milwaukee found that in 1970, over 54 percent of black men in the city were employed in factories, more than twice the percentage of whites. But, as Milwaukee’s Sentinel Journal reports, 100,000 jobs in Delco Electronics, Pabst Brewing Company and other factories left the city since 1980. By 2009, under 15 percent of black men held manufacturing these jobs, about equivalent to the percentage as white workers.

As these jobs disappeared, Milwaukee’s rate of black unemployment spiked. Before the recession, the city rivaled Buffalo, NY with the highest rates of black unemployment, according to a report from the University. And those who have found work are now far more likely to be relegated to non-union, minimum wage jobs. The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development projects that food preparation and serving jobs, including those in fast food, will grow by 12 percent in the next decade, three times the rate of jobs overall.

Over 200 workers from fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell joined workers from retailers like TJ Maxx, Dollar Tree and FootAction joined the growing “McJobs” rebellion.

With the average Walmart salesperson making only $8.81 per hour, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune have pocketed about $100 billion in wealth – more than the least well-off 41 percent of Americans combined.

McDonald’s raked in $5.5 billion in profits in 2012, while Yum! Brands, which includes KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, took home $1.6 billion in profits.

With government failing to act and corporations succeeding in keeping out unions, the Robin-Hood-in-reverse economy – taking from workers to give to the rich – is steadily getting worse. A majority of jobs created in the economic recovery have been in low-wage industries. Unless pay levels are raised, seven out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage positions, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what do participants in the Raise Up Milwaukee campaign, and their counterparts in other cities, want? A basic wage of $15 per hour, and the right to form unions without corporate interference and intimidation. They understand that big corporations in the service industries can afford to pay more, but that these companies won’t do so unless workers join together and demand wages that support families. Like workers have through U.S. history, they are turning to unions to help solve a low-wage problem that is dragging our entire economy down.

Raises and the right to form unions would shift money back to working families for basic necessities, instead of sending it off to distant corporate headquarters to pad profits for executives and Wall Street stockholders. That shift, in turn, would help support small businesses and jobs in local communities.

Minimum wage workers in Wisconsin currently earn $7.25 an hour. Working 40 hours a week at that rate, a worker would earn about $15,080 a year — more than $400 below Wisconsin’s poverty line for a family of two. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would still fall short of a wage to support a family of two.

Workers earning $7.25 and working a consistent 40 hours a week earn $15,080 a year—over $400 under the Wisconsin poverty line for a family of two. While a $9 minimum wage would increase that annual income to $18,720, an increase to $15 would make it a full $31,200. That’s still barely three quarters of what’s needed to comfortably support one adult and one child in Wisconsin, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Minimum Wage Calculator, but it would be a dramatic upgrade from current conditions.

It gets worse if you take wage theft into consideration. According to a new survey by Fast Food Forward, 84 percent of fast food workers in New York City have experienced various forms of wage theft in the past year.

• 36 percent report being forced to work while off the clock
• 32 percent of cashiers reported being required to pay their employers if their registers were short
• 30 percent report working more than 40 hours in a week without receiving time-and-a-half for overtime
• 46 percent report begin the victim of at least one illegal paycheck deduction, such as paying for meals not eaten or for company-required uniforms
• 30 percent report receiving their paychecks late, or having their paychecks bounce

Thus McDonald’s, KFC, and Taco Bell are raking in billions in profits, while employees like 34-year-old Tessie Harrell, struggle to afford basic necessities, and have to rely on food stamps. If taxpayers are supplementing wages for the employees of corporations earning billions of dollars in profit  (and paying little to no taxes themselves), maybe we need to start thinking of food stamps, etc., as a form of  ”corporate welfare.” 

Or we can join minimum wage workers in Milwaukee in demanding a $15 minimum wage, and the right to unionize. 

As President Obama settles into his second term, a number of presidentially-appointed positions that require Senate confirmation remain vacant – more than were vacant at the end of Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s first terms in office. Of the 68 positions that remained vacant at the end of Obama’s first term in office, 43 had been vacant for more than a year. Those vacancies, spread across several agencies, have the effect of nearly bringing government to a griding halt. Agencies operating under acting directors, without fully authorized leadership, effectively operate in “stand-down mode”

The lack of appointed leaders can create problems. Too many vacancies can put agencies “in stand-down, waiting for policymakers to show up,” said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied appointments.

Acting heads of agencies “don’t make any big decisions,” said Cal Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College who has studied appointments since the 1970s. “Your authority is not going to be recognized in the same way a Senate-confirmed appointee is going to be recognized.”

Therein lies the problem. In a 2010 Brookings Institution paper titled “A Half-Empty Government Can’t Govern: Why Everyone Wants to Fix the Appointments Process, Why It Never Happens, and How We Can Get It Done,” E.J. Dionne and William A. Galston describe a system clogged by abuses of the Senate confirmation process, and end up weakening both the executive and legislative branches, and alter the very structure of our government.

Abuses of the confirmation process, far from strengthening the executive’s accountability to the legislative branch, instead call forth ever more creative executive actions to get around Congressional scrutiny. And that creativity has, in turn, led to an executive branch potentially weaker and less able to control and influence the departments and agencies it depends on to implement its policies.

Without any formal Constitutional change, the very structure of the American government is being altered. A confirmation process designed to safeguard Congress’ prerogatives has, in important ways, undermined them.

As we know all too well by now, Senators wield considerable power over confirmations. Individual Senators can single-handedly shut down the whole “terrible, horrible, no-good Senate confirmation process” by placing “holds” on confirmations, which amount to “silent filibusters” that prevent a vote unless the Senate can round of a two-thirds majority and squeeze in time for debate. Republicans have used such “holds,” and exploited every trick in the book to keep block President Obama’s nominees.

Most recently, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to even show up for a vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection agency. Republicans resorted to the parliamentary equivalent of holding their breath, because they claimed McCarthy failed to comply with their “very reasonable” request that she answer over 1,000 questions (a record number, which The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky labeled “the new McCarthyism.” ). Republicans notified Democrats 30 minutes before the hearing that they would not show up to hear the answers they complained about getting.

(McCarthy’s not alone. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received 444 questions from senators before his confirmation; more than the last seven nominees combined.)

The Republican’s “boycott” of McCarthy Hearing was merely a tactic employed in the service of the underlying GOP agenda: making sure the EPA could not fulfill its mission. Republicans aren’t going to confirm McCarthy unless she stoops to answer their questions about the “underlying data used to justify EPA’s job-killing regulations,” and promises to force the EPA to subject everything it does to a “business-friendly analysis,” and force the agency to undertake a “whole economy” cost-benefit analysis of its rules and regulations. The result would be enough bureaucratic red tape to ensure that the EPA did almost nothing else. by insisting on conditions that no nominee to head the agency is likely to agree to, the GOP could ensure that the EPA operates in “stand-down” mode for the duration of Obama’s presidency.

The vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board are another example of how GOP obstructionist tactics are impacting government.

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

(As Dave’s post points out, the courts play a huge role in this, Republican obstruction of court appointments has far-reaching implications that are better addressed in a separate post.)

The list of top-level vacancies is long and disturbing.

• The IRS has been without an appointed commissioner since last November, when Bush administration holdover Douglas Shulman resigned.
• A quarter of the senior positions at the State Department remain unfilled.
• Republicans blocked President Obama’s appointees to Election Assistance Commission — an agency charged with helping Americans vote, and which Republicans wanted to do away with in 2011.
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services hasn’t had a director since 2006, and still doesn’t since Republicans blocked a vote on Donald Berwick’s nomination. (Obama managed a recess appointment for Berwick, who has since resigned.)
• A hearing on Tom Perez’s nomination as Secretary of Labor was postponed after Republicans threatened to invoke an obscure procedural rule to stop the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from meeting. The move was driven purely by objections to Perez’s “ideological background.”
• Republicans are attempting to sabotage health care reform by refusing to offer Republican nominees to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, charged with achieving savings in Medicare without sacrificing quality.

Without a presidentially-appointed, Senate confirmed director, the EPA can’t effectively fulfill its mission to “protect human health and the environment.” The NRLB cannot effectively safeguard “employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative, if it lacks enough members to operate. Health Care Reform can’t be fully implemented, and thus can’t help 32 million uninsured Americans, if the agencies that must implement it are without leaders who have the authority to set policy.

All of this is just fine with Republicans in Congress. Breaking government by keeping offices vacant, though ongoing obstruction of presidential nominees, is a tactic that serves the conservative agenda.

It’s not that the GOP is “no longer a serious partner in governing,” as a New York Times editorial put it. That which Republicans didn’t win the right to govern last November, they have resolved to make ungovernable. But Republicans aren’t just disrupting the agenda that won President Obama a second term. By keeping vital government positions vacant, they are implementing an un-mandated shrinking of government.

Conservatives have always said that government doesn’t work, when they really believe that it shouldn’t work. Given enough power to do so, once elected they set about making damn sure government can’t work. And, like I said earlier, government can’t work if there’s nobody around to run it.

Fast food workers, most of which are adults with a family to support, simply can’t survive on $7.35 an hour. They don’t make enough to cover basic needs – like food, health care, rent, and transportation. What’s worse, many workers are kept from working full-time so that their employers don’t have to cover their health care. It’s a shame that we let this happen here in St. Louis. And it has to stop.

Paying workers a living wage is the right thing to do – and it will also help fix St. Louis’s economy by putting much needed money into the hands of consumers, who will spend it on the basic things anyone needs to support a family.

If you think workers should be able to earn enough to pay for basic needs like food, shelter, health care, transportation — or if you believe something is fundamentally wrong when a CEO makes 1,795 times a workers salary, while workers don’t earn enough to meet basic needs — then it’s time to stand with the people who stand at the cash register, behind the sales counter, or on the work floor.

If you’re in St. Louis, it’s time to stand with workers on the corner of Delmar Blvd. and Kingland Ave. You can use the link above to RSVP. If you’re not in St. Louis, you can still stand with workers in St. Louis and everywhere, by signing our petition to raise the minimum wage, and signing the St, Louis worker’s petition.

Today’s rally is actually the second day of action in St. Louis. Hundreds of workers walked off the job on Wednesday, in a “surprise strike” that spread from one restaurant to another. It started when worker’s at Jimmy John’s in Soulard went on strike, to protest low wages and humiliating treatment in the workplace.

Garth-Rhodes said Jimmy John’s employees were subjected to forms of mental abuse.

“In the past several months, Jimmy John’s managers have required workers to publicly hold signs when they don’t perform up to the sandwich chain’s ‘freaky fast’ job expectations,” Garth-Rhodes said.

One worker was ordered to hold a sign stating, “I made 3 wrong sandwiches today,” Garth-Rhodes said; while another was forced to hold a sign that said, “I was more than 13 seconds in the drive thru.”

St. Louis Jimmy John’s workers also picketed in front of the Soulard location Thursday morning.

Gerneisha Clark has worked at that location for five months and picketed Thursday. She said she is one of the workers subjected to management abuse of power.

“They have a lack of respect for the people that work for them and they just do us any kind of way,” she said. “I’m one of the people that had to hold up a sign as punishment for making a mistake.”

Clark not only had to endure the embarrassment of having to wear a sign, but management actually expected her to “smile for the camera” too. 

Clark said it’s time for people to stand up because keeping quiet won’t improve working conditions.

“When he (her manager) had me hold the sign up, he told me don’t be offended while he took a picture with his cell phone,” she said. “He didn’t have to make me hold up a sign. I felt humiliated.”

Miller said this is a selfless act and said she is fearful of being fired.

“When is enough going to be enough,” she asked. “You have to fight for what you believe in, and hopefully there is a great outcome afterward.

(If this is the way to handle mistakes made on the job, when does Jamie Dimon get his sign, and do we all get to take a picture?)

The campaign, “STL Can’t Survive on $7.35, is aptly named, because according to the MIT LIving Wage Calculator, $7.35 an hour doesn’t even add up to a living wage for a single adult. Add just one child, and it gets worse. A single adult with a child in St. Louis actually needs to earn $17 an hour, just to pay for food, child care, medical care, housing, transportation, and other essentials. A family of four — with 2 adults and 2 children — would need to earn $18 an hour just to afford basic necessities. (Two adults working full-time for minimum wage still can’t make ends meet.)

If raising the minimum wage for St. Louis’ fast food workers from $7.35 to $15 per hour, keep in mind that the typical hourly wage for management in St. Louis currently stands at about $38. Fast food workers in St. Louis currently earn less than quarter of what managers typically earn. At $15 per hour, their wages would still be less than half of what managers earn, but it would a livable wage.  

The STL Can’t Survive on $735 says that kind of inequality has implications for the entire economy.

The St. Louis strike comes amid growing concern from economists and other experts that the proliferation of low-wage work is hampering the nation’s recovery. In a speech last month, Federal Reserve Board Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin suggested the types of jobs being created are slowing economic growth. “Those jobs will directly affect the fortunes and challenges of households and neighborhoods as well as the course of the recovery,” she said. It also comes as major national companies like McDonald’s and Walmart are facing increasing questions about whether low wages are causing breakdowns in customer service.

 “I’ve been at Jack in the Box for four years, cleaning and prepping food and all I get paid is $7.55 without any benefits,” said Anita Gregory, a mother of one, who is expecting her second child in the next few weeks. “I’m tired of having to struggle to survive while working so hard.”

Fast food workers bring $1 billion a year into the cash registers of St. Louis, yet most of these workers earn Missouri’s minimum wage of $7.35, or just above it, and are forced to rely on public assistance programs to provide for their families and gethealthcare for their children. It would take a typical St. Louis fast food worker minimum-wage full-time worker more than 1,300 years to earn as much as the CEO of YUM! Brands— which owns Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut— made in 2012.

The St. Louis Organizing Committee campaign, STL Can’t Survive on $7.35, seeks to put money back in the pockets of the 36,000 men and women who work hard in the St. Louis-area’s fast food chains but still can’t afford basic necessities like food, clothing, and rent. A single adult in St. Louis with a child actuallyneeds to make more than $17 an hour to get by, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. If workers were paid more, they’d spend more, helping to get St. Louis’ economy moving again.

“Workers in fast-food jobs are no longer freckle-faced teenagers looking for some summer pocket change,” said the Rev. Martin Rafanan, director of STL $7.35. “Increasingly, fast food jobs are the only options for St. Louisans, but these workers can’t even afford to pay for rent, food and carfare. If they workers earned more, fast food workers would spend that money at local businesses here in St. Louis and help lift our economy.”

After the Chicago strike, I wrote that this movement doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon. As with New York and Chicago, it won’t stop with St Louis. St. Louis organizers hope their action will spread to other areas, and it most likely will. Just as word spread from one restaurant to another when Jimmy John’s employees walked out, courage may prove to be contagious, and the next strike may coming soon to a lunch counter near you. When it does, join it.  

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It’s called the “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013″ (H.R. 1406), and it’s as Orwellian as it sounds.

In fact, it fits this Wikipedia defintion of “Orwellian” rather nicely: “Official encouragement of policies contributing to the socio-economic disintegration of the family.”

The bill isn’t any more likely to pass than it was in 1997, 2003, or any of the other times Republicans introduced it in one form or another. In fact, it won’t go any further than the House. If it did, working families would end up with even less time and less money, in exchange for the GOP’s favorite variety of faux “flexibility.” 

It’s (Not) Your Time

This “Working Family Flexibility Act” does not give workers the “flexibility” to “take time off when they want. You have to ask for it, but you might not get it. According to the language of the bill, an employee “shall be permitted by the employee’s employer to use such time within a reasonable period after making the request if the use of the compensatory time does not unduly disrupt the operations of the employer.”

A few key phrases stand out.

• “… shall be permitted …”: Workers “shall be permitted” to use their comp-time by their employers. In other words, an employer may allow you to use your comp-time when you need it, but you don’t have a right to use your comp-time when you need it. You must ask permission to use your time, and then you must be allowed to use it.
   
• “… within a reasonable period …”: What’s a reasonable period of time? Who decides? They same people who decide whether you can use your time or not: your employer. Maybe it’s a month, maybe two weeks, maybe you have until the end of the week.

  Actually, employers are the ones with all the flexibility here. They can decide to put all time over 40 hours into a “pot” to be used for future time off, over which they have complete control.

• “… does not unduly disrupt …”: What constitutes an “unduly disruption” of your employers business? Who decides? Again, the same people who’ve made all the decisions so far: your employer.

Do you need to use your comp-time to attend a critical parent/teacher conference at your child’s school? Tough luck if your employer decides that  your absence would be too much a “disruption.” Getting that big order out the door, finishing that major report, or even just staffing the dinner rush trumps everything else — including family.

“It’s your time,” intones the TV spot for the bill. “You shouldn’t have to choose between work or family.” Well, it’s not “your time.” As far as this bill is concerned, “your time” belongs to your employer, to be doled out (or not) as they see fit. You can request it, sure. But, as we say where I come from, “Asking ain’t getting.” Your request can be denied.

As for “choosing between work and family,” don’t worry. You won’t be the one making the choice. Your employer will decide, and will grant you use of “your time” if it doesn’t disrupt their business or their bottom line.

It’s (Not) Your Money

Every day thousands of Americans volunteer to work overtime, and even jump at the chance, because they need the money to pay for various family-related experience. Sometimes, overtime pay can mean the difference between putting food on the table and keeping the lights on, or going hungry and sitting in the dark. Sometimes, it helps pay for medical expenses, or defrays the cost of putting kids through school.

Time-and-a-half pay can make a huge difference for working families. The “Working Family Flexibility Act” will insure that many working famines have even less money, by reducing take-home pay. Families will lose the supplemental income that overtime pay provides, and that money will end up employers’ hands instead.

An employer can not only decide to put all time exceeding 40 hours a week into a “pot” of time-off to be doled out at a later date, but employer can also decide when that date will be. Employers can hold on to that “pot” until the end of the year. Employers can even designate “a 12-month period other than the calendar year,” so long as they tell their employees.

Workers, then, are not paid for their overtime work during the current pay period. Instead, their overtime pay becomes an interest free loan to the employer, to be paid back to the worker at the end of the year – or perhaps later.

The flexibility in this comp time bill would have employees working unpaid overtime hours beyond the 40-hour workweek and accruing as many as 160 hours of compensatory time. A low-paid worker making $10 an hour who accrued that much comp time in lieu of overtime pay would effectively give his or her employer an interest-free loan of $1,600 – equal to a month’s pay. That’s a lot to ask of a worker making about $20,000 a year. Indeed, any worker who accrues 160 hours of comp time will in effect have loaned his or her employer a month’s pay. This same arithmetic provides employers with a powerful incentive to increase workers’ overtime hours. Instead of having to pay time-and-a-half wages when an hourly-paid employee works longer than the standard 40-hour work week, the employer incurs no financial cost at the time the extra hours are worked.

Even then, workers get extra days off, not the extra money overtime provided before it was transformed into comp-time.

The bill includes a “safety valve”  provision for workers to “cash out” of such agreements. But, as the Chicago Tribune’s Rex Huppke pointed out, those safety valves would be fine in a perfect works,  but they don’t always work in the real world.

It’s Not Your Choice

The bill presents the whole comp-time exchange as optional. Employers can choose to offer comp-time instead of overtime, and employees can choose to enter into comp-time agreements with their employers. But Huppke asks “What happens if your employer tries to deny you the hours you have accrued?”

The bill explicitly prohibits that, but in the real world the interminable recession and the reality of working in a “no-quit” economy make it simple enough for an employer to make you “an offer you can’t refuse.”

In principle a worker’s agreement to receive comp time instead of overtime pay is supposed to be voluntary. But anyone who has worked at a $10 an hour job understands what it is to get an offer from your employer that you can’t refuse. Under the provisions of the bill, employers are not supposed to threaten, intimidate or coerce employees into agreeing to comp time in lieu of wages. But employers don’t need to resort to such tactics. Everyone understands that in this economy, with unemployment still at recession levels, the employer holds all the cards. Workers who refuse to go along with an employer’s request for comp time instead of wages know that their commitment to their employer will be questioned. They fear that in a crunch they will be vulnerable to having their hours cut or being let go. In a weak job market, very few hourly-paid workers can risk that. Without a union to protect their right to refuse to trade overtime pay for comp time, and with no funds in the bill for enforcement of these provisions, the voluntary nature of such agreements is highly suspect.

Faux “Flexibility”

When Republicans start touting “flexibility” working Americans and their families should make haste to their battle-stations, because it’s an attack. If Republicans are offering your “flexibility” with one hand, they are usually taking away a lot more with the other hand. (For example giving state’s more “flexibility” in administering Medicaid actually means slashing Medicaid’s federal funding, and block-granting the remains t to the states to administer as they please.)

In conservative doublespeak, “flexibility” stands in for “freedom,” but for middle-class, working-class and low-income Americans, it means “freedom” to try and get by with a lot less. That’s  because the “Working Families Flexibility Act,” doesn’t actually give working family more flexibility. (The Healthy Families Act introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, which would allow forty percent of private-sector American workers have no access to paid sick days to accrue paid sick leave, does a much better job of this.) It takes flexibility away from our families and gives employers more flexibility to make their employers work longer and harder for less.

A quick comparison of organizations supporting the “Working Families Flexibility Act” and the organizations opposing it makes it clear that this bill is really about taking flexibility away from working families, and given employers even more flexibility to make their employees work harder and longer for less. On one side, we’ve got the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, and the International Foodservice Distributors Association, representing that employ many low-wage workers who rely on overtime, and have little enough “flexibility” already. On the other side, organizations like the Family Values At Work Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Main Street Alliance, the National Employment Law Project, and the Service Employees International Union, speak for the working families who would be harmed by this Republican bill.

The National Partnership for Women and Families spells out exactly what’s wrong with the “Family Flexibility Act.” 

The Working Families Flexibility Act offers a false choice between time and pay. The bill’s supporters claim H.R. 1406 would give hourly workers more flexibility and time with their loved ones by allowing them to choose paid time off, rather than time-and-a-half wages, as compensation for working more than 40 hours in one week (“comp time”). But the irony is that workers will only get more time with their families after they’ve spent long hours away at work. And there is nothing in H.R. 1406 that guarantees that workers will be able to use the comp time they have earned when they need it.

The worker flexibility offered by H.R. 1406 is nothing more than a mirage. That’s because this proposal gives the employer, not the employee, the “flexibility” to decide when and even if comp time can be used. The bill permits the employer to deny the request entirely if the employee’s use of comp time would “unduly disrupt” operations or to grant leave on a day other than the day requested by the employee. This means that H.R. 1406 provides no guarantee that workers can use their earned time when a child falls ill, to attend a parent-teacher conference, or to help an aging parent settle in to a nursing home. Employers can veto an employee’s request to use comp time even in cases of urgent need.

H.R. 1406 would put workers at very real risk and provides an interest-free loan to employers. An employee who does not accept comp time could be penalized with fewer hours, bad shifts and loss of overtime hours. And because it is cheaper to provide comp time than to pay overtime wages, there is a significant incentive for employers to hire fewer people and rely on overtime hours – paid for in future comp time – to get work done. It would permit employers to defer compensation for unused comp time for as long as 13 months, creating an interest-free loan for employers and hardships for workers.

Once again, Republicans are advancing policies that benefit the powerful at the expense hard-working Americans, and selling it as “flexibility” instead of calling it was it really is — class warfare against working families. 

Alas, support for improving mental health services have proven even more fleeting than support for gun control — until the next shooting, that is. Unfortunately, the sequester will turn those existing “cracks” in to chasms, and create new ones.

The sequester does the most harm to the most vulnerable, and it’s hard to think of a more vulnerable population — or one with fewer advocates, and less ability to self-advocate — than the mentally ill; especially those with serious mental illness that require more care than our system currently provides. The sequester reserves some of its cruelest cuts for the mentally ill. (Of course, none of it has to happen. Congress passed the sequester, and Congress can repeal the sequester.)

According to the Office for Budget Management, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) will lost about $275 million under sequestration, with serious consequences for the mentally ill:

• 684,000 individuals will lose critical employment and housing assistance, case management services, and school- based supports;
• 1.13 million children and adults will be at risk of losing access to any type of public mental health support
• 1,300 youth with severe emotional disturbances will lose access to treatment services
• 18,000 fewer homeless individuals will receive outreach services
• 9,000 fewer individuals living on the street will be enrolled in homelessness assistance programs;
• 27,000 of the nation’s most vulnerable homeless individuals will lose access to primary care referrals, housing assistance, education opportunities, and job training
• More than 320,000 children will not receive coordinated mental health services, early intervention and prevention programming, and other suicide prevention services

The Department of Defense, facing $500 billion in sequestration cuts, will have to furlough most of its 800,000 civilian employees for at least one day a week — including more than half of of the army’s 4,500 mental health professionals. For mental health professionals, it means up to a 20% reduction in pay. For soldiers, sequestration means shorter therapy sessions for those dealing with PTSD, less time with physical therapists, and longer waits for grief counseling.

These are just a few of the sequester’s consequences for our mental health, but they begin to paint a picture of what the sequester will do to many vulnerable Americans who will literally have nowhere to go, in a mental health system that was already stressed and under-funded before the sequester.

If you think these cuts are unlikely to affect you, think again. One in five Americans have some form of mental illness, and that 26.2 percent of Americans have a diagnosable mental illness in a given year. It’s entirely likely that someone you know —a coworker, a neighbor, a spouse or other family member — is living with mental illness. Perhaps you are, too. And since 67 percent of adults and 80 percent of children who need mental health services don’t receive them, there’s a good chance that you or someone you know and love is living with untreated mental illness.

If you or someone you know is living with mental illness, and has tried to get help, you know how little help is available; especially if you happen to be poor and/or have a serious mental illness. America spends about $113 billion on mental health treatment, just 5.6 percent of our national budget. Most of that goes to prescription drugs and outpatient treatment. If medication and outpatient treatment doesn’t help, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you can get yourself arrested in the right state or county. Otherwise there’s nowhere for you to go.

Understanding how we got here requires a brief history lesson. But first , let’s have some fun. Try this. Head over to the internet search engine of your choice, and search for “abandoned mental hospitals.” In just 31 seconds, I got about 304,000 results. Check out a few links, and you might begin to think that the country is just littered with these huge, decaying buildings, quietly beckoning “urban explorers” to traipse their dark, dank halways. That’s because it is. There’s probably a crumbling monument to our former mental health infrastructure in your own community.

It would take more time or space than I have here to cover the history of mental institutions or psychiatric hospitals in America. They are the stuff of legend, and the source of old horror stories whispered about in communities, and sometimes widely reported in the news. (Not to mention television’s “American Horror Story” series.) Some were awful places where vulnerable patients were abused by untrained and/or uncaring staff. Some were places where people with serious, and sometimes little-understood, mental illnesses to go.

At the very least, for nearly a century there was somewhere for the seriously mentally ill. Then the trend towards “deinstitutionalization” — which began in the mid 1960′s and culminated in 1981, when Ronald Reagan ended the federal government’s role in providing mental health services, cut federal mental health spending by 30 percent, and block-granted the rest to the state — changed all that.

Time, right-wing obstructionism, and the recession did the rest, on the state level. Since 2008, about 31 states have cut mental health spending, and those cuts surpassed 10 percent of the mental health budget in one third of those states. In 2012 alone, states have cut more than $840 million in spending on mental health services, further burdening and already stressed system. Nine state run psychiatric hospitals were closed during this time, and another 3,200 beds for the mentally ill were eliminated in 29 states.

At the same time, states have experience an increase in demand for mental health services due to the recession. Half reported a rise in need for services, and 27 percent reported a rise in need for crisis services. Meanwhile, congressional Republican obstruction of efforts to increase aid to states only ratcheted up the budget pressure in the states.

The consequences for mental health workers and patients just increase stresses on the mental health system. Mental health professionals have seen their pay cut or their salaries frozen for years. People charged with assessing treatment needs and providing treatment have to resort to food stamps to keep food on their tables. (The sequester will take a chunk of that, too.)

For patients, it means access to mental health professionals is worse than access to other health professionals. Some 89.3 billion Americans live in federally designated “Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas,” compared to 55.3 million living in primary care shortage areas, and 44.6 million living in dental health shortage areas. Low income patients experienced longer waits for services, received less money and help to get housing and jobs, and spent more time in the emergency room.

Patients who don’t end up in the emergency room stand a good chance of ending up in the criminal justice system. Shortages of adequate care facilities has made prisons becoming the de-facto safety net for the mentally ill, and the best shot at getting care in some places. Nearly half, 45 percent of federal prison inmates have some form of mental illness, while 56 percent of state prisoners and 64 percent of local inmates suffer the same. Taxpayers end up supporting the incarceration of the mentally ill to the tune of $9 billion per year.

Outpatient therapist Alyx Beckwith illustrated what all these cuts mean for real people dealing with mental illness, in a column about a 14-year-old patient in North Carolina, whom she calls “Trevor.”

A 14-year-old with large brown eyes and tightly cropped hair told me a few weeks ago that voices were telling him to kill people. A day before the Sandy Hook school massacre, he threatened to light his house on fire and stab everyone in the family, according to his mother. This boy — whom I’ll call Trevor — is a severe case, presenting the early, violent symptoms of schizophrenia at an age when the illness often begins to emerge. Untreated, his condition poses a serious danger to himself and those around him.

… Trevor’s coverage provides for mental health care, but most psychiatrists in his area do not accept it because of the low reimbursement rates. Those offices that do have two- to three-month waiting lists. Trevor needs psychiatric care and cannot wait months to get it. Last October, when my concern about Trevor first began to escalate, I made a dozen calls and finally managed to get him in to see a psychiatrist near his home. The doctor, according to Trevor’s mother, spent 15 minutes with the boy. He diagnosed Trevor with obsessive compulsive disorder, prescribed no medication and suggested that Trevor continue to see me weekly. From what I know of Trevor, 15 minutes is insufficient to gather the information necessary for a diagnosis.

Trevor’s statements to me in December — referred to as homicidal ideation — demanded, both legally and ethically, that I send him to an emergency room. In North Carolina, as in many states, there aren’t enough hospital beds to accommodate mentally ill individuals in crisis. Physical maladies and injuries take precedence, and those with mental-health issues often do not get out of a waiting room. Trevor spent five hours at the emergency room, then was sent home with instructions to call the hospital’s adolescent mental health team the following day; his mother was unable to reach a member of that team when she called, she told me.

For mental health providers in North Carolina, 2013 marks another year of cuts to Medicaid reimbursement rates, which have declined steadily since 2008. States are responsible for a larger portion of mental health services than they are for physical services, which means mental health is hit hard by state budget negotiations. More than $4.3 billion has been slashed from state mental health budgets nationwide since 2009, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. South Carolina, Alabama, Alaska, Illinois and Nevada are among the states that have had the deepest cuts.

This is the state of mental health care for people like “Trevor” before sequestration cuts to mental health services kick in. Ideally, Beckwith says, “Trevor” would be admitted to an inpatient facility for evaluation and monitoring. The reality is that he most likely won’t be. In many communities across the country, those places don’t exist anymore, and the few that do simply don’t have enough beds. The mental health services that do exist for “Trevor” are so far away that his family can barely afford gas money for weekly outpatient therapy visits, and so overtaxed to spare the time and attention “Trevor’s” condition requires.

“Where will all this leave Trevor?” Beckwith asks. Where will all of this plus the sequester leave “Trevor” and thousands like him across the country? And the sad part is that it doesn’t’ have to happen. Congress created the sequester, and Congress can just stop it.

The sequester is only going to make this worse for “Trevor” and thousands of others like him. We’ll never know anything about the vast majority of them. We’ll have no reason to know their names until another of them falls through the widening and multiplying “cracks” in our mental health care system, and becomes the latest staple in our 24-hour news cycle.

Then we’ll quickly forget them, and probably do nothing to stop the next one from falling through those unprepared “cracks.” That, if you ask me, is insane.