WELCOME TO AMERICA
WHOEVER LOOKS AT AMERICA WILL SEE: THE SHIP IS POWERED BY STUPIDITY,
CORRUPTION, OR PREJUDICE
JOHANN MOST
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AMERICAN REALITIES
can you think of one thing to be proud of in america today?
the easiest thing to be in america is ignorant and americans excel at it
FATHER MICHAEL PFLEGER: RACISM IS IN THE DNA OF AMERICA
we have shitholes galore!!!
*HOMELESSNESS ISN'T INEVITABLE BUT RATHER A MANIFESTATION OF A SOCIETY THAT IS SORELY LACKING IN JUSTICE
THE #1 THREAT TO PEACE IN THE WORLD? WORLD POLLING SUGGESTS IT’S THE UNITED STATES
march 2023
poverty in america
While poverty and economic insecurity are too high across the country, some parts of the nation fare better than others. Use our interactive map to learn more about the economic health of your state and congressional district across a variety of indicators.
11.8%
38.1 million people in the U.S. fell below the poverty line in 2018.
the apocalypse of settler colonialism
by dr. gerald horne
"through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and a minimum of self-awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but inimical to the founding of the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce a persistent sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so thus this unsteadiness has prevailed."
We have political democracy in America but scarce economic democracy. We have the political structures of democracy, but they teeter on foundations of exceptions. These check the advance of genuine democracy from below. We have democracy for the few and exclusion for the many. We have socialism for capital and capitalism for the rest. Every political right or freedom, moreover, is provisional. It comes with clauses of exception in small print or loopholes accrued over time. These preserve the state’s privilege to rescind them.
by LUCIANA BOHNE - counterpunch.org
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LIST OF RACE RIOTS IN THE UNITED STATES
FOR EXAMPLE: 1841: CINCINNATI, OHIO WHITE IRISH-DESCENDANT AND IRISH IMMIGRANT DOCK WORKERS RIOTED AGAINST BLACK DOCK WORKERS. WHEN THE BLACK DOCK WORKERS BANDED TOGETHER TO DEFEND THEIR COMMUNITY FROM THE APPROACHING WHITES, THE WHITE RIOTERS RETREATED AND THEN COMMANDEERED A 6-POUND CANNON AND SHOT IT THROUGH THE STREETS OF CINCINNATI.
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RACIAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1660
REGRETTABLY RACIAL VIOLENCE HAS BEEN A DISTINCT PART OF AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1660. WHILE THAT VIOLENCE HAS IMPACTED ALMOST EVERY ETHNIC AND RACIAL GROUP IN THE UNITED STATES, IT HAS HAD A PARTICULARLY HORRIFIC EFFECT ON AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE.
america
IN THE LAND OF STUPID THIS MAKES SENSE TO REPUBLICAN VOTERS!!!
NANCEGREGGS @DU
THE GREATEST THREAT TO OUR NATION IS STUPIDITY
IF WE COULD WIPE OUT THE ABJECT STUPIDITY THAT HAS GRIPPED OUR COUNTRY, WE COULD GO ON TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION - ONE FREE OF POLITICAL GRIFTERS WHO TAKE THEIR CONSTITUENTS' MONEY WHILE FUCKING THEM AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY.
WHAT IS IT OTHER THAN STUPIDITY THAT LEADS AMERICAN CITIZENS TO SUPPORT POLITICIANS WHOSE IDEA OF 'FREEDOM' MEANS TAKING AWAY A WOMEN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE, OR A PARENT'S RIGHT TO ENSURE THAT THEIR CHILDREN HAVE MORE ACCESS TO BOOKS AND LESS ACCESS TO GUNS?
WHAT IS IT OTHER THAN STUPIDITY THAT CONVINCES GOD-FEARING "CHRISTIANS" THAT A LYING, SELF-PROCLAIMED PUSSY-GRABBER WAS ANOINTED BY THE ALMIGHTY TO LEAD A NATION?
WHAT IS IT OTHER THAN STUPIDITY THAT CAUSES PEOPLE LIVING PAYCHEQUE-TO-PAYCHEQUE TO DONATE MONEY TO MULTI-MILLIONAIRES LIKE JOEL OSTEEN SO HE CAN AFFORD TO LIVE IN LUXURY WHILE THEY SCROUNGE TO AFFORD TO EAT - OR DONATE MONEY TO PEOPLE LIKE STEVE BANNON WHO POCKETED THEIR "BUILD THE WALL" FUNDS WHILE LAUGHING AT THEIR GULLIBILITY ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK?
WHAT IS IT OTHER THAN STUPIDITY THAT PROMPTS VOTERS TO ELECT WHACK-JOBS WHO BELIEVE IN JEWISH SPACE LASERS, THE GAZPACHO POLICE, AND PEACH-TREE DISHES?
WHAT IS IT OTHER THAN STUPIDITY THAT CONVINCES THE UNBEARABLY STUPID TO VOTE FOR THE VERY PEOPLE WHO DISDAIN THEM, DESPISE THEM, AND SEE THEM AS SUCKERS WHO WILL LITERALLY BELIEVE ANY BULLSHIT THEY'RE FED?
IF WE COULD WIPE OUT STUPIDITY LIKE THE MIND-NUMBING, BRAIN-EATING DISEASE THAT IT IS, WE MIGHT ACTUALLY ACHIEVE
BEING THE DEMOCRACY WE WERE ALWAYS DESTINED TO BE.
FIGHT THE STUPIDITY AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY - IT'S OUR ONLY CHANCE OF SURVIVAL.
THERE IS NOT A COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IN WHICH RACISM HAS BEEN MORE IMPORTANT, FOR SO LONG A TIME, AS THE UNITED STATES. AND THE PROBLEM OF "THE COLOR LINE," AS W.E.B. DU BOIS PUT IT, IS STILL WITH US.
"PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES"
BY HOWARD ZINN
The United States has become a country that is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among the Republican Party's right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice, and despise it. All that matters is that control - financial and political - serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. (Henry A. Giroux, Truthout)
american exceptionalism - defining the shithole
the art of protecting a corrupt and debased system while living in a
bubble devoid of reality
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
"THE TRUTH IS AMERICA DOES STAND OUT—IN SOME OF THE WORST WAYS. WE ARE EXCEPTIONAL FOR HAVING SURVIVED SO LONG WITHOUT A NATIONAL HEALTH PROGRAM, AND FOR CONTINUING TO TOLERATE OBSCENE INEQUALITY THAT CONSTANTLY FAVORS THE WEALTHY OVER THE REST OF US. THIS NATION IS EXCEPTIONAL FOR IMPRISONING A LARGER PERCENTAGE OF OUR POPULATION THAN ANY OTHER NATION AND FOR CONTINUING TO LIVE WITH THE CONSTANT SPECTER OF GUN VIOLENCE. WE ARE EXCEPTIONAL IN BEING AT WAR FOR MOST OF THE PAST SEVERAL CENTURIES. AND OF COURSE, WE ARE EXCEPTIONAL IN HAVING A POPULATION LARGE ENOUGH TO ELECT A PRESIDENT AS HORRIFYING AS DONALD TRUMP. THESE ARE TRULY THE THINGS THAT HAVE MADE AMERICA EXCEPTIONAL."
*bloodsucking capitalist are poisoning our food, air, and water for profit and our "government" sits on it's ass
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*the internet allows america's racist underbelly to terrorize citizens.
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Chris Hedges on authoritarian and militaristic nature of the Christian right:
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic "virtues," glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the "secular humanist" state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
connect the dots: division in america
US States By Evangelical Protestant Population,
POVERTY, RACISM, AND EDUCATION
NOTICE THE NUMBER OF STATES MAKING ALL LISTS AND CONSIDER THE TRASH THEY HAVE ELECTED TO OFFIICE, THE ANTI-VAX MOVEMENT, BAN BOOK CALLS, ETC
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Rank State % of Adults Who Are Evangelical Protestant (Source: PEW Research Center)
1 Tennessee 52% 2 Alabama 49% 3 Kentucky 49% 4 Oklahoma 47% 5 Arkansas 46% 6 Mississippi 41% 7 West Virginia 39% 8 Georgia 38% 9 Missouri 36% 10 North Carolina 35% The 10 Poorest States In America For 2021
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MOST RACIST STATES
ALABAMA ARKANSAS FLORIDA GEORGIA ILLINOIS LOUISIANA MISSISSIPPI NORTH CAROLINA TEXAS LEAST EDUCATED STATES (1-50) 39 Texas 40 South Carolina 41 Tennessee 42 New Mexico 43 Nevada 44 Oklahoma 45 Kentucky 46 Alabama 47 Arkansas 48 Louisiana 49 Mississippi 50 West Virginia |
Study: Red States Have Higher Murder Rates Than Blue States
Wait, what?
By John Amato — crooks & liars
January 31, 2023
A new study conducted by Third Way found that the murder rates in states that voted for Trump eclipsed Blue states that voted for Biden.
Actually, Trump-voting red states had a 40% higher murder rate that Biden's voting bloc.
Wait, what?
Has Fox News been lying to us?
Axios reported that , " Third Way's report analyzed homicide data for all 50 states from 2000 through 2020, using CDC data."
"Four reliably-red states consistently made the top of the list — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri."
Has George Soros purchased the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri right under Sen. Marsha Blackburn's nose?
Third Way then looked at homicide rates from the year 2000, and guess what they found.
In this study, we collected homicide data from 2000 through 2020 for all 50 states from the Center of Disease Control Wonder’s National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Data. Data is based on death certificates collected by state registries and provided to the National Vital Statistics System.
--
We found that the murder rate in Trump-voting states has exceeded the murder rate in Biden-voting states every year this century. Cumulatively, overall murder rates since 2000 were on average 23% higher in Trump-voting states.
Ops.
Fox News and Republicans pushed the crime narrative during the run-up to the 2022 midterms like crackheads after a fix.
As Digby notes in her post Red State Killing Fields, "Democrats are not allowed to make this point because it’s disrespectful of Real Americans in red states. Only Republicans can insult people who live in cities and blue states calling them depraved hellholes infested with criminals and deviants. It’s the law."
I'm no fan of Third Way, but facts are facts.
Will the media even bother looking or do what they usually do and channel right-wing talking points?
It's up to the Democratic Party to call out the lazy media and lying Republicans whenever they bring up the issue of crime and cite this study.
Actually, Trump-voting red states had a 40% higher murder rate that Biden's voting bloc.
Wait, what?
Has Fox News been lying to us?
Axios reported that , " Third Way's report analyzed homicide data for all 50 states from 2000 through 2020, using CDC data."
"Four reliably-red states consistently made the top of the list — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri."
Has George Soros purchased the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri right under Sen. Marsha Blackburn's nose?
Third Way then looked at homicide rates from the year 2000, and guess what they found.
In this study, we collected homicide data from 2000 through 2020 for all 50 states from the Center of Disease Control Wonder’s National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Data. Data is based on death certificates collected by state registries and provided to the National Vital Statistics System.
--
We found that the murder rate in Trump-voting states has exceeded the murder rate in Biden-voting states every year this century. Cumulatively, overall murder rates since 2000 were on average 23% higher in Trump-voting states.
Ops.
Fox News and Republicans pushed the crime narrative during the run-up to the 2022 midterms like crackheads after a fix.
As Digby notes in her post Red State Killing Fields, "Democrats are not allowed to make this point because it’s disrespectful of Real Americans in red states. Only Republicans can insult people who live in cities and blue states calling them depraved hellholes infested with criminals and deviants. It’s the law."
I'm no fan of Third Way, but facts are facts.
Will the media even bother looking or do what they usually do and channel right-wing talking points?
It's up to the Democratic Party to call out the lazy media and lying Republicans whenever they bring up the issue of crime and cite this study.
Why do Americans die earlier than Europeans?
The ‘mortality penalty’ that the US pays every year is equivalent to the number of Americans who died of Covid in 2020
SAMUEL PRESTON AND YANA VIERBOOM - the guardian
5/4/2021
A 30-year-old American is three times more likely to die at that age than his or her European peers. In fact, Americans do worse at just about every age. To make matters more grim, the American disadvantage is growing over time.
In 2017, for example, higher American mortality translated into roughly 401,000 excess deaths – deaths that would not have occurred if the US had Europe’s lower age-specific death rates. Pre-pandemic, that 401,000 is about 12% of all American deaths. The percentage is even higher below age 85, where one in four Americans die simply because they do not live in Europe.
The tremendous losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have been widely publicized. The US government estimates that 377,000 deaths in 2020 were attributable to Covid-19. This means that the mortality penalty that the US pays every year is equivalent to the number of American pandemic deaths in 2020. And since people tend to die from Covid at much older ages than America’s typical excess deaths, the total number of years of potential life lost in an average year is three times greater than those lost to Covid in 2020 (13.0 million versus 4.4 million).
There have been many efforts to account for the US mortality disadvantage. There is no single answer, but three factors stand out. First, death rates from drug overdose are much higher in the US than in Europe and have risen sharply in the 21st century. Second is the rapid rise in the proportion of American adults who are obese. In 2016, 40% of American adults were obese, a larger proportion than in Europe. Higher levels of obesity in the US may account for 55% of its shortfall in life expectancy relative to other rich countries. Third, the US stands out among wealthy countries for not offering universal healthcare insurance. One analysis suggests that the absence of universal healthcare resulted in 45,000 excess deaths at ages 18-64 in 2005. That number represents about a quarter of excess deaths in that age range.
Why does the US perform so poorly in these realms? We would argue that a lack of federal oversight and regulation, powerful lobbying structure, deindustrialization of American jobs, and systemic racism combine to create an annual tsunami of excess deaths.
Both supply and demand factors are involved in the increasing number of US deaths from drug overdose. Large pharmaceutical companies marketed pain relievers without adequate federal oversight of their safety claims in the 1990s, fueling overdoses of prescription opioids. Big pharma’s lobbying power protected their sales campaigns. Although restrictions were eventually put in place, the damage had been done. Illegal use of opiates grew dramatically, especially among people in economically depressed areas and with lower levels of schooling.
Noting that this increase coincided with increases in mortality from suicide and alcohol-related deaths, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have argued that American society is suffering from a growing tide of despair. They argue that one of the main drivers is de-industrialization, which eliminated millions of well-paying jobs for people who did not attend college. This is the group with the largest increase in premature mortality during the 21st century.
Above age 65, healthcare insurance coverage is nearly universal via Medicare. An international review of medical practice by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the US does comparatively well in identifying and treating cardiovascular diseases and many cancers. But the prevalence of these diseases, the principal killers in wealthy countries, is unusually high in the US. Heart disease, a type of cardiovascular disease and America’s number one cause of death for decades, is strongly linked to lifestyle factors such as obesity. Although the connection between obesity and health risks is well known, consumer preferences for unhealthy food are strong. Not just because humans are biologically vulnerable to sweets and fats, but because major food producers and distributors are incentivized to turn this weakness into profit.
The systemic racism present in US society generates inequalities in resources and power, which in turn have a major impact “downstream” on the health of people of color. Healthcare inequalities and provider bias are importantly associated with infant and maternal mortality. For example, many physicians (usually white and male) have been shown to take the health concerns of Black and Latinx people less seriously during pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in poorer health outcomes for both mothers and their children. Black infants have significantly better outcomes when treated by Black doctors.
The US also has exceptionally high income inequality, superimposed on its yawning racial divide. And social policy in the US is less likely to correct inequality than elsewhere. One study concluded that US life expectancy would be three to four years longer if the country had the social policy generosity of other OECD countries. A factor in the social policy shortcomings in the US, including in providing health insurance, is the sense on the part of the white majority that more generous policies would disproportionately benefit African Americans.
All of this suggests that our shortcomings are not simply a product of what happens in a sector called “medicine and public health”. Rather, these shortcomings are deeply embedded in enduring features of American society. The failure of the United States to adequately protect its members from premature death casts doubt on American civic processes and undermines any effort of the US to serve as a model for other countries.
In 2017, for example, higher American mortality translated into roughly 401,000 excess deaths – deaths that would not have occurred if the US had Europe’s lower age-specific death rates. Pre-pandemic, that 401,000 is about 12% of all American deaths. The percentage is even higher below age 85, where one in four Americans die simply because they do not live in Europe.
The tremendous losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have been widely publicized. The US government estimates that 377,000 deaths in 2020 were attributable to Covid-19. This means that the mortality penalty that the US pays every year is equivalent to the number of American pandemic deaths in 2020. And since people tend to die from Covid at much older ages than America’s typical excess deaths, the total number of years of potential life lost in an average year is three times greater than those lost to Covid in 2020 (13.0 million versus 4.4 million).
There have been many efforts to account for the US mortality disadvantage. There is no single answer, but three factors stand out. First, death rates from drug overdose are much higher in the US than in Europe and have risen sharply in the 21st century. Second is the rapid rise in the proportion of American adults who are obese. In 2016, 40% of American adults were obese, a larger proportion than in Europe. Higher levels of obesity in the US may account for 55% of its shortfall in life expectancy relative to other rich countries. Third, the US stands out among wealthy countries for not offering universal healthcare insurance. One analysis suggests that the absence of universal healthcare resulted in 45,000 excess deaths at ages 18-64 in 2005. That number represents about a quarter of excess deaths in that age range.
Why does the US perform so poorly in these realms? We would argue that a lack of federal oversight and regulation, powerful lobbying structure, deindustrialization of American jobs, and systemic racism combine to create an annual tsunami of excess deaths.
Both supply and demand factors are involved in the increasing number of US deaths from drug overdose. Large pharmaceutical companies marketed pain relievers without adequate federal oversight of their safety claims in the 1990s, fueling overdoses of prescription opioids. Big pharma’s lobbying power protected their sales campaigns. Although restrictions were eventually put in place, the damage had been done. Illegal use of opiates grew dramatically, especially among people in economically depressed areas and with lower levels of schooling.
Noting that this increase coincided with increases in mortality from suicide and alcohol-related deaths, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have argued that American society is suffering from a growing tide of despair. They argue that one of the main drivers is de-industrialization, which eliminated millions of well-paying jobs for people who did not attend college. This is the group with the largest increase in premature mortality during the 21st century.
Above age 65, healthcare insurance coverage is nearly universal via Medicare. An international review of medical practice by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the US does comparatively well in identifying and treating cardiovascular diseases and many cancers. But the prevalence of these diseases, the principal killers in wealthy countries, is unusually high in the US. Heart disease, a type of cardiovascular disease and America’s number one cause of death for decades, is strongly linked to lifestyle factors such as obesity. Although the connection between obesity and health risks is well known, consumer preferences for unhealthy food are strong. Not just because humans are biologically vulnerable to sweets and fats, but because major food producers and distributors are incentivized to turn this weakness into profit.
The systemic racism present in US society generates inequalities in resources and power, which in turn have a major impact “downstream” on the health of people of color. Healthcare inequalities and provider bias are importantly associated with infant and maternal mortality. For example, many physicians (usually white and male) have been shown to take the health concerns of Black and Latinx people less seriously during pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in poorer health outcomes for both mothers and their children. Black infants have significantly better outcomes when treated by Black doctors.
The US also has exceptionally high income inequality, superimposed on its yawning racial divide. And social policy in the US is less likely to correct inequality than elsewhere. One study concluded that US life expectancy would be three to four years longer if the country had the social policy generosity of other OECD countries. A factor in the social policy shortcomings in the US, including in providing health insurance, is the sense on the part of the white majority that more generous policies would disproportionately benefit African Americans.
All of this suggests that our shortcomings are not simply a product of what happens in a sector called “medicine and public health”. Rather, these shortcomings are deeply embedded in enduring features of American society. The failure of the United States to adequately protect its members from premature death casts doubt on American civic processes and undermines any effort of the US to serve as a model for other countries.
THE EXCUSE: WHITE RACISM!!!
‘There’s no excuse for this’: thousands in Mississippi city still without water weeks after storms
Oliver Laughland in Jackson, Mississippi
THE GUARDIAN
Thu 4 Mar 2021 02.00 EST
In Jackson, where 80% of residents are Black, the cold led to breakages in the city’s ageing pipes, leaving thousands of its residents without running water
As the sound of rainwater droplets crescendoed around him, Rodrick Readus stood by his front door and took a moment to reflect on the many indignities of the past fortnight.
“It’s just the simple fact you can’t wash your hands,” he said. “You can’t take a bath. Every time I touch something I know I’m not clean.”
Like every other resident in his two-story apartment complex, Readus has been without running water since mid-February, when Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital, was lashed by two back-to-back winter storms. They crippled the city’s ailing water infrastructure and left thousands of residents now entering their third week without flowing pipes. While most national and international attention has focused on the aftermath of the storms in Texas, Mississippi has been largely ignored.
Buckets, jugs, bottles and plastic trays litter the ground outside Readus’s apartment complex, many are perched under gutters to capture the rainwater before it disperses into the mud. It’s the water he uses to flush his toilet.
The 47-year-old self-employed home repairman has no car, meaning he relies on family members and neighbours to drop off small containers of non-potable water to wash his dishes, which are piling up in the sink. He has already spent a few hundred dollars on bottled water to drink, an amount he simply cannot afford.
“We are all citizens and there’s no excuse for this,” Readus said. “Don’t treat us as second class because we don’t have the things that others do.”
The winter storms, which crippled power sources throughout the US south, brought record low temperatures to parts of Mississippi. In Jackson, where 80% of residents are Black, the cold led to at least 96 breakages in the city’s ageing pipes, which, combined with power outages, lead to catastrophically low pressure throughout its water system. As of Monday evening 35 breakages remained, and although pressure was slowly coming back, thousands of residents are without water. Most of them in the city’s south, which sits on higher ground and is furthest away from the treatment plant. A citywide boil notice remains in effect and officials have offered no timeline for full restoration.
K’Acia Drummer, a 27 year-old middle school teacher, also lives in south Jackson. She tried in vain to stick it out at her apartment after the ice receded last month, but with no running water and the increasing cost ($40 a day) of purchasing bottled water, she elected to leave and stay with friends. She returned home on Tuesday hoping to see her water restored but felt a sinking feeling as the taps dribbled an insignificant stream and her toilet still wouldn’t fill.
“I feel displaced,” she said. “Now I know what it feels like to live without basic necessities, and it’s one of those things that puts you in a different place mentally. My anxiety has been through the roof.”
With no shower water, she plans to bathe at her gym. With no functioning toilet, she has decided to “take in less fluids”.
Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has said the city requires $2bn to revitalize its ailing piping and treatment system. He compared the city’s pipes to peanut brittle, explaining that as repair crews move in to fix the pipes, one repair can lead to another breakage.
Mississippi, American’s poorest state, has long faced chronic infrastructure problems. A 2020 report card published by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state a D+ grade, noting decaying systems across roads, energy, solid waste and a host of other essential services. On its drinking water systems, the report noted some were losing as much as 50% of treated water due to breakages and that certain systems were still dependent on pipes laid in the 1920s. “Many of these networks have aged past their useful life span,” the report notes.
But at a press conference on Monday, Mayor Lumumba made clear that the changing climate was exacerbating the issue.
“One thing that is clear is that our winters are colder, our summers are hotter and the rain we experience is more abundant,” he said, pointing out that the city’s outdoor water treatment facility was simply not built to endure the cold. “And so not only do we need this investment because of the ageing infrastructure we need this investment because of the increased pressure that these extreme weather conditions are taking.”
Jackson is far from unique, as Texas’s widespread power outages last month revealed, but with systems across the US faltering under the climate crisis, experts predict these catastrophic events are likely to become more and more frequent.
“The climate is changing. Infrastructure is ageing. Funding for updating infrastructure is decreasing. And we as a society do not like thinking about paying for infrastructure, we only typically do when there is something as dramatic as the Flint water crisis or hurricane Katrina,” said Professor Martin Doyle, a director of the water policy program at Duke University.
In Jackson, the city has moved to raise sales taxes in order to pay for water and sewage upgrades in the wake of the crisis, but Mayor Lumumba made clear on Monday he believed the federal government should also be offering financial assistance.
Doyle points out that until the 1980s the federal government was a major source of water infrastructure funding, which was “largely taken away … so cities and utilities are now on their own financially and they are having to figure it out”.
The issue was the subject of a major investigation by the Guardian last year.
At the Forest Hill high school in south Jackson a steady stream of residents queued for non-potable water being distributed by national guard troops on Tuesday morning. Residents came with buckets, milk bottles, bins and tankers, anything to bring home as many gallons as possible.
Many did not want to talk during what was an intimate, and for some almost humiliating, moment of need.
But Cedric Weeks, a local restaurant owner who had been forced to temporarily close his business, took a moment to reflect.
“I saw [the water crisis in] Flint and I didn’t flinch at it,” he said. “But to be in that predicament now. I see the major need of water. I’ve never lived without it. So to have to haul it and to have to flush toilets and take baths with what you hauled … it’s terrible, you know.”
It was something one of the troops themselves could relate to.
Specialist Christopher Shannon, out to assist residents and media with queries about the operation, had also been living without water for two weeks. “You hate to see people struggle, but we love to come out and help,” he said. “No one expected it. Nothing is built for winter out here … You can prepare all you want, but if you’re not built for it, you’re not built for it.”
As the sound of rainwater droplets crescendoed around him, Rodrick Readus stood by his front door and took a moment to reflect on the many indignities of the past fortnight.
“It’s just the simple fact you can’t wash your hands,” he said. “You can’t take a bath. Every time I touch something I know I’m not clean.”
Like every other resident in his two-story apartment complex, Readus has been without running water since mid-February, when Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital, was lashed by two back-to-back winter storms. They crippled the city’s ailing water infrastructure and left thousands of residents now entering their third week without flowing pipes. While most national and international attention has focused on the aftermath of the storms in Texas, Mississippi has been largely ignored.
Buckets, jugs, bottles and plastic trays litter the ground outside Readus’s apartment complex, many are perched under gutters to capture the rainwater before it disperses into the mud. It’s the water he uses to flush his toilet.
The 47-year-old self-employed home repairman has no car, meaning he relies on family members and neighbours to drop off small containers of non-potable water to wash his dishes, which are piling up in the sink. He has already spent a few hundred dollars on bottled water to drink, an amount he simply cannot afford.
“We are all citizens and there’s no excuse for this,” Readus said. “Don’t treat us as second class because we don’t have the things that others do.”
The winter storms, which crippled power sources throughout the US south, brought record low temperatures to parts of Mississippi. In Jackson, where 80% of residents are Black, the cold led to at least 96 breakages in the city’s ageing pipes, which, combined with power outages, lead to catastrophically low pressure throughout its water system. As of Monday evening 35 breakages remained, and although pressure was slowly coming back, thousands of residents are without water. Most of them in the city’s south, which sits on higher ground and is furthest away from the treatment plant. A citywide boil notice remains in effect and officials have offered no timeline for full restoration.
K’Acia Drummer, a 27 year-old middle school teacher, also lives in south Jackson. She tried in vain to stick it out at her apartment after the ice receded last month, but with no running water and the increasing cost ($40 a day) of purchasing bottled water, she elected to leave and stay with friends. She returned home on Tuesday hoping to see her water restored but felt a sinking feeling as the taps dribbled an insignificant stream and her toilet still wouldn’t fill.
“I feel displaced,” she said. “Now I know what it feels like to live without basic necessities, and it’s one of those things that puts you in a different place mentally. My anxiety has been through the roof.”
With no shower water, she plans to bathe at her gym. With no functioning toilet, she has decided to “take in less fluids”.
Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has said the city requires $2bn to revitalize its ailing piping and treatment system. He compared the city’s pipes to peanut brittle, explaining that as repair crews move in to fix the pipes, one repair can lead to another breakage.
Mississippi, American’s poorest state, has long faced chronic infrastructure problems. A 2020 report card published by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state a D+ grade, noting decaying systems across roads, energy, solid waste and a host of other essential services. On its drinking water systems, the report noted some were losing as much as 50% of treated water due to breakages and that certain systems were still dependent on pipes laid in the 1920s. “Many of these networks have aged past their useful life span,” the report notes.
But at a press conference on Monday, Mayor Lumumba made clear that the changing climate was exacerbating the issue.
“One thing that is clear is that our winters are colder, our summers are hotter and the rain we experience is more abundant,” he said, pointing out that the city’s outdoor water treatment facility was simply not built to endure the cold. “And so not only do we need this investment because of the ageing infrastructure we need this investment because of the increased pressure that these extreme weather conditions are taking.”
Jackson is far from unique, as Texas’s widespread power outages last month revealed, but with systems across the US faltering under the climate crisis, experts predict these catastrophic events are likely to become more and more frequent.
“The climate is changing. Infrastructure is ageing. Funding for updating infrastructure is decreasing. And we as a society do not like thinking about paying for infrastructure, we only typically do when there is something as dramatic as the Flint water crisis or hurricane Katrina,” said Professor Martin Doyle, a director of the water policy program at Duke University.
In Jackson, the city has moved to raise sales taxes in order to pay for water and sewage upgrades in the wake of the crisis, but Mayor Lumumba made clear on Monday he believed the federal government should also be offering financial assistance.
Doyle points out that until the 1980s the federal government was a major source of water infrastructure funding, which was “largely taken away … so cities and utilities are now on their own financially and they are having to figure it out”.
The issue was the subject of a major investigation by the Guardian last year.
At the Forest Hill high school in south Jackson a steady stream of residents queued for non-potable water being distributed by national guard troops on Tuesday morning. Residents came with buckets, milk bottles, bins and tankers, anything to bring home as many gallons as possible.
Many did not want to talk during what was an intimate, and for some almost humiliating, moment of need.
But Cedric Weeks, a local restaurant owner who had been forced to temporarily close his business, took a moment to reflect.
“I saw [the water crisis in] Flint and I didn’t flinch at it,” he said. “But to be in that predicament now. I see the major need of water. I’ve never lived without it. So to have to haul it and to have to flush toilets and take baths with what you hauled … it’s terrible, you know.”
It was something one of the troops themselves could relate to.
Specialist Christopher Shannon, out to assist residents and media with queries about the operation, had also been living without water for two weeks. “You hate to see people struggle, but we love to come out and help,” he said. “No one expected it. Nothing is built for winter out here … You can prepare all you want, but if you’re not built for it, you’re not built for it.”
A PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING!!!
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YET, 45 MILLION VOTE FOR GOP!!!
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THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, RIGHT!!!
‘Health insurance or food’: Americans face difficult choices amid pandemic
People with chronic illnesses are being forced to make hard decisions about delaying vital care or sacrificing basic necessities in order to pay for health insurance
Michael Sainato - THE GUARDIAN
Tue 12 Jan 2021 05.00 EST
Throughout the United States, Americans with chronic illnesses have been forced to navigate a healthcare system battered by the coronavirus pandemic while trying to afford medical treatment and resolve health insurance issues.
That has led to many Americans making difficult decisions about delaying vital care, or sacrificing other basic necessities – such as transport costs or food – in order to pay for health insurance so that they can get the treatment they need.
Quana Madison, a disabled artist in Denver, Colorado, has struggled with high medical costs for several years while fighting breast cancer that included requiring a double mastectomy, several other illnesses, chronic pain issues, and complications from surgeries.
She filed for bankruptcy due to debt from medical bills in 2017, even as she had private health insurance at the time.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Madison has continued facing health issues and recently undergone breast reconstruction surgery and biopsies. Due to her reported income being too high one month to remain eligible for Medicaid coverage, she is currently trying to appeal against a decision to kick her off Medicaid coverage at the end of January 2021.
“My income as an artist fluctuates dramatically every month,” said Madison, who lost a significant amount of work and contracts due to the pandemic. “After January who knows if I will have insurance.”
Through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Madison wouldn’t be able to keep her doctors or medical specialists because they wouldn’t be covered by any of the plans, and on the private marketplace she can’t find any coverage due to pre-existing conditions, though no options are affordable with her income which fluctuates based on art sales and what commission based work she is able to obtain.
Out of pocket, her medical care every year would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s overwhelming worrying how I will afford paying for health insurance. I wonder, do I pay for health insurance or food this month?” added Madison.
Madison is far from alone.
A November 2020 survey conducted by the patient financial management company VisitPay found 35% of Americans would delay care for coronavirus out of fear for associated medical bills. Though the federal government is supposed to cover any coronavirus-related medical bills for the uninsured, many coronavirus patients and families of coronavirus victims have received medical bills anyways.
Claire Chadwick, who works for a big box retailer in the Kansas City, Missouri, area, was diagnosed with coronavirus in March 2020 and has since experienced long-term side-effects, such as fatigue and rapid heart rate while at rest.
Despite her Covid-related medical issues, Chadwick works as many hours as possible to try to pay off hundreds of dollars in medical bills she accrued from doctor visits and medications, even as she is covered under her employer’s health insurance program.
“I worry about reinfection and the stress of working during the pandemic is difficult to handle,” said Chadwick. “I am working my ass off so that I can pay down on these medical bills. A couple months ago, when I was really struggling, I couldn’t work as many hours and had a lot of medical bills that still needed to be paid, the electric company came to shut off my electricity,”
She was forced to sign up for a payment plan to avoid having her electricity shut off, which is rolled into her monthly utility bills, and if she is one day late with the payment plan, Chadwick will owe everything at once and have her utilities shut off until it’s paid in full.
Though the health insured rate in the US has yet to show any significant changes so far, according to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an estimated 2 to 3 million Americans lost their employer-based health insurance coverage between March and September.
Prolonged job losses are expected to increase the numbers of Americans to lose health insurance during the pandemic, leaving tens of millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured through the worst pandemic to hit the US in over 100 years.
Daniel Oxford of Las Vegas, Nevada, has been fighting colon cancer since he was first diagnosed in March 2018.
He recently lost his health insurance through Medicaid due to a clerical error he is working to resolve before his next doctor appointment in February 2021.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he temporarily lost his job in cosmetics, and has relied on support from friends and family to cover expenses for medical supplies, bills and food.
“I need these medical supplies to live. It isn’t fair that I have to choose between buying groceries or medical supplies,” said Oxford. “I plan on going back to work soon, I’m just trying to get as healthy as possible, but I’m nervous to go back with such a bad immune system. Working with people and coronavirus going around like crazy, especially in a tourist city like Las Vegas, I’m not excited.”
Amy Nicole Fisher, 38, of Des Moines, Iowa, is disabled and suffers from an autoimmune disease. During the pandemic, Fisher, who is at high risk for coronavirus, explained she has been the sickest she has ever been, and has often avoided going to the hospital or seeking medical care for fear of the costs and the risks of exposure to coronavirus.
“I would likely not survive Covid-19, but honestly part of me thinks if I did get it, I wouldn’t be such a financial and just burden in general on my family,” said Fisher. can’
Though she has Medicare and a health insurance supplement through her husband’s employer, Fisher and her family face thousands of dollars in co-pays and medical bills every year. In past years, they lost a condo and a rental home due to surmounting medical bills.
“We just add it to our credit cards because we live paycheck to paycheck,” Fisher added.
That has led to many Americans making difficult decisions about delaying vital care, or sacrificing other basic necessities – such as transport costs or food – in order to pay for health insurance so that they can get the treatment they need.
Quana Madison, a disabled artist in Denver, Colorado, has struggled with high medical costs for several years while fighting breast cancer that included requiring a double mastectomy, several other illnesses, chronic pain issues, and complications from surgeries.
She filed for bankruptcy due to debt from medical bills in 2017, even as she had private health insurance at the time.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Madison has continued facing health issues and recently undergone breast reconstruction surgery and biopsies. Due to her reported income being too high one month to remain eligible for Medicaid coverage, she is currently trying to appeal against a decision to kick her off Medicaid coverage at the end of January 2021.
“My income as an artist fluctuates dramatically every month,” said Madison, who lost a significant amount of work and contracts due to the pandemic. “After January who knows if I will have insurance.”
Through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Madison wouldn’t be able to keep her doctors or medical specialists because they wouldn’t be covered by any of the plans, and on the private marketplace she can’t find any coverage due to pre-existing conditions, though no options are affordable with her income which fluctuates based on art sales and what commission based work she is able to obtain.
Out of pocket, her medical care every year would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s overwhelming worrying how I will afford paying for health insurance. I wonder, do I pay for health insurance or food this month?” added Madison.
Madison is far from alone.
A November 2020 survey conducted by the patient financial management company VisitPay found 35% of Americans would delay care for coronavirus out of fear for associated medical bills. Though the federal government is supposed to cover any coronavirus-related medical bills for the uninsured, many coronavirus patients and families of coronavirus victims have received medical bills anyways.
Claire Chadwick, who works for a big box retailer in the Kansas City, Missouri, area, was diagnosed with coronavirus in March 2020 and has since experienced long-term side-effects, such as fatigue and rapid heart rate while at rest.
Despite her Covid-related medical issues, Chadwick works as many hours as possible to try to pay off hundreds of dollars in medical bills she accrued from doctor visits and medications, even as she is covered under her employer’s health insurance program.
“I worry about reinfection and the stress of working during the pandemic is difficult to handle,” said Chadwick. “I am working my ass off so that I can pay down on these medical bills. A couple months ago, when I was really struggling, I couldn’t work as many hours and had a lot of medical bills that still needed to be paid, the electric company came to shut off my electricity,”
She was forced to sign up for a payment plan to avoid having her electricity shut off, which is rolled into her monthly utility bills, and if she is one day late with the payment plan, Chadwick will owe everything at once and have her utilities shut off until it’s paid in full.
Though the health insured rate in the US has yet to show any significant changes so far, according to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an estimated 2 to 3 million Americans lost their employer-based health insurance coverage between March and September.
Prolonged job losses are expected to increase the numbers of Americans to lose health insurance during the pandemic, leaving tens of millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured through the worst pandemic to hit the US in over 100 years.
Daniel Oxford of Las Vegas, Nevada, has been fighting colon cancer since he was first diagnosed in March 2018.
He recently lost his health insurance through Medicaid due to a clerical error he is working to resolve before his next doctor appointment in February 2021.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he temporarily lost his job in cosmetics, and has relied on support from friends and family to cover expenses for medical supplies, bills and food.
“I need these medical supplies to live. It isn’t fair that I have to choose between buying groceries or medical supplies,” said Oxford. “I plan on going back to work soon, I’m just trying to get as healthy as possible, but I’m nervous to go back with such a bad immune system. Working with people and coronavirus going around like crazy, especially in a tourist city like Las Vegas, I’m not excited.”
Amy Nicole Fisher, 38, of Des Moines, Iowa, is disabled and suffers from an autoimmune disease. During the pandemic, Fisher, who is at high risk for coronavirus, explained she has been the sickest she has ever been, and has often avoided going to the hospital or seeking medical care for fear of the costs and the risks of exposure to coronavirus.
“I would likely not survive Covid-19, but honestly part of me thinks if I did get it, I wouldn’t be such a financial and just burden in general on my family,” said Fisher. can’
Though she has Medicare and a health insurance supplement through her husband’s employer, Fisher and her family face thousands of dollars in co-pays and medical bills every year. In past years, they lost a condo and a rental home due to surmounting medical bills.
“We just add it to our credit cards because we live paycheck to paycheck,” Fisher added.
Why You Don’t Want To Live In A Republican-Run State
Red State Governors Still Flunk Coronavirus Testing
By Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research - DC REPORT
10/28/2020
As infection rates surge, Democrats still are outpacing Republicans in thwarting coronavirus spread according to my interpretation of data.
A few weeks back I noted in a post that states governed by Republicans had the highest positive COVID-19 test rates, while the states with the lowest positive rates mostly were governed by Democrats.
I argued that positive test rates are a good measure of how serious, or not, governors are in trying to bring the pandemic under control.
While leaders can take measures to limit the actual spread, such as longer and stronger lockdowns and mask requirements, many factors determining the spread are outside their control.
By contrast, they do have control over the amount of testing, although legislatures can play a role since they can appropriate or restrict funding.
Testing also has become a political issue since Donald Trump explicitly said that he wanted to see testing slowed to reduce the number of cases identified.
I thought it was worth an update to see what the story looks like as the country is experiencing a huge surge in infections.
Here’s the more recent picture showing the 10 states with the highest infection rates and the 10 states with the lowest rates, based on the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, seven-day moving averages. (Data are for Oct. 26, 2020.)
Eight of the 10 states with the highest rates have Republican governors. Kansas and Nevada, which come in eighth and ninth, both have Democratic governors.[1] While Democrats also control the legislature in Nevada, the legislature in Kansas is overwhelmingly Republican.
The story is more mixed among the states with the lowest positive rates, with five having Democratic governors and five having Republican governors. However, it is worth noting that all five of the states with Republican governors have legislatures that are controlled by Democrats.
In short, by this measure of efforts at getting the pandemic under control, Democrats seem far more serious than Republicans.
A few weeks back I noted in a post that states governed by Republicans had the highest positive COVID-19 test rates, while the states with the lowest positive rates mostly were governed by Democrats.
I argued that positive test rates are a good measure of how serious, or not, governors are in trying to bring the pandemic under control.
While leaders can take measures to limit the actual spread, such as longer and stronger lockdowns and mask requirements, many factors determining the spread are outside their control.
By contrast, they do have control over the amount of testing, although legislatures can play a role since they can appropriate or restrict funding.
Testing also has become a political issue since Donald Trump explicitly said that he wanted to see testing slowed to reduce the number of cases identified.
I thought it was worth an update to see what the story looks like as the country is experiencing a huge surge in infections.
Here’s the more recent picture showing the 10 states with the highest infection rates and the 10 states with the lowest rates, based on the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, seven-day moving averages. (Data are for Oct. 26, 2020.)
Eight of the 10 states with the highest rates have Republican governors. Kansas and Nevada, which come in eighth and ninth, both have Democratic governors.[1] While Democrats also control the legislature in Nevada, the legislature in Kansas is overwhelmingly Republican.
The story is more mixed among the states with the lowest positive rates, with five having Democratic governors and five having Republican governors. However, it is worth noting that all five of the states with Republican governors have legislatures that are controlled by Democrats.
In short, by this measure of efforts at getting the pandemic under control, Democrats seem far more serious than Republicans.
Gun suicide is overwhelming US rural districts in west and south, report says
In 11 congressional districts more than 100 residents each year use guns to end their lives – roughly double the national average
Alexandra Villarreal - the guardian
Tue 6 Oct 2020 06.00 EDT
Almost 23,000 people die annually by gun suicide in the United States, tragedies that are overwhelming some rural congressional districts clustered in the nation’s west and south, according to new research from the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund.
A dearth of mental health resources, shifting economic realities and widespread gun ownership factor in the devastating and disproportionate local death tolls around the country.
“Nationally, nearly half of suicides involve a firearm. But this congressional district research shows that the national average masks enormous differences between districts,” the Everytown report explains.
Meanwhile, experts fear as many as 7,000 additional lives could be lost to gun suicide during 2020 alone as Americans eye new firearm purchases amid a deeply felt economic recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s a toxic combination,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, director of research at the Everytown Support Fund.
For months, more than a third of American adults have experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression, and phones at crisis helplines have been ringing off the hook with callers worried about their mental health, including suicidal ideation.
But long before the first Covid-19 infection, a nationwide gun crisis still ravaged Americans: the firearm suicide rate has climbed a staggering 19% in recent years.
By showing constituents how their own neighbors are affected, Everytown’s breakdown of data from all 435 congressional districts plus Washington DC “brings home those observations that at the national level may not feel compelling”, said Deborah Azrael, director of research for the Harvard injury control research center at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
For residents and policymakers in the 20 hardest-hit districts, all in the southern and western US, the analysis represents a rude awakening around chronically bad firearm suicide rates. In 11 districts across Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and Tennessee, more than 100 residents each year use guns to end their lives – roughly double the national average.
By contrast, 17 congressional districts in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and DC experience 10 or fewer firearm suicides annually. All three states and the US capital have enacted “red flag laws”, a way for family members, law enforcement or other interested parties to petition a court for someone’s firearms to be temporarily confiscated if they present a danger to themselves or others.
Most states in the north-east have much lower gun ownership rates than elsewhere in the country and boast “strong laws” around firearm acquisition, Burd-Sharps said. But even in regions where guns prove more popular, families who store their firearms safely experience lower firearm suicide rates.
“It’s both less access to guns in crisis and very rigorous attention to gun storage practices that disrupt access to people in crisis,” she said. “Policies do matter, and one reason to do things by congressional district is to hold the elected official … accountable [for] supporting these policies.”
Almost half of white men and 46% of adults in rural areas own guns, the Pew Research Center reports, demographics that largely overlap with the people most vulnerable to firearm suicide. Although women are more likely to try to kill themselves generally, men and boys comprise 86% of all gun suicides.
Native American and Alaska Native communities are also particularly susceptible, a trend Burd-Sharps attributed to the challenges of rurality, a lack of culturally competent care, and intergenerational trauma from historically high rates of suicide.
So-called deaths of despair – fatalities from suicide, opioids or alcoholism – have plagued working-class Americans for decades as their economic prospects plunge amid a radically evolving employment landscape, even absent the virus-prompted economic downturn. Men also struggle with the social stigma and logistical hurdles to seeking emotional or mental help, especially in rural America.
During the pandemic, surging gun sales between March and August pumped an estimated 11.8m more firearms into the US’s arsenal, which was already bloated with approximately 393m civilian-held guns.
“What we know is that where there are more guns, more people die by suicide. And the reason more people die by suicide is that more people die by firearm suicide,” Azrael said.
About 90% of suicide attempts using guns prove lethal, compared with 4% where firearms are not involved. In households with access to a gun, everyone incurs triple the risk of death by suicide, according to Everytown.
“One of the most effective things you can do to help people in crisis,” Burd-Sharps said, “is to keep a gun out of their hand.”
A dearth of mental health resources, shifting economic realities and widespread gun ownership factor in the devastating and disproportionate local death tolls around the country.
“Nationally, nearly half of suicides involve a firearm. But this congressional district research shows that the national average masks enormous differences between districts,” the Everytown report explains.
Meanwhile, experts fear as many as 7,000 additional lives could be lost to gun suicide during 2020 alone as Americans eye new firearm purchases amid a deeply felt economic recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s a toxic combination,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, director of research at the Everytown Support Fund.
For months, more than a third of American adults have experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression, and phones at crisis helplines have been ringing off the hook with callers worried about their mental health, including suicidal ideation.
But long before the first Covid-19 infection, a nationwide gun crisis still ravaged Americans: the firearm suicide rate has climbed a staggering 19% in recent years.
By showing constituents how their own neighbors are affected, Everytown’s breakdown of data from all 435 congressional districts plus Washington DC “brings home those observations that at the national level may not feel compelling”, said Deborah Azrael, director of research for the Harvard injury control research center at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
For residents and policymakers in the 20 hardest-hit districts, all in the southern and western US, the analysis represents a rude awakening around chronically bad firearm suicide rates. In 11 districts across Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and Tennessee, more than 100 residents each year use guns to end their lives – roughly double the national average.
By contrast, 17 congressional districts in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and DC experience 10 or fewer firearm suicides annually. All three states and the US capital have enacted “red flag laws”, a way for family members, law enforcement or other interested parties to petition a court for someone’s firearms to be temporarily confiscated if they present a danger to themselves or others.
Most states in the north-east have much lower gun ownership rates than elsewhere in the country and boast “strong laws” around firearm acquisition, Burd-Sharps said. But even in regions where guns prove more popular, families who store their firearms safely experience lower firearm suicide rates.
“It’s both less access to guns in crisis and very rigorous attention to gun storage practices that disrupt access to people in crisis,” she said. “Policies do matter, and one reason to do things by congressional district is to hold the elected official … accountable [for] supporting these policies.”
Almost half of white men and 46% of adults in rural areas own guns, the Pew Research Center reports, demographics that largely overlap with the people most vulnerable to firearm suicide. Although women are more likely to try to kill themselves generally, men and boys comprise 86% of all gun suicides.
Native American and Alaska Native communities are also particularly susceptible, a trend Burd-Sharps attributed to the challenges of rurality, a lack of culturally competent care, and intergenerational trauma from historically high rates of suicide.
So-called deaths of despair – fatalities from suicide, opioids or alcoholism – have plagued working-class Americans for decades as their economic prospects plunge amid a radically evolving employment landscape, even absent the virus-prompted economic downturn. Men also struggle with the social stigma and logistical hurdles to seeking emotional or mental help, especially in rural America.
During the pandemic, surging gun sales between March and August pumped an estimated 11.8m more firearms into the US’s arsenal, which was already bloated with approximately 393m civilian-held guns.
“What we know is that where there are more guns, more people die by suicide. And the reason more people die by suicide is that more people die by firearm suicide,” Azrael said.
About 90% of suicide attempts using guns prove lethal, compared with 4% where firearms are not involved. In households with access to a gun, everyone incurs triple the risk of death by suicide, according to Everytown.
“One of the most effective things you can do to help people in crisis,” Burd-Sharps said, “is to keep a gun out of their hand.”
MAKING YOU PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!!!
HUNGER IN AMERICA, ESPECIALLY FOR CHILDREN, HAS “SKYROCKETED” DURING COVID-19, DATA SHOWS
The number of children who do not have enough to eat has soared in the pandemic, according to the Census Bureau and Agriculture Department.
Jon Schwarz - THE INTERCEPT
September 23 2020
THE LEVEL OF hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year, according to an analysis of new data from the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. Even more alarming, the proportion of American children who sometimes do not have enough to eat is now as much as 14 times higher than it was last year.
The Agriculture Department conducts yearly studies on food insecurity in the U.S., with its report on 2019 released this month. The Census Bureau began frequent household surveys in April in response to Covid-19 that include questions about hunger.
The analysis, by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that 3.7 percent of U.S. households reported they sometimes or often had “not enough to eat” during 2019. Meanwhile, the most recent Census data from the end of August of this year showed that 10 percent of households said they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat within the past seven days. Levels of food insecurity in Black and Latino households are significantly higher, at 19 percent and 17 percent, respectively, compared to 7 percent in white households.
Even worse, while about 1 percent of adults with children said their children sometimes or often went hungry in 2019, between 9 and 14 percent of such adults said the same about their kids in August 2020. CBPP estimates that this adds up to about 5 million school-aged children in such households.
“What I see every day from the pandemic is amazingly-increased numbers of severely underweight children coming to our clinic, and parents really panicked about how they’re going to find enough food,” says Dr. Megan Sandel, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.
According to CBPP, the USDA and Census numbers are not an exact apples-to-apples comparison due to some differences in how the surveys are conducted. But it’s clear, states CBPP’s Brynne Keith-Jennings, that the number of Americans “struggling to put food on the table has skyrocketed compared to before Covid-19.”
The increase in hunger among children is particularly disturbing, for several reasons. Generally, explains Dottie Rosenbaum, another CBPP expert, “parents shield their children.” Sandel says that “parents are reporting to me sometimes at mealtime going back into the kitchen so the kids don’t notice that they are not eating themselves.” So when children are going hungry, there is little food for anyone.
The numbers represent a failure of the federal government’s food programs. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — i.e., food stamps — is available to Americans of all ages. But the smaller Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — better known as WIC — and the National School Lunch Program are largely aimed specifically at preventing child hunger. Congress also created a temporary program called Pandemic-EBT in March to replace school lunches for children learning from home.
Unsurprisingly, going without regular food creates significant health problems for children. Studies have found that children in food insecure households suffer increased rates of anemia, asthma, long-term neurological damage, and many other ailments. “When you think about what the first few years of life are like,” Sandel points out, “that’s when you’re growing the brain you need for the rest of your life. This pandemic is really going to affect a generation of kids.” It is also a basic fact of school that hungry children cannot concentrate, and inevitably will fall behind their classmates.
The new government data matches anecdotal evidence from across the U.S. “Over my career I have met many desperately poor people,” says Sherrie Tussler, who’s run Hunger Task Force, a Milwaukee-area food bank, for 23 years. “But I have never seen any circumstances as bizarre and complicated as we’re seeing right now.” From large cities to modest towns, private food banks report being overwhelmed. Thousands line up in their cars in Texas to get food. There has been a 600 percent increase in demand at a South Florida food bank. In New York City, the number of people being served by one emergency food pantry went from 3,715 in February to over 18,000.
REMARKABLY, THIS INCREASE in hunger has nothing to do with any actual shortage of food. It is purely the result of political decisions.
According to the Agriculture Department, in recent years 31 percent of the U.S. food supply at the retail and consumer level has been thrown away in one way or another. This translates to 133 billion pounds of food with a value of $161 billion. This is almost twice as much as the federal government spends on all its food programs combined.
Even the Covid-19 shutdowns have not created any meaningful shortages in U.S. food availability. Food prices overall have increased 4.1 percent over the past year. But this modest uptick took place largely in the first months of the pandemic. Prices only went up by 0.1 percent in August, and actually fell in July.
Moreover, it’s a problem that does not have to be solved from scratch. It simply requires Congress to greatly expand or simply maintain the programs that already exist.
SNAP, unlike many aspects of the U.S. government, has not been hollowed out and functions well. Millions of people were added to the program after the pandemic began, with few hiccups: The technology worked, and they quickly got food stamps. The issue with SNAP is simply that the benefits are too skimpy; the average SNAP recipient gets about $125 worth of food stamps per month. The HEROES Act, passed by the Democrats in the House of Representatives in May, raised the maximum benefit by 15 percent, as well as making other beneficial changes to the program’s rules. But the GOP-controlled Senate and President Donald Trump have shown little interest in anything along these lines.
The Pandemic-EBT has also been a success, getting money to families to enable them to buy meals that children would otherwise have gotten at school. However, it is set to expire at the end of this month. As with a SNAP extension, there is not much appetite among Republicans to take action.
Finally, the government could restart the extra $600 per week in unemployment benefits that lasted until the end of July. Trump’s end run around Congress to provide $300 extra in unemployment has been slow to ramp up, is not available in some states, and will run out of money soon, in any case.
So as of now, hunger in America will continue to be a quiet but extremely dire emergency. “If Congress could see what I see every day, and talk to the families that I talk to, they would take immediate action,” says Kessler from Milwaukee.
But they don’t, and they won’t.
The Agriculture Department conducts yearly studies on food insecurity in the U.S., with its report on 2019 released this month. The Census Bureau began frequent household surveys in April in response to Covid-19 that include questions about hunger.
The analysis, by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that 3.7 percent of U.S. households reported they sometimes or often had “not enough to eat” during 2019. Meanwhile, the most recent Census data from the end of August of this year showed that 10 percent of households said they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat within the past seven days. Levels of food insecurity in Black and Latino households are significantly higher, at 19 percent and 17 percent, respectively, compared to 7 percent in white households.
Even worse, while about 1 percent of adults with children said their children sometimes or often went hungry in 2019, between 9 and 14 percent of such adults said the same about their kids in August 2020. CBPP estimates that this adds up to about 5 million school-aged children in such households.
“What I see every day from the pandemic is amazingly-increased numbers of severely underweight children coming to our clinic, and parents really panicked about how they’re going to find enough food,” says Dr. Megan Sandel, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.
According to CBPP, the USDA and Census numbers are not an exact apples-to-apples comparison due to some differences in how the surveys are conducted. But it’s clear, states CBPP’s Brynne Keith-Jennings, that the number of Americans “struggling to put food on the table has skyrocketed compared to before Covid-19.”
The increase in hunger among children is particularly disturbing, for several reasons. Generally, explains Dottie Rosenbaum, another CBPP expert, “parents shield their children.” Sandel says that “parents are reporting to me sometimes at mealtime going back into the kitchen so the kids don’t notice that they are not eating themselves.” So when children are going hungry, there is little food for anyone.
The numbers represent a failure of the federal government’s food programs. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — i.e., food stamps — is available to Americans of all ages. But the smaller Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — better known as WIC — and the National School Lunch Program are largely aimed specifically at preventing child hunger. Congress also created a temporary program called Pandemic-EBT in March to replace school lunches for children learning from home.
Unsurprisingly, going without regular food creates significant health problems for children. Studies have found that children in food insecure households suffer increased rates of anemia, asthma, long-term neurological damage, and many other ailments. “When you think about what the first few years of life are like,” Sandel points out, “that’s when you’re growing the brain you need for the rest of your life. This pandemic is really going to affect a generation of kids.” It is also a basic fact of school that hungry children cannot concentrate, and inevitably will fall behind their classmates.
The new government data matches anecdotal evidence from across the U.S. “Over my career I have met many desperately poor people,” says Sherrie Tussler, who’s run Hunger Task Force, a Milwaukee-area food bank, for 23 years. “But I have never seen any circumstances as bizarre and complicated as we’re seeing right now.” From large cities to modest towns, private food banks report being overwhelmed. Thousands line up in their cars in Texas to get food. There has been a 600 percent increase in demand at a South Florida food bank. In New York City, the number of people being served by one emergency food pantry went from 3,715 in February to over 18,000.
REMARKABLY, THIS INCREASE in hunger has nothing to do with any actual shortage of food. It is purely the result of political decisions.
According to the Agriculture Department, in recent years 31 percent of the U.S. food supply at the retail and consumer level has been thrown away in one way or another. This translates to 133 billion pounds of food with a value of $161 billion. This is almost twice as much as the federal government spends on all its food programs combined.
Even the Covid-19 shutdowns have not created any meaningful shortages in U.S. food availability. Food prices overall have increased 4.1 percent over the past year. But this modest uptick took place largely in the first months of the pandemic. Prices only went up by 0.1 percent in August, and actually fell in July.
Moreover, it’s a problem that does not have to be solved from scratch. It simply requires Congress to greatly expand or simply maintain the programs that already exist.
SNAP, unlike many aspects of the U.S. government, has not been hollowed out and functions well. Millions of people were added to the program after the pandemic began, with few hiccups: The technology worked, and they quickly got food stamps. The issue with SNAP is simply that the benefits are too skimpy; the average SNAP recipient gets about $125 worth of food stamps per month. The HEROES Act, passed by the Democrats in the House of Representatives in May, raised the maximum benefit by 15 percent, as well as making other beneficial changes to the program’s rules. But the GOP-controlled Senate and President Donald Trump have shown little interest in anything along these lines.
The Pandemic-EBT has also been a success, getting money to families to enable them to buy meals that children would otherwise have gotten at school. However, it is set to expire at the end of this month. As with a SNAP extension, there is not much appetite among Republicans to take action.
Finally, the government could restart the extra $600 per week in unemployment benefits that lasted until the end of July. Trump’s end run around Congress to provide $300 extra in unemployment has been slow to ramp up, is not available in some states, and will run out of money soon, in any case.
So as of now, hunger in America will continue to be a quiet but extremely dire emergency. “If Congress could see what I see every day, and talk to the families that I talk to, they would take immediate action,” says Kessler from Milwaukee.
But they don’t, and they won’t.
a nation of idiots!!!
Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust
According to survey of adults 18-39, 23% said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure
Harriet Sherwood
the guardian
Wed 16 Sep 2020 00.01 EDT
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.
“The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) which commissioned the survey.
Taylor added: “We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”
The survey, the first to drill down to state level in the US, ranks states according to a score based on three criteria: whether young people have definitely heard about the Holocaust; whether they can name one concentration camp, death camp or ghetto; and whether they know 6 million Jews were killed.
The top-scoring state was Wisconsin, where 42% of millennial and Gen Z adults met all three criteria, followed by Minnesota at 37% and Massachusetts at 35%. The lowest-scoring states were Florida at 20%, Mississippi at 18% and Arkansas at 17%.
Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.
Eleven per cent of respondents across the US believed that Jews had caused the Holocaust, with the proportion in New York state at 19%, followed by 16% in Louisiana, Tennessee and Montana, and 15% in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico.
Nationally, 44% of those questioned were able to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 3% were familiar with Bergen-Belsen. Six out of 10 respondents in Texas could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
However, almost two-thirds (64%) of American millennial and Gen Z adults believe Holocaust education should be compulsory in schools. Seven out of 10 said it was not acceptable for an individual to hold neo-Nazi views.
The Claims Conference, whose mission is “to provide a measure of justice for Jewish Holocaust victims”, set up a taskforce to oversee the survey. It included Holocaust survivors, historians and experts from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Data was collected from 1,000 interviews nationwide and 200 interviews in each state with young adults aged 18 to 39 selected at random.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.
“The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) which commissioned the survey.
Taylor added: “We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”
The survey, the first to drill down to state level in the US, ranks states according to a score based on three criteria: whether young people have definitely heard about the Holocaust; whether they can name one concentration camp, death camp or ghetto; and whether they know 6 million Jews were killed.
The top-scoring state was Wisconsin, where 42% of millennial and Gen Z adults met all three criteria, followed by Minnesota at 37% and Massachusetts at 35%. The lowest-scoring states were Florida at 20%, Mississippi at 18% and Arkansas at 17%.
Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.
Eleven per cent of respondents across the US believed that Jews had caused the Holocaust, with the proportion in New York state at 19%, followed by 16% in Louisiana, Tennessee and Montana, and 15% in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico.
Nationally, 44% of those questioned were able to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 3% were familiar with Bergen-Belsen. Six out of 10 respondents in Texas could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
However, almost two-thirds (64%) of American millennial and Gen Z adults believe Holocaust education should be compulsory in schools. Seven out of 10 said it was not acceptable for an individual to hold neo-Nazi views.
The Claims Conference, whose mission is “to provide a measure of justice for Jewish Holocaust victims”, set up a taskforce to oversee the survey. It included Holocaust survivors, historians and experts from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Data was collected from 1,000 interviews nationwide and 200 interviews in each state with young adults aged 18 to 39 selected at random.
Harvard study: Institutional racism 'permeates' Massachusetts justice system
By Ray Sanchez, CNN
9/13/2020
Blacks and Latinos sent to prison in Massachusetts receive longer sentences than their White counterparts sentenced for similar crimes, says a new report by Harvard Law School researchers.
They're also more likely than White people to get arrested and convicted on drug and weapons charges.
"People of color are overrepresented across all stages of the criminal system relative to their share of population in the state," Felix Owusu, a research fellow at the university's Criminal Justice Policy Program and an author of the report, told The Harvard Gazette on Thursday.
The release of "Racial Disparities in the Massachusetts Criminal Justice System" coincides with America's racial reckoning stemming from the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans. So the findings shouldn't be surprising.
"The report speaks to the need to consider policies outside of the courts entirely, such as how we structure our communities, economically, socially, how we police our communities, and what kinds of activities to criminalize at all," Owusu told the university's news website.
The 100-page report highlights a yearlong analysis of more than one million cases.
A Massachusetts Sentencing Commission review of 2014 data found the state locked up Black people at a rate nearly 8 times that of White people and Latinos at 4.9 times that of White counterparts. The researchers said they took on the task after Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts asked for a deeper look at the disparities.
"The report reveals how institutional racism permeates the whole criminal justice system and ends up playing a big role in the racial disparities in incarceration rates in the state," Brook Hopkins, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, told the website. "It's not just disparate treatment by police, prosecutors, or judges once somebody is in the system. There is also a legislative piece."
Here are some the key findings:
Hopkins told the university news website a big surprise was the difficulty in gathering data from numerous state agencies.
"For instance, we were unable to get data from prosecutors' offices or obtain sufficient data from police and law enforcement," she said.
"Nor could we get final conviction offenses for most of the people in our data set or get data about judges or prosecutors. We got data about probation, but ... it didn't link up to a sufficient number of trial court cases... It took a lot of work ... and this is information that we should be able to know, as citizens of Massachusetts, that we just can't know because there is no data."
They're also more likely than White people to get arrested and convicted on drug and weapons charges.
"People of color are overrepresented across all stages of the criminal system relative to their share of population in the state," Felix Owusu, a research fellow at the university's Criminal Justice Policy Program and an author of the report, told The Harvard Gazette on Thursday.
The release of "Racial Disparities in the Massachusetts Criminal Justice System" coincides with America's racial reckoning stemming from the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans. So the findings shouldn't be surprising.
"The report speaks to the need to consider policies outside of the courts entirely, such as how we structure our communities, economically, socially, how we police our communities, and what kinds of activities to criminalize at all," Owusu told the university's news website.
The 100-page report highlights a yearlong analysis of more than one million cases.
A Massachusetts Sentencing Commission review of 2014 data found the state locked up Black people at a rate nearly 8 times that of White people and Latinos at 4.9 times that of White counterparts. The researchers said they took on the task after Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts asked for a deeper look at the disparities.
"The report reveals how institutional racism permeates the whole criminal justice system and ends up playing a big role in the racial disparities in incarceration rates in the state," Brook Hopkins, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, told the website. "It's not just disparate treatment by police, prosecutors, or judges once somebody is in the system. There is also a legislative piece."
Here are some the key findings:
- "White people make up roughly 74% of the Massachusetts population while accounting for 58.7% of cases in our data. Meanwhile, Black people make up just 6.5% of the Massachusetts population and account for 17.1% of cases. Latinx people are similarly overrepresented, making up 8.7% of the Massachusetts population but 18.3% of the cases in the sample."
- A report on the Boston Police Department from 2007 to 2010 found that Black people -- who represent 24% of the city's population -- accounted for 63% of people interrogated, stopped, frisked or searched. Latinos make up 12% of the population but were subjected to 18% of those encounters. "The disparity in searches was more consistent with racial bias than with differences in criminal conduct," the Harvard researchers wrote.
- Black people received sentences an average of 168 days longer and Latinos an average of 148 days longer than their White counterparts.
- Black and Latino people received more serious initial charges than White defendants, negating possible plea deals and exposing them to longer sentences.
- "The penalty in incarceration length is largest for drug and weapons charges, offenses that carry longstanding racialized stigmas. We believe that this evidence is consistent with racially disparate initial charging practices leading to weaker initial positions in the plea bargaining process for Black defendants, which then translate into longer incarceration sentences for similar offenses."
- "Black and Latinx people are more likely to have their cases resolved in Superior Court where the available sentences are longer, both because they are more likely to receive charges for which the Superior Court exercises exclusive jurisdiction and because prosecutors are more likely to exercise their discretion to bring their cases in Superior Court instead of District Court..."
Hopkins told the university news website a big surprise was the difficulty in gathering data from numerous state agencies.
"For instance, we were unable to get data from prosecutors' offices or obtain sufficient data from police and law enforcement," she said.
"Nor could we get final conviction offenses for most of the people in our data set or get data about judges or prosecutors. We got data about probation, but ... it didn't link up to a sufficient number of trial court cases... It took a lot of work ... and this is information that we should be able to know, as citizens of Massachusetts, that we just can't know because there is no data."
This. One would almost think it intentional....
DHS: White supremacy top threat to U.S.
"They’re extremely sophisticated": DHS confirms white supremacists remain the biggest threat to U.S.
A new draft report from the US Department of Homeland Security warns that white supremacists are a "lethal" threat
ALEX HENDERSON - salon
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020 8:37AM (UTC)
A new draft report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that white supremacists are the "most persistent and lethal" threat in the United States, according to a new CNN report by Geneva Sands.
It stands in sharp contrast to the notion of terroristic threats typically portrayed by conservatives, which focuses on the threat from Muslim attackers from other countries and, more recently "Antifa" and leftist groups. The DHS report warns that although foreign terrorist groups will continue to call for attacks on the U.S., those groups "probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year." But it predicts that the U.S. will face an "elevated threat environment at least through" early 2021 because of white supremacists.
Sands notes that DHS has had three different drafts of that report. According to Sands, the language in the drafts varies. But all three versions cite white supremacists as the greatest terrorist threat in the U.S.
Journalist Abigail Tracy, in Vanity Fair, reports that some former DHS officials believe that Trump is seriously downplaying the threat that white supremacists and far-right militia groups pose — or is even encouraging them. One former DHS official who is especially critical of Trump is John Cohen, former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the agency.
Trump has praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old militia member who is accused of shooting three people — two of them fatally — at an anti-racism protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And according to Cohen, praising Rittenhouse is the last thing Trump should be doing.
"He is literally throwing gasoline on a fully raging fire," Cohen told Vanity Fair. "You're going to see potentially armed extremists from the other side of the political spectrum travel to those same cities to protect the protesters. Then you run the very real risk of a full-blown firefight breaking out between these different armed camps. Rittenhouse is a classic illustration of the concern."
Miles Taylor, another former DHS official, also believes that Trump's administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups. Taylor told Vanity Fair, "There was a mindset in this administration from Day One that the threat wasn't real — a deliberate burying of the head in the sand. I didn't ever see that change within the White House, even as attacks started to happen."
The Trump White House, Tracy notes, has been uncomfortable with the term "domestic terrorism" — and Taylor blames Trump.
"I'd say most of this lays at the president's feet because ultimately, people are following the tone that he sets and the vision that he lays out," Taylor told Vanity Fair. "In this case, it's very clear to someone who would serve the president that he would hold views sympathetic to conspiracy-theory-wielding, semi-violent groups because they tend to like him…. People knew that talking about these issues too much was going to get them in trouble. And so, it had a chilling effect on the subject, whether or not the president directly ordered them to stand down."
Elizabeth Neumann, a conservative Republican who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at DHS and is now supporting Democratic nominee Joe Biden in this year's presidential race, has stressed that the greatest threat of violence in the U.S. isn't coming from Antifa — as Trump claims — but from far-right groups like the Boogaloo movement and QAnon. Neumann told Vanity Fair that Trump is "more than willing to talk about domestic terrorism in the context of Antifa. He clearly has a hard time admitting when he's made a mistake."
Neumann told Vanity Fair: "What we're seeing now is more coordination among the white supremacist groups. They're extremely sophisticated…. an enemy that is sophisticated enough to know how to operate without getting themselves caught. We might be aware of them, but we can't do anything about their activities. The bigger concern is when some of these folks get together and they decide: this is it, this is the time to start that civil war, that race war — and they plan something big."
It stands in sharp contrast to the notion of terroristic threats typically portrayed by conservatives, which focuses on the threat from Muslim attackers from other countries and, more recently "Antifa" and leftist groups. The DHS report warns that although foreign terrorist groups will continue to call for attacks on the U.S., those groups "probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year." But it predicts that the U.S. will face an "elevated threat environment at least through" early 2021 because of white supremacists.
Sands notes that DHS has had three different drafts of that report. According to Sands, the language in the drafts varies. But all three versions cite white supremacists as the greatest terrorist threat in the U.S.
Journalist Abigail Tracy, in Vanity Fair, reports that some former DHS officials believe that Trump is seriously downplaying the threat that white supremacists and far-right militia groups pose — or is even encouraging them. One former DHS official who is especially critical of Trump is John Cohen, former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the agency.
Trump has praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old militia member who is accused of shooting three people — two of them fatally — at an anti-racism protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And according to Cohen, praising Rittenhouse is the last thing Trump should be doing.
"He is literally throwing gasoline on a fully raging fire," Cohen told Vanity Fair. "You're going to see potentially armed extremists from the other side of the political spectrum travel to those same cities to protect the protesters. Then you run the very real risk of a full-blown firefight breaking out between these different armed camps. Rittenhouse is a classic illustration of the concern."
Miles Taylor, another former DHS official, also believes that Trump's administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups. Taylor told Vanity Fair, "There was a mindset in this administration from Day One that the threat wasn't real — a deliberate burying of the head in the sand. I didn't ever see that change within the White House, even as attacks started to happen."
The Trump White House, Tracy notes, has been uncomfortable with the term "domestic terrorism" — and Taylor blames Trump.
"I'd say most of this lays at the president's feet because ultimately, people are following the tone that he sets and the vision that he lays out," Taylor told Vanity Fair. "In this case, it's very clear to someone who would serve the president that he would hold views sympathetic to conspiracy-theory-wielding, semi-violent groups because they tend to like him…. People knew that talking about these issues too much was going to get them in trouble. And so, it had a chilling effect on the subject, whether or not the president directly ordered them to stand down."
Elizabeth Neumann, a conservative Republican who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at DHS and is now supporting Democratic nominee Joe Biden in this year's presidential race, has stressed that the greatest threat of violence in the U.S. isn't coming from Antifa — as Trump claims — but from far-right groups like the Boogaloo movement and QAnon. Neumann told Vanity Fair that Trump is "more than willing to talk about domestic terrorism in the context of Antifa. He clearly has a hard time admitting when he's made a mistake."
Neumann told Vanity Fair: "What we're seeing now is more coordination among the white supremacist groups. They're extremely sophisticated…. an enemy that is sophisticated enough to know how to operate without getting themselves caught. We might be aware of them, but we can't do anything about their activities. The bigger concern is when some of these folks get together and they decide: this is it, this is the time to start that civil war, that race war — and they plan something big."
living near racists!!!
Family’s welcome to new neighborhood turns cold when neighbors find out they’re biracial
August 31, 2020
By Sky Palma - raw story
When Maureen Roland’s family moved from California into their new neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, they got a cold reception from neighbors when they found out that Maureen’s husband is Black and they have biracial children, according to a report from The Kansas City Star.
Maureen said she’s experience racism before, but not to this degree. “I have not experienced it this much. I have not experienced it this vocally,” she said.
Her husband, Jamari Roland, is an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and works for the State Department — bonafides that she thought would have earned respect from all of the police officers and firefighters who live in the area.
“It’s been a unique situation for me,” Jamari said. “I went to school in Hollywood. Growing up in a diverse community, I’ve had people call me slurs. I’ve had teachers ask my friends why they were hanging out with me. But we got here, and it’s so out in the open. I don’t know if it’s a sign of the times, but to openly go up to someone or make sure they get your attention and acknowledge that they don’t agree with your family?”
“Although they don’t know what the words mean, the expressions and body language are very clear: ‘What are you guys doing here?'” he added.
Read the Rolands’ full story over at The Kansas City Star.
Maureen said she’s experience racism before, but not to this degree. “I have not experienced it this much. I have not experienced it this vocally,” she said.
Her husband, Jamari Roland, is an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and works for the State Department — bonafides that she thought would have earned respect from all of the police officers and firefighters who live in the area.
“It’s been a unique situation for me,” Jamari said. “I went to school in Hollywood. Growing up in a diverse community, I’ve had people call me slurs. I’ve had teachers ask my friends why they were hanging out with me. But we got here, and it’s so out in the open. I don’t know if it’s a sign of the times, but to openly go up to someone or make sure they get your attention and acknowledge that they don’t agree with your family?”
“Although they don’t know what the words mean, the expressions and body language are very clear: ‘What are you guys doing here?'” he added.
Read the Rolands’ full story over at The Kansas City Star.
People Who Live in Red States Die Younger. Conservative Policies Are to Blame.
BY Peter Montague, Truthout
PUBLISHEd August 27, 2020
People in red states don’t live as long as people in blue states, often by a wide margin.
Now, a major new study demonstrates that differences in life expectancy correlate closely with many state policies: Most red states have adopted more policies that correlate strongly with lives cut short, while most blue states have adopted opposite policies.
The new study, conducted by well-known Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez and seven colleagues, notes: “State policies affect nearly every aspect of people’s lives, including economic well-being, social relationships, education, housing, lifestyles, and access to medical care.” Life expectancy is like a social mirror that reflects the overall health of a population. Longevity captures, in a single number, overall social, economic, physical and mental well-being.
In 2017, life expectancy (at birth) in West Virginia was 74.6 years, but in Hawaii, it was 81.6 years — a full 7-year difference. If West Virginia were a nation, it would rank #93 in the world for life expectancy, below Morocco, Tunisia and Honduras — all nations with many fewer resources than the United States. If Hawaii were a nation, it would rank #23 in the world, with life expectancy within 0.7 years of countries with the highest longevity such as Canada, Iceland and Sweden.
Health scientists have known for more than two decades that differences in medical care explain only 10 to 15 percent of the gap in overall health between two populations, and the other 85 to 90 percent can be explained by “the social determinants of health,” including employment, income, education, social insurance (health, unemployment and retirement), the environment (exposure to toxic chemicals, for example), civil rights (fair employment and housing practices, for example), racism, sexism, and other social circumstances. Individual behavior is important, too — how people cope with psychological distress, depression, loneliness and hopelessness sometimes created by social circumstances. All these social determinants of health are made better or worse by state policies. Extensive data indicate that elected officials in red states have chosen policies that worsen the circumstances and shorten the lives of their constituents, whereas blue-state officials have chosen the opposite.
The Montez study examined more than 120 state policies, clustered into 17 main groups or “policy domains.” The policy domains were labeled “liberal” or “conservative.” Liberal policies are those that expand state economic regulation (e.g., minimum-wage laws) or that protect marginalized groups (e.g., prohibit racial bias in housing), or that restrict states from criminalizing nonviolent behavior (e.g., legalizing marijuana). Conservative policies do the opposite.
The longevity gap between U.S. states has been growing steadily larger for several decades. In 1959, people in Connecticut and Oklahoma both had the same life expectancy: 71.1 years. However, by 2017, Connecticut’s life expectancy had grown to 80.1 years — putting it near the top in the U.S. — while Oklahoma had reached only 75.8 years, putting it near the bottom. As time passed, Connecticut’s social policies became increasingly liberal, while Oklahoma’s became increasingly conservative. Oklahomans today are paying a cruel price for Republican policies — a price measured in lives cut short by four years, unnecessarily.
The Montez study reveals that life expectancy in red and blue states began to diverge slowly in the 1970s but accelerated after 1980 when Ronald Reagan propelled the rise of the modern conservative movement. The year 2010 was another “watershed moment,” the study says, when Republicans swept into power in 21 states and aggressively eliminated liberal policies, noticeably shortening the lives of red-state residents.
In 2009, Democrats held complete control of 16 states (governorship, plus legislative dominance) while Republicans controlled only nine. In the 2010 elections, Republicans gained complete control in 21, Democrats in only 11.
---
Three radical-right organizations worked hand-in-glove to impose the death-dealing state policy changes after 2010: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). ALEC writes model state-level legislation; SPN, a network of over 60 state-level think tanks, supports legislation with a steady stream of research and media commentary; while AFP floods state legislatures and governors’ offices with mail, phone calls and emails threatening electoral retribution if they reject ALEC’s proposals. (Democrats and progressives are often simply outgunned, having never developed anything so comprehensive and coordinated. To understand ALEC better, see ALEC Exposed.)
All three radical-right organizations have been heavily funded by the billionaires who make up the Koch brothers’ “dark money” cadre, known as the Kochtopus. Years ago, the founding members of the Kochtopus hatched a plan to eliminate majority rule from the U.S. political system, and arguably they have succeeded. A Princeton University study of how our laws are enacted can be accurately summarized as, “Nobody cares what you think unless you’re rich.”
In addition to changing specific state policies, the Republican billionaire network has also promoted changes in the basic relationships between federal, state and local governments. In 1995, Republican strategist Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced, “We are going to rethink the entire structure of American society and the entire structure of American government…. This is a real revolution.”
He wasn’t kidding. In 1996, the federal government overturned 30 years of policy, giving states greater authority over programs like welfare and Medicaid, replacing entitlements with “block grants” that had far fewer strings attached. After this “devolution,” states were free to impose more conservative welfare policies, including punitive restrictions on welfare recipients, such as cutting off cash benefits after a certain period of time.
Meanwhile red states began to preempt local control from cities and towns, greatly curtailing local authority. Red states then outlawed local indoor-smoking bans, local minimum-wage statutes and local requirements for paid sick days, for example. Today, 25 states preempt locales from passing minimum-wage laws.
Since the early days of devolution and preemption, states have engineered vastly different health outcomes for their residents. In 1980, life expectancy in blue New York and red Mississippi differed by only 1.6 years. By 2014, the difference had grown to 5.5 years. In life expectancy, New York now resembles Denmark and Mississippi resembles Romania.
The state-level changes were reflected in national health statistics. According to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1980, the U.S. ranked #13 for longevity among 22 rich democracies. By the early 2000s, we ranked at the bottom at #22.
The Montez study reveals that, if all states adopted the policies of the most liberal U.S. states, U.S. men would live an average of 2.1 years longer, women would live 2.8 years longer, and average U.S. life expectancy would rise to the level of other high-income countries. It seems that the main thing standing in the way of better longevity from Maine to California and everywhere in between is the modern Republican Party.
Now, a major new study demonstrates that differences in life expectancy correlate closely with many state policies: Most red states have adopted more policies that correlate strongly with lives cut short, while most blue states have adopted opposite policies.
The new study, conducted by well-known Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez and seven colleagues, notes: “State policies affect nearly every aspect of people’s lives, including economic well-being, social relationships, education, housing, lifestyles, and access to medical care.” Life expectancy is like a social mirror that reflects the overall health of a population. Longevity captures, in a single number, overall social, economic, physical and mental well-being.
In 2017, life expectancy (at birth) in West Virginia was 74.6 years, but in Hawaii, it was 81.6 years — a full 7-year difference. If West Virginia were a nation, it would rank #93 in the world for life expectancy, below Morocco, Tunisia and Honduras — all nations with many fewer resources than the United States. If Hawaii were a nation, it would rank #23 in the world, with life expectancy within 0.7 years of countries with the highest longevity such as Canada, Iceland and Sweden.
Health scientists have known for more than two decades that differences in medical care explain only 10 to 15 percent of the gap in overall health between two populations, and the other 85 to 90 percent can be explained by “the social determinants of health,” including employment, income, education, social insurance (health, unemployment and retirement), the environment (exposure to toxic chemicals, for example), civil rights (fair employment and housing practices, for example), racism, sexism, and other social circumstances. Individual behavior is important, too — how people cope with psychological distress, depression, loneliness and hopelessness sometimes created by social circumstances. All these social determinants of health are made better or worse by state policies. Extensive data indicate that elected officials in red states have chosen policies that worsen the circumstances and shorten the lives of their constituents, whereas blue-state officials have chosen the opposite.
The Montez study examined more than 120 state policies, clustered into 17 main groups or “policy domains.” The policy domains were labeled “liberal” or “conservative.” Liberal policies are those that expand state economic regulation (e.g., minimum-wage laws) or that protect marginalized groups (e.g., prohibit racial bias in housing), or that restrict states from criminalizing nonviolent behavior (e.g., legalizing marijuana). Conservative policies do the opposite.
The longevity gap between U.S. states has been growing steadily larger for several decades. In 1959, people in Connecticut and Oklahoma both had the same life expectancy: 71.1 years. However, by 2017, Connecticut’s life expectancy had grown to 80.1 years — putting it near the top in the U.S. — while Oklahoma had reached only 75.8 years, putting it near the bottom. As time passed, Connecticut’s social policies became increasingly liberal, while Oklahoma’s became increasingly conservative. Oklahomans today are paying a cruel price for Republican policies — a price measured in lives cut short by four years, unnecessarily.
The Montez study reveals that life expectancy in red and blue states began to diverge slowly in the 1970s but accelerated after 1980 when Ronald Reagan propelled the rise of the modern conservative movement. The year 2010 was another “watershed moment,” the study says, when Republicans swept into power in 21 states and aggressively eliminated liberal policies, noticeably shortening the lives of red-state residents.
In 2009, Democrats held complete control of 16 states (governorship, plus legislative dominance) while Republicans controlled only nine. In the 2010 elections, Republicans gained complete control in 21, Democrats in only 11.
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Three radical-right organizations worked hand-in-glove to impose the death-dealing state policy changes after 2010: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). ALEC writes model state-level legislation; SPN, a network of over 60 state-level think tanks, supports legislation with a steady stream of research and media commentary; while AFP floods state legislatures and governors’ offices with mail, phone calls and emails threatening electoral retribution if they reject ALEC’s proposals. (Democrats and progressives are often simply outgunned, having never developed anything so comprehensive and coordinated. To understand ALEC better, see ALEC Exposed.)
All three radical-right organizations have been heavily funded by the billionaires who make up the Koch brothers’ “dark money” cadre, known as the Kochtopus. Years ago, the founding members of the Kochtopus hatched a plan to eliminate majority rule from the U.S. political system, and arguably they have succeeded. A Princeton University study of how our laws are enacted can be accurately summarized as, “Nobody cares what you think unless you’re rich.”
In addition to changing specific state policies, the Republican billionaire network has also promoted changes in the basic relationships between federal, state and local governments. In 1995, Republican strategist Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced, “We are going to rethink the entire structure of American society and the entire structure of American government…. This is a real revolution.”
He wasn’t kidding. In 1996, the federal government overturned 30 years of policy, giving states greater authority over programs like welfare and Medicaid, replacing entitlements with “block grants” that had far fewer strings attached. After this “devolution,” states were free to impose more conservative welfare policies, including punitive restrictions on welfare recipients, such as cutting off cash benefits after a certain period of time.
Meanwhile red states began to preempt local control from cities and towns, greatly curtailing local authority. Red states then outlawed local indoor-smoking bans, local minimum-wage statutes and local requirements for paid sick days, for example. Today, 25 states preempt locales from passing minimum-wage laws.
Since the early days of devolution and preemption, states have engineered vastly different health outcomes for their residents. In 1980, life expectancy in blue New York and red Mississippi differed by only 1.6 years. By 2014, the difference had grown to 5.5 years. In life expectancy, New York now resembles Denmark and Mississippi resembles Romania.
The state-level changes were reflected in national health statistics. According to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1980, the U.S. ranked #13 for longevity among 22 rich democracies. By the early 2000s, we ranked at the bottom at #22.
The Montez study reveals that, if all states adopted the policies of the most liberal U.S. states, U.S. men would live an average of 2.1 years longer, women would live 2.8 years longer, and average U.S. life expectancy would rise to the level of other high-income countries. It seems that the main thing standing in the way of better longevity from Maine to California and everywhere in between is the modern Republican Party.
illinois
A Sundown Town Sees Its First Black Lives Matter Protest
Most people I met in Anna, Illinois, wish the racist lore behind the city’s name would go away. Some say Anna’s first Black Lives Matter protest is a step toward real change. But what is next?
by Logan Jaffe - propublica
June 12, 4 a.m. CDT
The image on Facebook showed three raised fists — one white, one brown, one black — with the hashtag BLM overlaid in large letters. A date and place to meet was at the bottom: Thursday, June 4. The location: Anna, Illinois.
A Black Lives Matter protest. In Anna?
In November, I’d published a story about this small southern Illinois city’s reputation as a sundown town — a place where black people were not welcome after dark — and the legend about what Anna stands for: “Ain’t No N——— Allowed.” The article stirred up strong feelings in the town, where all public officials, police officers and nearly all teachers are white. While many current and former residents wrote to me to share their own stories about racism in the area, others decried the story as perpetuating the A-N-N-A reputation.
A Black Lives Matter protest in Anna. Who was behind it? How many people would join? What would the reaction be?
And what would this mean for A-N-N-A?
“I was terrified to do this. I’m not going to lie,” said Jessica Moore, 25, one of the organizers.
She added, “I’ve experienced racism in Anna my entire life.”
Moore, who is biracial, grew up in Ullin, a small town about 20 minutes south of Anna. Her earliest memory of being a victim of racism in Anna happened when she was 8, she told me. As she was leaving the Anna Walmart with her mother, who is white, Moore said she remembers a woman screaming at her after she accidentally pushed a shopping cart into her car, repeatedly calling Moore the N-word. When she got older and started going to bars and restaurants in Anna, she said people would call her the N-word, too.
Moore is one of a small group of young people in southern Illinois leading the region’s recent demonstrations against police brutality and in support of black lives, many in towns with histories like Anna’s. Most of the organizers did not know one another a month ago. And many, like Moore, are new to the cause.
After she took part in her first protest in Paducah, Kentucky, on May 31, Moore said leaders there encouraged her to organize in her own community and gave her some tips. A few days later, a lightbulb went off: “It’s time to show Anna,” she thought.
Anna resident Takiyah Coleman, 19, agreed. The two, along with several other young adults from the area, met with Anna Police Chief Bryan Watkins to explain their plan to protest. Watkins said he told them he wanted to ensure they felt safe coming to town to do so, but to also expect some opposition from residents.
“We’ve never had a demonstration in town like this,” Watkins, who said he’s lived in Anna for 45 years, later told me. (He prefers to use the word “demonstrate” instead of “protest,” he said, because “people associate protest with rioting.”)
When Watkins informed residents through his personal Facebook page about the event, the post prompted more than 350 shares and 600 comments, which ranged from curiosity to praise to fear.
“I hope everyone is ready to protect their business with brute force!” wrote one commenter from the area.
“How long do these things typically last??” wrote another.
The comments reminded me of stories people in Anna have told me about rumors spreading through town in the late 1960s and early 1970s that black people from Cairo, about 30 minutes south, were coming up to Anna to riot. That never happened, but some residents remember waiting with guns in case it did.
Anna City Council member Bryan Miller said he got received calls from residents concerned about the Black Lives Matter protest. He and I have been talking since November, when he commented on a Facebook post about my story, saying: “Uhm, I’m guessing [A-N-N-A] doesn’t go away because you keep writing about an issue that is long gone.”
I’ve appreciated our frank discussions about the story and about his community. A new City Council member, Miller said he is determined to erase the A-N-N-A stigma. When residents called him with concerns about the protest, he said that he told them it was a chance to change Anna’s reputation, and that, “I expect you to do your part.”
The day of the protest, a post on the official Facebook page for Anna expressed a similar sentiment: “In recent months, citizens were outraged over an article written about Anna. Well, actions speak louder than words. Tonight is our chance to show the world what we are made of.”
Moore, one of the organizers, said she expected about 60 people to show up. She was wrong.
Nearly 200 people marched through Anna’s streets. Many of them were young and white and described themselves as being from southern Illinois. Other area residents gathered along the route to watch an event many thought they’d never see.
Alexis Steward, 21, who grew up in Anna and helped organize the march, said she spent much of it bawling. The tears started when she began to realize how many people had shown up. She remembered when she was bullied at Anna junior high. She said she wants Anna to be a place where she feels she could start a family, and where she wouldn’t have to worry about her children feeling the pain she felt growing up there.
“I’ve always been shy,” Steward said. “Not anymore.”
“We need more people who are educated, loud and who can stand for people who cannot.”
When she marched past some Anna residents she recognized, who she said were screaming at the protesters to “get out of their town,” she said she knew she was doing something right.
So, too, did Aveon Winfield, another organizer, who grew up in nearby Grand Chain. When he heard onlookers repeatedly use the N-word, Winfield, 21, said he kept his eyes fixed on the ground and marched on. Winfield’s mother has worked for years at a mental health center in Anna. He thought about her, a woman of color, spending her days in a town where some residents still used racial slurs.
Coleman said she wanted the protest to show other residents that “change starts here.” Coleman and her family moved to Anna from Chicago three years ago, she said. She knew what Anna stood for but said she didn’t think much of it until a white customer at the local McDonald’s, where she worked, refused to let her pour his coffee.
Among the marchers, too, was Easter Smith.
I first met Easter in 2018, after a number of Anna residents suggested I speak with her. At the time, Smith and her six children were one of the few black families living in Anna. Her eldest son, Arieh, had won the Illinois state wrestling championship for his weight class. He was elected homecoming king of Anna-Jonesboro Community High School. I wrote about how the family challenged many white residents’ assumptions about black people while quietly struggling to balance their very public status in the community with the private pain of the racism they experienced.
Easter said she has lost some friends in Anna and become more outspoken about her experience there since the story was published. Last week, her family moved about 20 minutes away, to Murphysboro. She said she would have liked to stay in Anna until her children finished school there, but she had trouble finding a comfortable home to rent. She decided to march before she left, she said, because she felt she “needed to see it.”
“How are we going to be one of the first black families and not go to the protest?” Easter said.
Early on during the protest, a speaker, who was white, reminded the crowd of the signs posted around the city limits in Arieh’s honor, a positive contrast to signs long rumored to have once warned black people to be out of town before dark.
Two thoughts struck Easter. The first, she said, was that, as a black person in America, “Normally when your name is called in public, it’s because it’s in memorial.” The second: It “doesn’t take away racism because a black kid holds a title at your school.”
The protest ended peacefully. Police made no arrests. No property was damaged.
The protest was covered across the region and the focus of a Reuters story about small-town Black Lives Matter protests, which was republished by national news outlets.
The headline of a story in the Southern Illinoisan referenced a chant repeated at the protest: “Ain’t No Negativity Allowed,” a new, positive twist on A-N-N-A.
Miller, the City Council member, said he’s thinking about making yard signs for residents with the slogan. Everybody is welcome in Anna, he said.
I asked him what he thinks can be done to show that beyond the protest.
“It’s our responsibility to change everything that is going on around here,” Miller said. “If people were more just willing to talk to other people, things would change so much quicker.”
I asked some of the organizers, too, whether Anna still deserves A-N-N-A.
Moore didn’t think so, though she said, “There are people in Anna that still give Anna the name it has.”
But Coleman disagreed. The town is still A-N-N-A, she said.
“The people in the town have to change in order for that to change. They have to make it mean something else,” Coleman said. “They have to not be racist.”
But, she added: “Change starts somewhere, and if a group of teenagers have to be the ones to do it, so be it.”
A Black Lives Matter protest. In Anna?
In November, I’d published a story about this small southern Illinois city’s reputation as a sundown town — a place where black people were not welcome after dark — and the legend about what Anna stands for: “Ain’t No N——— Allowed.” The article stirred up strong feelings in the town, where all public officials, police officers and nearly all teachers are white. While many current and former residents wrote to me to share their own stories about racism in the area, others decried the story as perpetuating the A-N-N-A reputation.
A Black Lives Matter protest in Anna. Who was behind it? How many people would join? What would the reaction be?
And what would this mean for A-N-N-A?
“I was terrified to do this. I’m not going to lie,” said Jessica Moore, 25, one of the organizers.
She added, “I’ve experienced racism in Anna my entire life.”
Moore, who is biracial, grew up in Ullin, a small town about 20 minutes south of Anna. Her earliest memory of being a victim of racism in Anna happened when she was 8, she told me. As she was leaving the Anna Walmart with her mother, who is white, Moore said she remembers a woman screaming at her after she accidentally pushed a shopping cart into her car, repeatedly calling Moore the N-word. When she got older and started going to bars and restaurants in Anna, she said people would call her the N-word, too.
Moore is one of a small group of young people in southern Illinois leading the region’s recent demonstrations against police brutality and in support of black lives, many in towns with histories like Anna’s. Most of the organizers did not know one another a month ago. And many, like Moore, are new to the cause.
After she took part in her first protest in Paducah, Kentucky, on May 31, Moore said leaders there encouraged her to organize in her own community and gave her some tips. A few days later, a lightbulb went off: “It’s time to show Anna,” she thought.
Anna resident Takiyah Coleman, 19, agreed. The two, along with several other young adults from the area, met with Anna Police Chief Bryan Watkins to explain their plan to protest. Watkins said he told them he wanted to ensure they felt safe coming to town to do so, but to also expect some opposition from residents.
“We’ve never had a demonstration in town like this,” Watkins, who said he’s lived in Anna for 45 years, later told me. (He prefers to use the word “demonstrate” instead of “protest,” he said, because “people associate protest with rioting.”)
When Watkins informed residents through his personal Facebook page about the event, the post prompted more than 350 shares and 600 comments, which ranged from curiosity to praise to fear.
“I hope everyone is ready to protect their business with brute force!” wrote one commenter from the area.
“How long do these things typically last??” wrote another.
The comments reminded me of stories people in Anna have told me about rumors spreading through town in the late 1960s and early 1970s that black people from Cairo, about 30 minutes south, were coming up to Anna to riot. That never happened, but some residents remember waiting with guns in case it did.
Anna City Council member Bryan Miller said he got received calls from residents concerned about the Black Lives Matter protest. He and I have been talking since November, when he commented on a Facebook post about my story, saying: “Uhm, I’m guessing [A-N-N-A] doesn’t go away because you keep writing about an issue that is long gone.”
I’ve appreciated our frank discussions about the story and about his community. A new City Council member, Miller said he is determined to erase the A-N-N-A stigma. When residents called him with concerns about the protest, he said that he told them it was a chance to change Anna’s reputation, and that, “I expect you to do your part.”
The day of the protest, a post on the official Facebook page for Anna expressed a similar sentiment: “In recent months, citizens were outraged over an article written about Anna. Well, actions speak louder than words. Tonight is our chance to show the world what we are made of.”
Moore, one of the organizers, said she expected about 60 people to show up. She was wrong.
Nearly 200 people marched through Anna’s streets. Many of them were young and white and described themselves as being from southern Illinois. Other area residents gathered along the route to watch an event many thought they’d never see.
Alexis Steward, 21, who grew up in Anna and helped organize the march, said she spent much of it bawling. The tears started when she began to realize how many people had shown up. She remembered when she was bullied at Anna junior high. She said she wants Anna to be a place where she feels she could start a family, and where she wouldn’t have to worry about her children feeling the pain she felt growing up there.
“I’ve always been shy,” Steward said. “Not anymore.”
“We need more people who are educated, loud and who can stand for people who cannot.”
When she marched past some Anna residents she recognized, who she said were screaming at the protesters to “get out of their town,” she said she knew she was doing something right.
So, too, did Aveon Winfield, another organizer, who grew up in nearby Grand Chain. When he heard onlookers repeatedly use the N-word, Winfield, 21, said he kept his eyes fixed on the ground and marched on. Winfield’s mother has worked for years at a mental health center in Anna. He thought about her, a woman of color, spending her days in a town where some residents still used racial slurs.
Coleman said she wanted the protest to show other residents that “change starts here.” Coleman and her family moved to Anna from Chicago three years ago, she said. She knew what Anna stood for but said she didn’t think much of it until a white customer at the local McDonald’s, where she worked, refused to let her pour his coffee.
Among the marchers, too, was Easter Smith.
I first met Easter in 2018, after a number of Anna residents suggested I speak with her. At the time, Smith and her six children were one of the few black families living in Anna. Her eldest son, Arieh, had won the Illinois state wrestling championship for his weight class. He was elected homecoming king of Anna-Jonesboro Community High School. I wrote about how the family challenged many white residents’ assumptions about black people while quietly struggling to balance their very public status in the community with the private pain of the racism they experienced.
Easter said she has lost some friends in Anna and become more outspoken about her experience there since the story was published. Last week, her family moved about 20 minutes away, to Murphysboro. She said she would have liked to stay in Anna until her children finished school there, but she had trouble finding a comfortable home to rent. She decided to march before she left, she said, because she felt she “needed to see it.”
“How are we going to be one of the first black families and not go to the protest?” Easter said.
Early on during the protest, a speaker, who was white, reminded the crowd of the signs posted around the city limits in Arieh’s honor, a positive contrast to signs long rumored to have once warned black people to be out of town before dark.
Two thoughts struck Easter. The first, she said, was that, as a black person in America, “Normally when your name is called in public, it’s because it’s in memorial.” The second: It “doesn’t take away racism because a black kid holds a title at your school.”
The protest ended peacefully. Police made no arrests. No property was damaged.
The protest was covered across the region and the focus of a Reuters story about small-town Black Lives Matter protests, which was republished by national news outlets.
The headline of a story in the Southern Illinoisan referenced a chant repeated at the protest: “Ain’t No Negativity Allowed,” a new, positive twist on A-N-N-A.
Miller, the City Council member, said he’s thinking about making yard signs for residents with the slogan. Everybody is welcome in Anna, he said.
I asked him what he thinks can be done to show that beyond the protest.
“It’s our responsibility to change everything that is going on around here,” Miller said. “If people were more just willing to talk to other people, things would change so much quicker.”
I asked some of the organizers, too, whether Anna still deserves A-N-N-A.
Moore didn’t think so, though she said, “There are people in Anna that still give Anna the name it has.”
But Coleman disagreed. The town is still A-N-N-A, she said.
“The people in the town have to change in order for that to change. They have to make it mean something else,” Coleman said. “They have to not be racist.”
But, she added: “Change starts somewhere, and if a group of teenagers have to be the ones to do it, so be it.”
Michigan
drew brees has lots of company. willful ignorance on display!!!
Detroit's largely peaceful protests seen very differently from white suburb
St Clair Shores was a destination for white flight after the 1968 riots and some residents view the George Floyd protests sceptically
Each evening since a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd during an arrest, emotional protests have erupted in downtown Detroit. Thousands of protesters march nightly through the city’s streets demanding justice for Floyd and an end to police brutality, especially against African Americans.
The protesters are generally backed by Detroit residents. They and their supporters see the police as aggressors; officers have fired teargas, flash grenades and rubber bullets, sometimes at protesters who are peaceful but breaking curfew. Activists say the marches are the only appropriate response to a grave injustice.
But about 17 miles north-east of downtown Detroit, in the largely white, middle-class suburb of St Clair Shores, some see a totally different reality playing out. Residents here who spoke to the Guardian said the police were acting with restraint and protesters were aggressors who are provoking violence.
While Detroit’s population is more than 80% black, St Clair Shores, which sits just a few miles from the city’s northern border, is 93% white – a common racial disparity in a highly segregated region. Most of Detroit’s white residents left the city for suburbs like St Clair Shores in the decade following the city’s 1968 protests over racial inequality. The violent “rebellion” raged for days as hundreds of buildings were burned and 16 died.
These are the people whom Donald Trump is seeking to appeal to with his bid to be a “law and order” president as he seeks re-election. He hopes to mobilize a largely white voter base that has historically shunned integration and sought to preserve its privileges in the face of political and economic advancement by minorities.
Many in St Clair Shores share the president’s world view that the police and national guard are heroically battling violent agitators, not brutally suppressing largely peaceful protesters.
Several men who were part of a construction crew called the protests “stupid” and a “waste of time and energy”. Some even suggested Floyd was at fault for his death because he allegedly committed a crime, despite general worldwide outrage at the brutal manner of his killing and the criminal charges it has now brought against the officers involved.
Others, like Gloria Kinne, a St Clair Shores business owner, acknowledged that racial discrimination exists “in isolated spots” and said she supported the right to peaceful protest, but she added that she was troubled by images of protesters clashing with police and vandalizing property.
“I’m really sorry to see the violence come into it,” Kinne said. “The people who are harmed are the small businesses and people who have nothing to do with it and no control over it. It’s been bad enough with Covid-19, but now they have their stores vandalized on top of that.”
Jim Angel, a St Clair Shores retiree, suggested it was African Americans who were always behind police protests, though he ignored the long and unique history of black people in America, a land where they were once enslaved.
“This hasn’t had anything to do with the Irish, Polish and Germans – why is it only one ethnic group that needs change?” he asked.
Politically, St Clair Shores is considered a swing district in the vital 2020 battleground state of Michigan, though it has leaned conservative in recent elections. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by between 10 and 20 points in each of the city’s precincts in 2016.
The reviews of Trump’s handling of the protests have been mixed. Kinne said with a laugh, “You don’t want to hear my answer to that,” when asked about the president’s response. But local resident Ted Miller said he “applauds” the president’s harsh measures and inflammatory rhetoric. He also “fully supports” any decision to call in the military.
“These are the kind of things that he’s best at. He’s the law and order president,” Miller said.
Angel told the Guardian he didn’t think the military was needed yet, and also praised the police for remaining “very, very calm” in the face of provocation.
Kinne echoed that, adding: “It’s important that they measure their response based on the temper of the protest.
“If the protest is peaceful then the police need to be – and they have been – very calm,” she said. “On the other hand, if the protest becomes violent, then they have the right to protect themselves, too.”
Kinne added that she disagreed with claims that racism and police brutality are systemic within law enforcement, despite the fact minority groups, and especially African Americans, suffer disproportionately at the hands of the justice system and the police.
Kinne did not believe it was fair to blame “all police in every state in every city for what certain individuals do”.
“The vast majority of police officers and first responders are out there doing good,” she said. “There are a few bad actors among shopkeepers, among steelworkers and among any group of people you’re going to find an element that can be violent and be racist, and it’s a terrible thing, but I don’t think it’s fair to say, ‘All police are violent.’”
Though the protests are an emotional controversy, Miller said the country was “full of controversies” and he didn’t think this would influence the November election.
“People already have their minds made up how they’re going to vote,” he said. “This is just one more thing for everyone to disagree about and fight about.”
The protesters are generally backed by Detroit residents. They and their supporters see the police as aggressors; officers have fired teargas, flash grenades and rubber bullets, sometimes at protesters who are peaceful but breaking curfew. Activists say the marches are the only appropriate response to a grave injustice.
But about 17 miles north-east of downtown Detroit, in the largely white, middle-class suburb of St Clair Shores, some see a totally different reality playing out. Residents here who spoke to the Guardian said the police were acting with restraint and protesters were aggressors who are provoking violence.
While Detroit’s population is more than 80% black, St Clair Shores, which sits just a few miles from the city’s northern border, is 93% white – a common racial disparity in a highly segregated region. Most of Detroit’s white residents left the city for suburbs like St Clair Shores in the decade following the city’s 1968 protests over racial inequality. The violent “rebellion” raged for days as hundreds of buildings were burned and 16 died.
These are the people whom Donald Trump is seeking to appeal to with his bid to be a “law and order” president as he seeks re-election. He hopes to mobilize a largely white voter base that has historically shunned integration and sought to preserve its privileges in the face of political and economic advancement by minorities.
Many in St Clair Shores share the president’s world view that the police and national guard are heroically battling violent agitators, not brutally suppressing largely peaceful protesters.
Several men who were part of a construction crew called the protests “stupid” and a “waste of time and energy”. Some even suggested Floyd was at fault for his death because he allegedly committed a crime, despite general worldwide outrage at the brutal manner of his killing and the criminal charges it has now brought against the officers involved.
Others, like Gloria Kinne, a St Clair Shores business owner, acknowledged that racial discrimination exists “in isolated spots” and said she supported the right to peaceful protest, but she added that she was troubled by images of protesters clashing with police and vandalizing property.
“I’m really sorry to see the violence come into it,” Kinne said. “The people who are harmed are the small businesses and people who have nothing to do with it and no control over it. It’s been bad enough with Covid-19, but now they have their stores vandalized on top of that.”
Jim Angel, a St Clair Shores retiree, suggested it was African Americans who were always behind police protests, though he ignored the long and unique history of black people in America, a land where they were once enslaved.
“This hasn’t had anything to do with the Irish, Polish and Germans – why is it only one ethnic group that needs change?” he asked.
Politically, St Clair Shores is considered a swing district in the vital 2020 battleground state of Michigan, though it has leaned conservative in recent elections. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by between 10 and 20 points in each of the city’s precincts in 2016.
The reviews of Trump’s handling of the protests have been mixed. Kinne said with a laugh, “You don’t want to hear my answer to that,” when asked about the president’s response. But local resident Ted Miller said he “applauds” the president’s harsh measures and inflammatory rhetoric. He also “fully supports” any decision to call in the military.
“These are the kind of things that he’s best at. He’s the law and order president,” Miller said.
Angel told the Guardian he didn’t think the military was needed yet, and also praised the police for remaining “very, very calm” in the face of provocation.
Kinne echoed that, adding: “It’s important that they measure their response based on the temper of the protest.
“If the protest is peaceful then the police need to be – and they have been – very calm,” she said. “On the other hand, if the protest becomes violent, then they have the right to protect themselves, too.”
Kinne added that she disagreed with claims that racism and police brutality are systemic within law enforcement, despite the fact minority groups, and especially African Americans, suffer disproportionately at the hands of the justice system and the police.
Kinne did not believe it was fair to blame “all police in every state in every city for what certain individuals do”.
“The vast majority of police officers and first responders are out there doing good,” she said. “There are a few bad actors among shopkeepers, among steelworkers and among any group of people you’re going to find an element that can be violent and be racist, and it’s a terrible thing, but I don’t think it’s fair to say, ‘All police are violent.’”
Though the protests are an emotional controversy, Miller said the country was “full of controversies” and he didn’t think this would influence the November election.
“People already have their minds made up how they’re going to vote,” he said. “This is just one more thing for everyone to disagree about and fight about.”
Welcome to a failed state in slow motion: The United States of America
The ludicrous mask “debate” is just the latest example of a country devolving into chaos and tribal anarchy
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV - salon
MAY 23, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
What is a failed state? It's a country that would hire me to make things work.
I learned that the night I made the trip between Kabul and Jalalabad. The main trading route between the countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan was how virtually everything needed in Afghanistan was shipped into the country, from automobiles to food to medicine to fuel to people. You would think that a road carrying such essential trade would be well-paved and cared for, protected by a strong police presence and lined with gas stations, restaurants and motels, the kinds of businesses ordinarily found along such routes.
But in the failed state of Afghanistan, you would be wrong. It was a dusty, potholed dirt road strewn with gigantic boulders (some the size of small cars), lined with fields of unexploded mines, packed bumper to bumper with every means of conveyance known to man, from donkey carts to farm tractors to taxis to interstate buses to tractor trailers. It was a 10-mile-an-hour road, 70 miles from the capital of Afghanistan to one of its most populous cities that typically took seven to eight hours to drive.
I was riding in a kind of mini-SUV, accompanied by a driver, a translator and a photographer. We had had trouble procuring the car, so we were late departing Kabul, leaving in the mid-afternoon. The traffic was fierce and the road was rough, so bad we frequently had to get out and help others move rocks and boulders out of the way. The sun had gone down behind the rock-strewn mountains on either side of the road when we reached the Kabul River gorge, a deep canyon through the mountains where the road dropped about 3,000 feet in altitude within a couple of miles.
Just as we reached the first of many, many switchback turns down the side of the gorge, we stopped. Ahead of us were hundreds of cars, buses and trucks jammed together crowding both sides of the road. Nothing could move. We could tell they had been there awhile because truck drivers were already out of their cabs buying firewood from little boys to cook their dinners with. Several had laid out sleeping bags beneath their trucks. They were settling in for the night.
I got out and walked over to the lip of the gorge where I could see several thousand feet all the way to the bottom. The road was jammed through switchback after switchback, nose to tail, at least a couple of thousand vehicles. I got my translator and we walked over to ask a nearby trucker if he had been in a traffic jam along this stretch of bad road before. "Many times," he answered without any emotion at all. Asked how long the similar traffic jams he had been in had lasted, he said, "Two, three days. Sometimes longer."
I looked around. A crowd was gathering. They were gathering around me. I studied the faces of people who had dismounted from taxis and buses and trucks. There were no policemen, no soldiers from the Afghan army (or the U.S. Army, for that matter). I was the only American there.
It began to dawn on me that if I spent the night in the gorge, I wasn't going to make it out alive. So I grabbed my translator, whose name was Esos, and I got out my binoculars and I made a study of the traffic jam just as darkness set in. There was a way to get the jammed-up cars moving. What we had to do was free up the switchback turns, one by one, by getting the vehicles going in each direction to back up from the jammed corners enough to let a few vehicles through, and then move everyone who was going east towards Jalalabad far enough to the side of the road to allow the westbound traffic through.
I explained the plan to Esos, and he enlisted the help of an old man who was wearing a tattered Afghan army uniform and hat, and we started by moving a string of tractor trailer trucks back from the apex of the first switchback turn. Once it was free, we began moving the eastbound cars out of the way. I took a flashlight and jumped up on a boulder and began directing traffic. Not knowing any Pashto or Dari, I started yelling "Bongo-bongo-bongo!" as I waved the flashlight. The traffic started moving slowly to the west. It was like a miracle! A cheer went up, and people pointed at me atop the boulder. A bus driver approached Esos and asked him who I was. "That is General Bongo," Esos said. "He is an important man from America."
It took about seven hours, but we undid that traffic jam. Near the bottom, we found two gigantic trucks carrying some kind of steel oil tanks jammed in the opening to a tunnel. We moved them out of the tunnel entrance to the side of the road and kept working on the jam along the Kabul River at the bottom of the gorge. We finally made it into Jalalabad around dawn.
We spent the next week in the badlands along the Pakistan border. Everywhere we went, people had heard the tale of a miraculous American who untangled the jam in the Kabul River Gorge, General Bongo. They gathered around me in villages we stopped in. "Is that General Bongo?" they would ask Esos. "Yes, it is General Bongo," he would answer, proudly introducing me. Apparently, the jams in the gorge were notorious in eastern Afghanistan, and nobody had ever heard of one undone in a matter of hours, instead of days.
As we explored the outlaw area between Jalalabad and Asadabad, a smuggling town to the north just a couple of miles from the border with Pakistan, we encountered more evidence of a failed state: There was no clean water; open sewers ran along the roadside; one village after another was controlled by rival warlords; marauding bands of thieves stole goats and sheep and donkeys from local farmers. Filth and disease were everywhere: Cholera, staph infections, deadly pneumonia and even polio. There was no electricity. There were no hospitals. Every town was ruled by a different tribal warlord. People were forced to grow poppies for opium instead of wheat and food crops. The road from Jalalabad to Asadabad was, incredibly, even worse than the other one, a five-mile-an-hour road. After a few days driving it, our shocks failed, leaking fluid all over our brakes. We had to have practically the entire suspension of the car repaired in Asadabad.
On our last night, the mayor of a small village we had visited stopped us on the road. He took Esos aside and they talked for several minutes. When he returned, Esos explained that his village had met and agreed to offer General Bongo an empty walled compound in the village along with goats and sheep and several donkeys. I could take as many wives as I wanted, and I would have my own militia, made up of local villagers who had armed themselves against the Taliban.
At that moment in my life, I was a failed screenwriter in Hollywood who hadn't made a deal for a script in more than a year. In Afghanistan, because I had untangled an impossible traffic jam in the Kabul River gorge in a matter of hours, I could be a warlord with my own army.
That is what a failed state is in the third world.
Back here in the so-called first world, we are almost there. Just look at the news from the last couple of weeks. Wearing a mask to guard against the coronavirus has become a tribal issue, with people refusing to wear them out of a sense of identity politics. Incidents of violence and even a shooting death have occurred over masks. Donald Trump is still promoting a drug that has now been proven to cause deaths when used in cases of coronavirus infection. Madness surrounds us.
Our national response to the pandemic hasn't been national at all. Lockdowns and social distancing have been state by state, county by county, city by city, business by business. The so-called "blue states" have responded one way, the "red states" another. People are not acting with a sense of what the consequences are. One tribe is saying, Your freedom ends where my health begins, and the other tribe is saying, The hell with your health! Freedom! Liberty!
All of it over whether or not to wear a goddamn protective mask.
With heavily armed men in full combat gear occupying the visitors galleries in the Michigan state capitol, we are one trigger-pull away from what happens every day in places like Kabul and Mogadishu and Tripoli. With tens of millions of people out of work, they're talking about cutting food stamps and canceling the unemployment bonus they just passed. Every day, there is more evidence that nothing is working the way it should in a country gripped by the biggest crisis it has faced in decades.
An op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday was titled, "The Worst is Yet to Come." Columnist Farhad Manjoo made the case that "every problem we face will get much worse than we ever imagined. The coronavirus is like a heat-seeking missile designed to frustrate progress in almost every corner of society, from politics to the economy to the environment … indeed, division and chaos might now be the permanent order of the day."
With close to 100,000 dead and counting, we need a General Bongo and we don't have one. I'm retired, and it's five and a half months until the November election.
Build your cooking fires, wear your masks and hang on tight. We are in the jam of our lives.
I learned that the night I made the trip between Kabul and Jalalabad. The main trading route between the countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan was how virtually everything needed in Afghanistan was shipped into the country, from automobiles to food to medicine to fuel to people. You would think that a road carrying such essential trade would be well-paved and cared for, protected by a strong police presence and lined with gas stations, restaurants and motels, the kinds of businesses ordinarily found along such routes.
But in the failed state of Afghanistan, you would be wrong. It was a dusty, potholed dirt road strewn with gigantic boulders (some the size of small cars), lined with fields of unexploded mines, packed bumper to bumper with every means of conveyance known to man, from donkey carts to farm tractors to taxis to interstate buses to tractor trailers. It was a 10-mile-an-hour road, 70 miles from the capital of Afghanistan to one of its most populous cities that typically took seven to eight hours to drive.
I was riding in a kind of mini-SUV, accompanied by a driver, a translator and a photographer. We had had trouble procuring the car, so we were late departing Kabul, leaving in the mid-afternoon. The traffic was fierce and the road was rough, so bad we frequently had to get out and help others move rocks and boulders out of the way. The sun had gone down behind the rock-strewn mountains on either side of the road when we reached the Kabul River gorge, a deep canyon through the mountains where the road dropped about 3,000 feet in altitude within a couple of miles.
Just as we reached the first of many, many switchback turns down the side of the gorge, we stopped. Ahead of us were hundreds of cars, buses and trucks jammed together crowding both sides of the road. Nothing could move. We could tell they had been there awhile because truck drivers were already out of their cabs buying firewood from little boys to cook their dinners with. Several had laid out sleeping bags beneath their trucks. They were settling in for the night.
I got out and walked over to the lip of the gorge where I could see several thousand feet all the way to the bottom. The road was jammed through switchback after switchback, nose to tail, at least a couple of thousand vehicles. I got my translator and we walked over to ask a nearby trucker if he had been in a traffic jam along this stretch of bad road before. "Many times," he answered without any emotion at all. Asked how long the similar traffic jams he had been in had lasted, he said, "Two, three days. Sometimes longer."
I looked around. A crowd was gathering. They were gathering around me. I studied the faces of people who had dismounted from taxis and buses and trucks. There were no policemen, no soldiers from the Afghan army (or the U.S. Army, for that matter). I was the only American there.
It began to dawn on me that if I spent the night in the gorge, I wasn't going to make it out alive. So I grabbed my translator, whose name was Esos, and I got out my binoculars and I made a study of the traffic jam just as darkness set in. There was a way to get the jammed-up cars moving. What we had to do was free up the switchback turns, one by one, by getting the vehicles going in each direction to back up from the jammed corners enough to let a few vehicles through, and then move everyone who was going east towards Jalalabad far enough to the side of the road to allow the westbound traffic through.
I explained the plan to Esos, and he enlisted the help of an old man who was wearing a tattered Afghan army uniform and hat, and we started by moving a string of tractor trailer trucks back from the apex of the first switchback turn. Once it was free, we began moving the eastbound cars out of the way. I took a flashlight and jumped up on a boulder and began directing traffic. Not knowing any Pashto or Dari, I started yelling "Bongo-bongo-bongo!" as I waved the flashlight. The traffic started moving slowly to the west. It was like a miracle! A cheer went up, and people pointed at me atop the boulder. A bus driver approached Esos and asked him who I was. "That is General Bongo," Esos said. "He is an important man from America."
It took about seven hours, but we undid that traffic jam. Near the bottom, we found two gigantic trucks carrying some kind of steel oil tanks jammed in the opening to a tunnel. We moved them out of the tunnel entrance to the side of the road and kept working on the jam along the Kabul River at the bottom of the gorge. We finally made it into Jalalabad around dawn.
We spent the next week in the badlands along the Pakistan border. Everywhere we went, people had heard the tale of a miraculous American who untangled the jam in the Kabul River Gorge, General Bongo. They gathered around me in villages we stopped in. "Is that General Bongo?" they would ask Esos. "Yes, it is General Bongo," he would answer, proudly introducing me. Apparently, the jams in the gorge were notorious in eastern Afghanistan, and nobody had ever heard of one undone in a matter of hours, instead of days.
As we explored the outlaw area between Jalalabad and Asadabad, a smuggling town to the north just a couple of miles from the border with Pakistan, we encountered more evidence of a failed state: There was no clean water; open sewers ran along the roadside; one village after another was controlled by rival warlords; marauding bands of thieves stole goats and sheep and donkeys from local farmers. Filth and disease were everywhere: Cholera, staph infections, deadly pneumonia and even polio. There was no electricity. There were no hospitals. Every town was ruled by a different tribal warlord. People were forced to grow poppies for opium instead of wheat and food crops. The road from Jalalabad to Asadabad was, incredibly, even worse than the other one, a five-mile-an-hour road. After a few days driving it, our shocks failed, leaking fluid all over our brakes. We had to have practically the entire suspension of the car repaired in Asadabad.
On our last night, the mayor of a small village we had visited stopped us on the road. He took Esos aside and they talked for several minutes. When he returned, Esos explained that his village had met and agreed to offer General Bongo an empty walled compound in the village along with goats and sheep and several donkeys. I could take as many wives as I wanted, and I would have my own militia, made up of local villagers who had armed themselves against the Taliban.
At that moment in my life, I was a failed screenwriter in Hollywood who hadn't made a deal for a script in more than a year. In Afghanistan, because I had untangled an impossible traffic jam in the Kabul River gorge in a matter of hours, I could be a warlord with my own army.
That is what a failed state is in the third world.
Back here in the so-called first world, we are almost there. Just look at the news from the last couple of weeks. Wearing a mask to guard against the coronavirus has become a tribal issue, with people refusing to wear them out of a sense of identity politics. Incidents of violence and even a shooting death have occurred over masks. Donald Trump is still promoting a drug that has now been proven to cause deaths when used in cases of coronavirus infection. Madness surrounds us.
Our national response to the pandemic hasn't been national at all. Lockdowns and social distancing have been state by state, county by county, city by city, business by business. The so-called "blue states" have responded one way, the "red states" another. People are not acting with a sense of what the consequences are. One tribe is saying, Your freedom ends where my health begins, and the other tribe is saying, The hell with your health! Freedom! Liberty!
All of it over whether or not to wear a goddamn protective mask.
With heavily armed men in full combat gear occupying the visitors galleries in the Michigan state capitol, we are one trigger-pull away from what happens every day in places like Kabul and Mogadishu and Tripoli. With tens of millions of people out of work, they're talking about cutting food stamps and canceling the unemployment bonus they just passed. Every day, there is more evidence that nothing is working the way it should in a country gripped by the biggest crisis it has faced in decades.
An op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday was titled, "The Worst is Yet to Come." Columnist Farhad Manjoo made the case that "every problem we face will get much worse than we ever imagined. The coronavirus is like a heat-seeking missile designed to frustrate progress in almost every corner of society, from politics to the economy to the environment … indeed, division and chaos might now be the permanent order of the day."
With close to 100,000 dead and counting, we need a General Bongo and we don't have one. I'm retired, and it's five and a half months until the November election.
Build your cooking fires, wear your masks and hang on tight. We are in the jam of our lives.
Michigan
Michigan: thousands evacuated after 'catastrophic' dam failures
*Governor says town of Midland could soon be under 9ft of water
*Edenville and Sanford dams along Tittabawassee River burst
Emily Holden in Washington and agency
the guardian
Wed 20 May 2020 11.01 EDT
Rapidly rising water overtook dams and forced the evacuation of about 10,000 people in central Michigan, where flooding struck communities along rain-swollen waterways and the governor said one downtown could be “under approximately nine feet of water“ by Wednesday.
For the second time in less than 24 hours, families living along the Tittabawassee River and connected lakes in Midland county were ordered Tuesday evening to leave home.
By Wednesday morning, water that was several feet high covered some streets near the river in downtown Midland, including riverside parkland, and reaching a hotel and parking lots.
The National Weather Service urged anyone near the river to seek higher ground following “catastrophic dam failures” at the Edenville dam, about 140 miles north of Detroit, and the Sanford dam, about seven miles downriver.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said downtown Midland, a city of 42,000 about eight miles downstream from the Sanford Dam, faced an especially serious flooding threat.
Dow Chemical Company’s main plant sits on the city’s riverbank.
“In the next 12 to 15 hours, downtown Midland could be under approximately 9ft of water,“ the governor said during a late Tuesday briefing. “We are anticipating an historic high water level.”
Further down the Tittabawassee River, communities in Saginaw county were on alert for flooding, with a flash-flood watch in effect Wednesday.
Whitmer declared a state of emergency for Midland county and urged residents threatened by the flooding to find a place to stay with friends or relatives or to seek out one of several shelters that opened across the county.
Emergency responders went door-to-door early Tuesday morning warning residents living near the Edenville dam of the rising water. Some residents were able to return home, only to be told to leave again following the dam’s breach several hours later.
The evacuations include the towns of Edenville, Sanford and parts of Midland, according to Selina Tisdale, spokeswoman for Midland county.
John Boothroyd, who lives in Midland, evacuated to his in-laws’ home in Grand Rapids after a state police officer drove through his neighborhood at about midnight with a blow horn warning residents of the emergency. He is in the process of purchasing a new house in another part of town and drove by it as he was leaving.
“It was like a scene from a meteor strike movie, like Armageddon or Deep Impact. There were people just throwing stuff in their cars. There was a line of cars trying to get out of the area they evacuated at least a couple miles down the road,” Boothroyd said. “I’ve never seen that many cars in Midland. It was crazy.”
Dow Chemical has activated its emergency operations center and will be adjusting operations as a result of current flood stage conditions, spokeswoman Rachelle Schikorra said in an email.
“Dow Michigan Operations is working with its tenants and Midland County officials and will continue to closely monitor the water levels on the Tittabawassee River,” Schikorra said.
Federal regulators in 2018 revoked the license of the company operating the Edenville dam after two decades of warnings that it was vulnerable to significant flooding. Boyce Hydro Power acquired the dam in 2004. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it had been trying to get the dam operator to comply with its rules for 14 years.
The Edenville Dam, which was built in 1924, was rated in unsatisfactory condition in 2018 by the state. The Sanford Dam, which was built in 1925, received a fair condition rating. Both dams are in the process of being sold.
For the second time in less than 24 hours, families living along the Tittabawassee River and connected lakes in Midland county were ordered Tuesday evening to leave home.
By Wednesday morning, water that was several feet high covered some streets near the river in downtown Midland, including riverside parkland, and reaching a hotel and parking lots.
The National Weather Service urged anyone near the river to seek higher ground following “catastrophic dam failures” at the Edenville dam, about 140 miles north of Detroit, and the Sanford dam, about seven miles downriver.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said downtown Midland, a city of 42,000 about eight miles downstream from the Sanford Dam, faced an especially serious flooding threat.
Dow Chemical Company’s main plant sits on the city’s riverbank.
“In the next 12 to 15 hours, downtown Midland could be under approximately 9ft of water,“ the governor said during a late Tuesday briefing. “We are anticipating an historic high water level.”
Further down the Tittabawassee River, communities in Saginaw county were on alert for flooding, with a flash-flood watch in effect Wednesday.
Whitmer declared a state of emergency for Midland county and urged residents threatened by the flooding to find a place to stay with friends or relatives or to seek out one of several shelters that opened across the county.
Emergency responders went door-to-door early Tuesday morning warning residents living near the Edenville dam of the rising water. Some residents were able to return home, only to be told to leave again following the dam’s breach several hours later.
The evacuations include the towns of Edenville, Sanford and parts of Midland, according to Selina Tisdale, spokeswoman for Midland county.
John Boothroyd, who lives in Midland, evacuated to his in-laws’ home in Grand Rapids after a state police officer drove through his neighborhood at about midnight with a blow horn warning residents of the emergency. He is in the process of purchasing a new house in another part of town and drove by it as he was leaving.
“It was like a scene from a meteor strike movie, like Armageddon or Deep Impact. There were people just throwing stuff in their cars. There was a line of cars trying to get out of the area they evacuated at least a couple miles down the road,” Boothroyd said. “I’ve never seen that many cars in Midland. It was crazy.”
Dow Chemical has activated its emergency operations center and will be adjusting operations as a result of current flood stage conditions, spokeswoman Rachelle Schikorra said in an email.
“Dow Michigan Operations is working with its tenants and Midland County officials and will continue to closely monitor the water levels on the Tittabawassee River,” Schikorra said.
Federal regulators in 2018 revoked the license of the company operating the Edenville dam after two decades of warnings that it was vulnerable to significant flooding. Boyce Hydro Power acquired the dam in 2004. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it had been trying to get the dam operator to comply with its rules for 14 years.
The Edenville Dam, which was built in 1924, was rated in unsatisfactory condition in 2018 by the state. The Sanford Dam, which was built in 1925, received a fair condition rating. Both dams are in the process of being sold.
“Common sense says it is racism"
Detroit
Detroit families still without clean water despite shutoffs being lifted
*Families say city has not made them aware water is back on
*City turned off taps under criticized debt-collection plan
Poppy Noor
the guardian
Wed 20 May 2020 06.30 EDT
Officials in Detroit have claimed the city has restored the water supply to its residents, but a number of families are still without clean running water and have had their bills paid by a charity, the Guardian has learned.
Water shutoffs were introduced in Detroit in 2014, as part of a widely condemned debt-collection program that critics said has unfairly affected minority communities during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Detroit, the policy before the coronavirus crisis was for water to be shut off for residents who fell $150 behind on their water bills. About 2,800 homes were estimated to be without running water at the start of the pandemic.
But as the pandemic reinforced the need for basic hygiene and sanitary practices, pressure mounted on cities to return water to residents, and Detroit in March became the first city to announce it was doing so.
As part of the moratorium, the state agreed to cover water bills and to pay the $25 reconnection fee, and an additional $25 per month for homes without water. Even after the city announced the restoration of water, residents were being advised to flush the water pipes before drinking to reduce their risk of lead poisoning.
However, many people at the Brightmoor Connections Food Pantry have reported that the Detroit water department has failed to offer the $25 reconnection plan to them – with many pantry customers unaware of the program to begin with. There is no sign of the $25 water restoration program on bills, either.
Brightmoor’s executive director, the Rev Roslyn Bouier, said she was left with no option but to assist people who continued to turn up at the pantry asking for bottled water – after the moratorium was announced. The Guardian has also seen water shutoff notices threatening service interruption as recently as 20 April.
“For the Detroit water sewage department to frighten and intimidate the most vulnerable families already with their backs against the walls [is bad enough] – but more so during Covid-19 … where is their moral compass?
This is a moral outrage that we are even having to challenge this policy of shutting off water. We are not asking for free water – we are asking for a water affordability plan,” said Bouier.
Brightmoor has now paid over $17,000 to restore service to stricken families in Detroit, mainly through donations it has received.
This includes payments towards bills, reconnection fees and payments for plumbing services. Despite a moratorium on evictions being in place, the pantry has also paid thousands to keep people housed during the pandemic.
“I am frustrated with the idea that I have to convince people to see the wrong in this. We are in the middle of a crisis,” said Bouier, who provided the Guardian with the documentation to back her claims.
A DSWD spokesperson said it had not required or demanded customers pay their past due bills in order to maintain service at any point during the pandemic. The spokesperson added that the service interruption threats may have been sent due to a technical error, as part of an old billing system which alerts customers to pay their bills before they fall too far behind on payments.
The continued water shutoffs are causing fear and pain in a community with one of the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths, the majority being African American.
“Common sense says it is racism,” said Bouier, noting that most of those who have had their water shut off are black and poor. The fatality rate of Covid-19 in Michigan is 7% of confirmed cases, but while African Americans make up only 14% of the state’s population, they make up 40% of the state’s deaths.
The city of Detroit has a bad record when it comes to accessing clean running water, with historic problems over lead poisoning, too. In 2017, it was found that 9% of children in Detroit tested positive for lead poisoning, higher than in Flint – including one zip code where 22% of children were found to have lead poisoning.
Asked what state of mind her clients are in, Bouier said: “They are terrified. They are in such panic and in a state of despair because water is still being shut off in real time.”
About the recent extension announcement that the areas with the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths will have shutdown orders extended, Bouier said it is a death sentence.
“The reality is: if you ask people to stay at home without running water, you are conscripting people to die.
“It is such a clear response that’s needed: turn the water on. Keep the water on.”
Water shutoffs were introduced in Detroit in 2014, as part of a widely condemned debt-collection program that critics said has unfairly affected minority communities during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Detroit, the policy before the coronavirus crisis was for water to be shut off for residents who fell $150 behind on their water bills. About 2,800 homes were estimated to be without running water at the start of the pandemic.
But as the pandemic reinforced the need for basic hygiene and sanitary practices, pressure mounted on cities to return water to residents, and Detroit in March became the first city to announce it was doing so.
As part of the moratorium, the state agreed to cover water bills and to pay the $25 reconnection fee, and an additional $25 per month for homes without water. Even after the city announced the restoration of water, residents were being advised to flush the water pipes before drinking to reduce their risk of lead poisoning.
However, many people at the Brightmoor Connections Food Pantry have reported that the Detroit water department has failed to offer the $25 reconnection plan to them – with many pantry customers unaware of the program to begin with. There is no sign of the $25 water restoration program on bills, either.
Brightmoor’s executive director, the Rev Roslyn Bouier, said she was left with no option but to assist people who continued to turn up at the pantry asking for bottled water – after the moratorium was announced. The Guardian has also seen water shutoff notices threatening service interruption as recently as 20 April.
“For the Detroit water sewage department to frighten and intimidate the most vulnerable families already with their backs against the walls [is bad enough] – but more so during Covid-19 … where is their moral compass?
This is a moral outrage that we are even having to challenge this policy of shutting off water. We are not asking for free water – we are asking for a water affordability plan,” said Bouier.
Brightmoor has now paid over $17,000 to restore service to stricken families in Detroit, mainly through donations it has received.
This includes payments towards bills, reconnection fees and payments for plumbing services. Despite a moratorium on evictions being in place, the pantry has also paid thousands to keep people housed during the pandemic.
“I am frustrated with the idea that I have to convince people to see the wrong in this. We are in the middle of a crisis,” said Bouier, who provided the Guardian with the documentation to back her claims.
A DSWD spokesperson said it had not required or demanded customers pay their past due bills in order to maintain service at any point during the pandemic. The spokesperson added that the service interruption threats may have been sent due to a technical error, as part of an old billing system which alerts customers to pay their bills before they fall too far behind on payments.
The continued water shutoffs are causing fear and pain in a community with one of the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths, the majority being African American.
“Common sense says it is racism,” said Bouier, noting that most of those who have had their water shut off are black and poor. The fatality rate of Covid-19 in Michigan is 7% of confirmed cases, but while African Americans make up only 14% of the state’s population, they make up 40% of the state’s deaths.
The city of Detroit has a bad record when it comes to accessing clean running water, with historic problems over lead poisoning, too. In 2017, it was found that 9% of children in Detroit tested positive for lead poisoning, higher than in Flint – including one zip code where 22% of children were found to have lead poisoning.
Asked what state of mind her clients are in, Bouier said: “They are terrified. They are in such panic and in a state of despair because water is still being shut off in real time.”
About the recent extension announcement that the areas with the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths will have shutdown orders extended, Bouier said it is a death sentence.
“The reality is: if you ask people to stay at home without running water, you are conscripting people to die.
“It is such a clear response that’s needed: turn the water on. Keep the water on.”
'A true emergency' Covid-19 pushes homeless crisis in San Francisco's Tenderloin to the brink
The number of tents in the historic neighborhood has exploded by 285% since the start of the coronavirus outbreak
Tents cram the narrow sidewalks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
America is a country ‘to be pitied’ for its ‘dysfunctional’ coronavirus response
Alex Henderson - alternet
May 15, 2020
Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has made no secret of his views on President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, but his May 14 column is especially sobering — and he lays out some ways in which Trump and his administration have been dropping the ball during the worst global health crisis in over 100 years.
“Only a handful of nations on Earth have arguably done a worse job of handling the coronavirus pandemic than the United States,” Robinson asserts. “What has happened to us? How did we become so dysfunctional? When did we become so incompetent? The shocking and deadly failures by President Trump and his administration have been well documented — we didn’t isolate, we didn’t test, we didn’t contact-trace, we waited too long to lock down. But Trump’s gross unfitness is only part of the problem.”
Robinson goes on to say, “The phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ has always meant different things to different people — that this nation should be admired, or perhaps that it should be feared. Not until now, at least in my lifetime, has it suggested that the United States should be pitied. No amount of patriotism or pride can change the appalling facts. The pandemic is acting as a stress test for societies around the world, and ours is in danger of failing.”
To be sure, the U.S. has become the coronavirus hotspot of the world. The coronavirus pandemic, according to researchers at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 302,000 people worldwide (as of early Friday morning, May 15). And more than 85,900 of them are in the United States.
“I’m used to thinking of a nation such as South Korea as a kind of junior partner, a beneficiary of American expertise and aid,” Robinson explains. “Yet the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 exceeds 85,000, while South Korea’s fatalities total 260. That is not a typo. How could a nation with barely half our per capita income have done so much better? Washington has been Seoul’s patron and teacher for more than six decades, yet somehow, we apparently have unlearned much of what we taught.”
Some Republicans, Robinson laments, are doing amazingly stupid things that will promote the spread of COVID-19 in their areas — for example, the ones on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
“On Wednesday,” Robinson laments, “the Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated Gov. Tony Evers’ (D) extension of his stay-at-home order. By evening, bars in some Wisconsin cities were packed — no social distancing, no masks. In Milwaukee and several other jurisdictions, however, orders by local officials kept the bars closed. What are the Wisconsin cities that remain closed supposed to do? Set up roadblocks to keep outsiders away?”
The coronavirus death toll in some European countries has been staggering, although lower than the U.S. — for example, over 33,600 deaths in the U.K., more than 31,300 in the Italy and over 27,000 in both Spain and France (according to Johns Hopkins). But Robinson notes how proactive some EU countries have been when it comes to taking care of businesses and workers financially.
“In the Netherlands, for example, the government is granting employers up to 90 % of their payroll costs so they can keep paying their workers rather than resort to furloughs or layoffs,” Robinson observes. “That kind of continuity ought to speed recovery when reopening becomes safe.”
Robinson concludes his column on a depressing note, asserting that the pandemic underscores the United States’ inability to handle a crisis under the Trump Administration.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the depth of America’s fall from greatness,” Robinson writes. “Ridding ourselves of Trump and his cronies in November will be just the beginning of our work to restore it.”
“Only a handful of nations on Earth have arguably done a worse job of handling the coronavirus pandemic than the United States,” Robinson asserts. “What has happened to us? How did we become so dysfunctional? When did we become so incompetent? The shocking and deadly failures by President Trump and his administration have been well documented — we didn’t isolate, we didn’t test, we didn’t contact-trace, we waited too long to lock down. But Trump’s gross unfitness is only part of the problem.”
Robinson goes on to say, “The phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ has always meant different things to different people — that this nation should be admired, or perhaps that it should be feared. Not until now, at least in my lifetime, has it suggested that the United States should be pitied. No amount of patriotism or pride can change the appalling facts. The pandemic is acting as a stress test for societies around the world, and ours is in danger of failing.”
To be sure, the U.S. has become the coronavirus hotspot of the world. The coronavirus pandemic, according to researchers at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 302,000 people worldwide (as of early Friday morning, May 15). And more than 85,900 of them are in the United States.
“I’m used to thinking of a nation such as South Korea as a kind of junior partner, a beneficiary of American expertise and aid,” Robinson explains. “Yet the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 exceeds 85,000, while South Korea’s fatalities total 260. That is not a typo. How could a nation with barely half our per capita income have done so much better? Washington has been Seoul’s patron and teacher for more than six decades, yet somehow, we apparently have unlearned much of what we taught.”
Some Republicans, Robinson laments, are doing amazingly stupid things that will promote the spread of COVID-19 in their areas — for example, the ones on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
“On Wednesday,” Robinson laments, “the Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated Gov. Tony Evers’ (D) extension of his stay-at-home order. By evening, bars in some Wisconsin cities were packed — no social distancing, no masks. In Milwaukee and several other jurisdictions, however, orders by local officials kept the bars closed. What are the Wisconsin cities that remain closed supposed to do? Set up roadblocks to keep outsiders away?”
The coronavirus death toll in some European countries has been staggering, although lower than the U.S. — for example, over 33,600 deaths in the U.K., more than 31,300 in the Italy and over 27,000 in both Spain and France (according to Johns Hopkins). But Robinson notes how proactive some EU countries have been when it comes to taking care of businesses and workers financially.
“In the Netherlands, for example, the government is granting employers up to 90 % of their payroll costs so they can keep paying their workers rather than resort to furloughs or layoffs,” Robinson observes. “That kind of continuity ought to speed recovery when reopening becomes safe.”
Robinson concludes his column on a depressing note, asserting that the pandemic underscores the United States’ inability to handle a crisis under the Trump Administration.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the depth of America’s fall from greatness,” Robinson writes. “Ridding ourselves of Trump and his cronies in November will be just the beginning of our work to restore it.”
Report: Anti-Semitic incidents in US hit record high in 2019
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN - ap
5/12/2020
SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP) — American Jews were targets of more anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 than any other year over the past four decades, a surge marked by deadly attacks on a California synagogue, a Jewish grocery store in New Jersey and a rabbi’s New York home, the Anti-Defamation League reported Tuesday.
The Jewish civil rights group counted 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in 2019, finding 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism. That’s the highest annual tally since the New York City-based group began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. It also marked a 12% increase over the 1,879 incidents it counted in 2018.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, attributes last year’s record high to a “normalization of anti-Semitic tropes,” the “charged politics of the day” and social media. This year, he said, the COVID-19 pandemic is fueling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“Anti-Semitism is a virus. It is like a disease, and it persists,” Greenblatt said. “It’s sometimes known as the oldest hatred. It never seems to go away. There truly is no single antidote or cure.”
The ADL’s count of anti-Semitic assaults involved 95 victims. More than half of the assaults occurred in New York City, including 25 in Brooklyn. Eight of those Brooklyn assaults happened during a span of eight days in December, primarily in neighborhoods where many Orthodox Jews live.
“Objects were thrown at victims, antisemitic slurs were shouted, and at least three victims were hit or punched in their heads or faces,” says the report first given exclusively to The Associated Press.
The ADL defines an anti-Semitic assault as “an attempt to inflict physical harm on one or more people who are Jewish or perceived to be Jewish, accompanied by evidence of antisemitic animus.” Three of those 2019 assaults were deadly.
A 20-year-old former nursing student, John T. Earnest, awaits trial on charges he killed a woman and wounded three other people during an attack on Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego in April 2019. The gunman told a 911 dispatcher that he shot up the synagogue on the last day of Passover because Jews were trying to “destroy all white people,” according to prosecutors.
Attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed a police detective in a cemetery and three people at a kosher market in December. Authorities said the attackers, David Anderson and Francine Graham, were motivated by a hatred of Jewish people and law enforcement.
A 37-year-old man, Grafton Thomas, was charged with stabbing five people with a machete at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City. One of the five victims died three months after the Dec. 28 attack. Federal prosecutors said Thomas had handwritten journals containing anti-Semitic comments and a swastika.
The ADL’s report attributed 270 anti-Semitic incidents to extremist groups or individuals. A separate ADL report, released in February, found that 2019 was the sixth deadliest year for violence by all domestic extremists since 1970.
The ADL counted 919 vandalism incidents in 2019, a 19% increase from 774 incidents in 2018.
Two men described by authorities as members of a white supremacist group called The Base were charged with conspiring last year to vandalize synagogues, including Beth Israel Sinai Congregation in Racine, Wisconsin. Even before his synagogue was defaced with swastikas, Rabbi Martyn Adelberg sensed that anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. have been increasing as extremist rhetoric migrates from the internet’s fringes to mainstream platforms.
“It provokes something else, too: an undying outpouring of love,” he said, noting that a crowd of 150 people — at least five times the normal size and consisting mostly of gentiles — attended the first service at the temple after the vandalism. “The support was overwhelming.”
The ADL says it helped authorities identify a suspect accused of plastering white supremacist and anti-Semitic stickers on a display case at Chabad Jewish Center in Ocean City, Maryland. Rabbi Noam Cohen, the center’s director, said anti-Semitism has ebbed and flowed for centuries. He views the vandalism of his center as an isolated incident, not a sign of growing anti-Semitism.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I hope not,” he said.
The ADL tallied 1,127 harassment incidents last year, a 6% increase over 2018. The group defined these incidents as cases in which at least one Jewish person reported feeling harassed by the perceived anti-Semitic words or actions of another person or group.
The ADL report doesn’t try to fully assess online anti-Semitism, but it does include incidents in which individuals or groups received anti-Semitic content in direct messages, on listservs or in social media settings “where they would have the reasonable expectation to not be subjected to anti-Semitism.”
The ADL counted 171 anti-Semitic incidents last year referencing Israel or Zionism, including five instances in which members of a white supremacist group, Patriot Front, protested outside Israel-aligned organizations to oppose “Zionist influence” over the U.S. government.
“Although it is not antisemitic to protest Israeli policies, these protests must be considered within the context of this group’s well-documented antisemitic agenda,” the report says.
The ADL says it tries to avoid conflating general criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. “However, Israel-related harassment of groups or individuals may be included when the harassment incorporates established anti-Jewish references, accusations and/or conspiracy theories, or when they demonize American Jews for their support of Israel,” the report says.
The Jewish civil rights group counted 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in 2019, finding 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism. That’s the highest annual tally since the New York City-based group began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. It also marked a 12% increase over the 1,879 incidents it counted in 2018.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, attributes last year’s record high to a “normalization of anti-Semitic tropes,” the “charged politics of the day” and social media. This year, he said, the COVID-19 pandemic is fueling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“Anti-Semitism is a virus. It is like a disease, and it persists,” Greenblatt said. “It’s sometimes known as the oldest hatred. It never seems to go away. There truly is no single antidote or cure.”
The ADL’s count of anti-Semitic assaults involved 95 victims. More than half of the assaults occurred in New York City, including 25 in Brooklyn. Eight of those Brooklyn assaults happened during a span of eight days in December, primarily in neighborhoods where many Orthodox Jews live.
“Objects were thrown at victims, antisemitic slurs were shouted, and at least three victims were hit or punched in their heads or faces,” says the report first given exclusively to The Associated Press.
The ADL defines an anti-Semitic assault as “an attempt to inflict physical harm on one or more people who are Jewish or perceived to be Jewish, accompanied by evidence of antisemitic animus.” Three of those 2019 assaults were deadly.
A 20-year-old former nursing student, John T. Earnest, awaits trial on charges he killed a woman and wounded three other people during an attack on Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego in April 2019. The gunman told a 911 dispatcher that he shot up the synagogue on the last day of Passover because Jews were trying to “destroy all white people,” according to prosecutors.
Attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed a police detective in a cemetery and three people at a kosher market in December. Authorities said the attackers, David Anderson and Francine Graham, were motivated by a hatred of Jewish people and law enforcement.
A 37-year-old man, Grafton Thomas, was charged with stabbing five people with a machete at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City. One of the five victims died three months after the Dec. 28 attack. Federal prosecutors said Thomas had handwritten journals containing anti-Semitic comments and a swastika.
The ADL’s report attributed 270 anti-Semitic incidents to extremist groups or individuals. A separate ADL report, released in February, found that 2019 was the sixth deadliest year for violence by all domestic extremists since 1970.
The ADL counted 919 vandalism incidents in 2019, a 19% increase from 774 incidents in 2018.
Two men described by authorities as members of a white supremacist group called The Base were charged with conspiring last year to vandalize synagogues, including Beth Israel Sinai Congregation in Racine, Wisconsin. Even before his synagogue was defaced with swastikas, Rabbi Martyn Adelberg sensed that anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. have been increasing as extremist rhetoric migrates from the internet’s fringes to mainstream platforms.
“It provokes something else, too: an undying outpouring of love,” he said, noting that a crowd of 150 people — at least five times the normal size and consisting mostly of gentiles — attended the first service at the temple after the vandalism. “The support was overwhelming.”
The ADL says it helped authorities identify a suspect accused of plastering white supremacist and anti-Semitic stickers on a display case at Chabad Jewish Center in Ocean City, Maryland. Rabbi Noam Cohen, the center’s director, said anti-Semitism has ebbed and flowed for centuries. He views the vandalism of his center as an isolated incident, not a sign of growing anti-Semitism.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I hope not,” he said.
The ADL tallied 1,127 harassment incidents last year, a 6% increase over 2018. The group defined these incidents as cases in which at least one Jewish person reported feeling harassed by the perceived anti-Semitic words or actions of another person or group.
The ADL report doesn’t try to fully assess online anti-Semitism, but it does include incidents in which individuals or groups received anti-Semitic content in direct messages, on listservs or in social media settings “where they would have the reasonable expectation to not be subjected to anti-Semitism.”
The ADL counted 171 anti-Semitic incidents last year referencing Israel or Zionism, including five instances in which members of a white supremacist group, Patriot Front, protested outside Israel-aligned organizations to oppose “Zionist influence” over the U.S. government.
“Although it is not antisemitic to protest Israeli policies, these protests must be considered within the context of this group’s well-documented antisemitic agenda,” the report says.
The ADL says it tries to avoid conflating general criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. “However, Israel-related harassment of groups or individuals may be included when the harassment incorporates established anti-Jewish references, accusations and/or conspiracy theories, or when they demonize American Jews for their support of Israel,” the report says.
An illustration from the 1882 book, ‘Slaves of the Jews,’ showing a line of women, seeking employment, standing before a lecherous man who was obviously Jewish. Library of Congress
South Dakota governor tells Sioux tribes they have 48 hours to remove Covid-19 checkpoints
By Chris Boyette, CNN
Sat May 9, 2020
(CNN)The governor of South Dakota has given an ultimatum to two Sioux tribes: Remove checkpoints on state and US highways within 48 hours or risk legal action.
Gov. Kristi Noem sent letters Friday to the leaders of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe demanding that checkpoints designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus on tribal land be removed, the governor's office said in a statement.
"We are strongest when we work together; this includes our battle against Covid-19," Noem said. "I request that the tribes immediately cease interfering with or regulating traffic on US and State Highways and remove all travel checkpoints."
CNN has reached out to both tribes for comment.According to Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe checkpoint policies posted on its social media, its reservation residents may travel within South Dakota to areas the state has not deemed a Covid-19 "hotspot" if it's for an essential activity such as medical appointments or to get supplies unavailable on the reservation. But they must complete a health questionnaire when they leave and when they return every time they go through a checkpoint.
South Dakota residents who don't live on the reservation are only allowed there if they're not coming from a hotspot and it is for an essential activity. But they must also complete a health questionnaire.
Those from a South Dakota hotspot or from outside the state cannot come to the reservation unless it is for an essential activity -- but they must obtain a travel permit available on the tribe's website.
Both tribes have also issued strict stay-at-home orders and curfews for their communities. Noem has not issued stay-at-home orders for the state.
Last month, when the checkpoints began, the US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a memorandum saying tribes must consult and come to an agreement with the state of South Dakota before closing or restricting travel on state or US Highways.
There are 169 cases of Covid-19 among Native Americans in the state as of Friday, the health department said. The state has 3,145 confirmed cases and 31 deaths.
UPDATE: Sioux tribe rejects South Dakota governor request to remove Covid-19 checkpoints
(CNN)The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has rejected an ultimatum by South Dakota's governor to remove checkpoints on state highways within tribal reservations or risk legal action. Gov. Kristi Noem sent letters Friday to the leaders of both the Oglala ... (CNN)
Gov. Kristi Noem sent letters Friday to the leaders of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe demanding that checkpoints designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus on tribal land be removed, the governor's office said in a statement.
"We are strongest when we work together; this includes our battle against Covid-19," Noem said. "I request that the tribes immediately cease interfering with or regulating traffic on US and State Highways and remove all travel checkpoints."
CNN has reached out to both tribes for comment.According to Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe checkpoint policies posted on its social media, its reservation residents may travel within South Dakota to areas the state has not deemed a Covid-19 "hotspot" if it's for an essential activity such as medical appointments or to get supplies unavailable on the reservation. But they must complete a health questionnaire when they leave and when they return every time they go through a checkpoint.
South Dakota residents who don't live on the reservation are only allowed there if they're not coming from a hotspot and it is for an essential activity. But they must also complete a health questionnaire.
Those from a South Dakota hotspot or from outside the state cannot come to the reservation unless it is for an essential activity -- but they must obtain a travel permit available on the tribe's website.
Both tribes have also issued strict stay-at-home orders and curfews for their communities. Noem has not issued stay-at-home orders for the state.
Last month, when the checkpoints began, the US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a memorandum saying tribes must consult and come to an agreement with the state of South Dakota before closing or restricting travel on state or US Highways.
There are 169 cases of Covid-19 among Native Americans in the state as of Friday, the health department said. The state has 3,145 confirmed cases and 31 deaths.
UPDATE: Sioux tribe rejects South Dakota governor request to remove Covid-19 checkpoints
(CNN)The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has rejected an ultimatum by South Dakota's governor to remove checkpoints on state highways within tribal reservations or risk legal action. Gov. Kristi Noem sent letters Friday to the leaders of both the Oglala ... (CNN)
America defined when lead by a criminal!
Governors Cut Off New Unemployment Benefits Before Some People Even Got Checks
There’s a plague outside, but some states think it’s urgently necessary for people to go to work.
By Arthur Delaney, Emily Peck, and Igor Bobic - huff post
05/08/2020 05:45 am ET
In March, Congress boosted unemployment insurance so that people could stay home and not catch the coronavirus currently killing a thousand Americans a day.
But now, as governors lift restrictions on commerce even amid the mounting death toll, some people are losing eligibility for the benefits ― before receiving a single dime.
Tracy McFetridge is a massage therapist in Springdale, Arkansas, who stopped working in March after Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) ordered a halt to certain business activities.
As a contract worker, McFetridge, 38, would not normally have been eligible for unemployment, but the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Stability (CARES) Act broadened eligibility to include independent contractors. Many states have struggled to update their systems, however, and it wasn’t until last Friday that McFetridge was finally able to file a claim.
That same day, Hutchinson announced that more businesses could reopen ― including massage therapy. And state Secretary of Commerce Michael Preston said anyone claiming unemployment who refused to return to their job could get in trouble.
“That’s a fraudulent claim for us, and we will be tracking that,” Preston said at a news conference with the governor.
The menacing tone shocked McFetridge.
“At that point, I knew they wanted people off unemployment,” she said.
So this week, she returned to the small, windowless room where she gives 60- and 90-minute massages. She still filed her unemployment claim and expects to receive benefits for the month of work she missed, but from now on she’ll be back at her job, changing her shirt between clients and wiping down equipment as much as she can.
“Going back to work and coming back in contact with everybody else’s bubble kind of makes me nervous,” she said.
The unemployment policy battle is a microcosm of the larger debate between public health experts who want people to stay home and President Donald Trump, who wants the nation’s economy to reopen.
The U.S. Labor Department has said that if someone’s employer wants them back, they can’t keep their benefits. There are a few exceptions, such as if a claimant has been diagnosed with the coronavirus or they have to watch their children because of school closures. But the department has specifically said workers can’t refuse employment just because they don’t want to contract COVID-19, the highly contagious and mysterious illness caused by the coronavirus.
Nevertheless, there may be some wiggle room on what counts as “suitable work” under the law, said Michele Evermore, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.
“Workers could argue that the conditions are no longer safe and try to refuse work in the first place instead of going in,” she said.
Workers can also quit for health and safety reasons if their employer isn’t following guidelines from public health experts and in some states still receive benefits, Evermore said.
Arkansas is probably not one of the friendlier states to workers. It’s one of several asking employers to report any former employees who refuse to come back. It is also one of about 20 states that hasn’t yet managed to provide the special pandemic unemployment assistance that Congress promised to workers like McFetridge at the end of March.
Congress expanded the jobless benefits and added an unprecedented $600 per week in order to encourage people to stay home, since social distancing is essentially the only effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19, for which there is no vaccine yet and no cure. But Republicans have simply complained that the benefits will stop people from taking jobs.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the Senate Democrats who crafted the expanded unemployment benefits, said Republicans are undermining the foundation of the government’s response to the pandemic.
“I mean, you’ve got a million Americans infected. Deaths averaging almost 2,000 per day. It’s very important that folks stay home until it’s safe to go back to work,” Wyden told HuffPost. “I believe the law is clear that benefits should continue until the economic crisis has passed and that people should get these benefits as Congress intended.”
The extra $600 is set to expire at the end of July, but the economy is unlikely to be back on track by then, and the pandemic may still be raging. Lawmakers are now debating whether to pass another law addressing the economic fallout, and unemployment policy is already one of the biggest disagreements.
Wyden and other Democrats want the benefits phased out only if economic conditions improve; the Republicans who were vocal in opposing the extra $600 say they will insist on changes.
“You can’t pay people more than they’re making. It just hurts our small businesses,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told HuffPost this week.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), meanwhile, said, “We’re not extending it without fewer dollars.”
When Arkansas said barbers, cosmetologists, tattoo artists and massage therapists could return to work this week, the state listed some “required precautions,” including “appropriate social distancing,” even though massage typically involves physical touch.
McFetridge knows most of her regular clients have been staying home, but she has a new client this weekend and doesn’t know whether that person has been social distancing. She said she wishes Arkansas hadn’t followed the lead of states like Georgia in reopening nonessential businesses, especially since the outcome in those states could demonstrate whether reopening is safe.
“They should have played the wait-and-see game,” McFetridge said.
But now, as governors lift restrictions on commerce even amid the mounting death toll, some people are losing eligibility for the benefits ― before receiving a single dime.
Tracy McFetridge is a massage therapist in Springdale, Arkansas, who stopped working in March after Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) ordered a halt to certain business activities.
As a contract worker, McFetridge, 38, would not normally have been eligible for unemployment, but the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Stability (CARES) Act broadened eligibility to include independent contractors. Many states have struggled to update their systems, however, and it wasn’t until last Friday that McFetridge was finally able to file a claim.
That same day, Hutchinson announced that more businesses could reopen ― including massage therapy. And state Secretary of Commerce Michael Preston said anyone claiming unemployment who refused to return to their job could get in trouble.
“That’s a fraudulent claim for us, and we will be tracking that,” Preston said at a news conference with the governor.
The menacing tone shocked McFetridge.
“At that point, I knew they wanted people off unemployment,” she said.
So this week, she returned to the small, windowless room where she gives 60- and 90-minute massages. She still filed her unemployment claim and expects to receive benefits for the month of work she missed, but from now on she’ll be back at her job, changing her shirt between clients and wiping down equipment as much as she can.
“Going back to work and coming back in contact with everybody else’s bubble kind of makes me nervous,” she said.
The unemployment policy battle is a microcosm of the larger debate between public health experts who want people to stay home and President Donald Trump, who wants the nation’s economy to reopen.
The U.S. Labor Department has said that if someone’s employer wants them back, they can’t keep their benefits. There are a few exceptions, such as if a claimant has been diagnosed with the coronavirus or they have to watch their children because of school closures. But the department has specifically said workers can’t refuse employment just because they don’t want to contract COVID-19, the highly contagious and mysterious illness caused by the coronavirus.
Nevertheless, there may be some wiggle room on what counts as “suitable work” under the law, said Michele Evermore, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.
“Workers could argue that the conditions are no longer safe and try to refuse work in the first place instead of going in,” she said.
Workers can also quit for health and safety reasons if their employer isn’t following guidelines from public health experts and in some states still receive benefits, Evermore said.
Arkansas is probably not one of the friendlier states to workers. It’s one of several asking employers to report any former employees who refuse to come back. It is also one of about 20 states that hasn’t yet managed to provide the special pandemic unemployment assistance that Congress promised to workers like McFetridge at the end of March.
Congress expanded the jobless benefits and added an unprecedented $600 per week in order to encourage people to stay home, since social distancing is essentially the only effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19, for which there is no vaccine yet and no cure. But Republicans have simply complained that the benefits will stop people from taking jobs.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the Senate Democrats who crafted the expanded unemployment benefits, said Republicans are undermining the foundation of the government’s response to the pandemic.
“I mean, you’ve got a million Americans infected. Deaths averaging almost 2,000 per day. It’s very important that folks stay home until it’s safe to go back to work,” Wyden told HuffPost. “I believe the law is clear that benefits should continue until the economic crisis has passed and that people should get these benefits as Congress intended.”
The extra $600 is set to expire at the end of July, but the economy is unlikely to be back on track by then, and the pandemic may still be raging. Lawmakers are now debating whether to pass another law addressing the economic fallout, and unemployment policy is already one of the biggest disagreements.
Wyden and other Democrats want the benefits phased out only if economic conditions improve; the Republicans who were vocal in opposing the extra $600 say they will insist on changes.
“You can’t pay people more than they’re making. It just hurts our small businesses,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told HuffPost this week.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), meanwhile, said, “We’re not extending it without fewer dollars.”
When Arkansas said barbers, cosmetologists, tattoo artists and massage therapists could return to work this week, the state listed some “required precautions,” including “appropriate social distancing,” even though massage typically involves physical touch.
McFetridge knows most of her regular clients have been staying home, but she has a new client this weekend and doesn’t know whether that person has been social distancing. She said she wishes Arkansas hadn’t followed the lead of states like Georgia in reopening nonessential businesses, especially since the outcome in those states could demonstrate whether reopening is safe.
“They should have played the wait-and-see game,” McFetridge said.
a state run by racists republicans!!!
Millions in Mississippi welfare funds misused on vehicles, concert tickets, Brett Favre: state audit
BY JOHN BOWDEN - the hill
05/05/20 09:40 AM EDT
An audit released Monday by Mississippi's state auditor found that officials had misused millions of federal dollars intended for the state's neediest families.
The report, from Mississippi's Office of the State Auditor, found that $94 million in total could either not be accounted for or had been spent on questionable purposes, more than 90 percent of what the state has received over the last three years.
The report is part of the largest investigation into misuse of welfare funds in state history and has already resulted in the arrest of the Mississippi Department of Human Services' former head, John Davis, in February.
The money came as part of the federally funded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provided state officials $98 million over the last three years to be distributed at officials' discretion to state programs and nonprofit groups supposed to help Mississippi's poor. Nearly all of that money was misused, according to the audit.
“This completed audit of DHS for the previous year shows the most egregious misspending my staff have seen in their careers at the Office of the State Auditor,” said state auditor Shad White.
“When you read this one-hundred-plus page audit, you will see that, if there was a way to misspend money, it seems DHS leadership or their grantees thought of it and tried it," White added.
Among the expenditures was $1.1 million sent to a nonprofit connected to retired NFL star Brett Favre for a speaking arrangement; Favre reportedly never attended, according to The New York Times. Other recipients of the money used it for a wide range of unapproved activities, such as concert tickets and new vehicles.
One of the prime beneficiaries of the misused money, according to the audit, was Nancy New, the founder of a chain of private schools who used the funds to pay a speeding ticket and received as much as $6 million from the program, which her family used for a wide range of purposes including the purchase of three trucks.
TANF money was also reportedly used to advertise during an NCAA game and to purchase tickets to a college football match.
“DHS staff should immediately move to seize any property that was purchased by grantees with taxpayer money, as that property belongs to the taxpayers,” added White. “That property does not belong to the Auditor’s office, so we cannot do this for them, but it should be marked as DHS property, and DHS should use their legal authority and move quickly to seize it."
The report, from Mississippi's Office of the State Auditor, found that $94 million in total could either not be accounted for or had been spent on questionable purposes, more than 90 percent of what the state has received over the last three years.
The report is part of the largest investigation into misuse of welfare funds in state history and has already resulted in the arrest of the Mississippi Department of Human Services' former head, John Davis, in February.
The money came as part of the federally funded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provided state officials $98 million over the last three years to be distributed at officials' discretion to state programs and nonprofit groups supposed to help Mississippi's poor. Nearly all of that money was misused, according to the audit.
“This completed audit of DHS for the previous year shows the most egregious misspending my staff have seen in their careers at the Office of the State Auditor,” said state auditor Shad White.
“When you read this one-hundred-plus page audit, you will see that, if there was a way to misspend money, it seems DHS leadership or their grantees thought of it and tried it," White added.
Among the expenditures was $1.1 million sent to a nonprofit connected to retired NFL star Brett Favre for a speaking arrangement; Favre reportedly never attended, according to The New York Times. Other recipients of the money used it for a wide range of unapproved activities, such as concert tickets and new vehicles.
One of the prime beneficiaries of the misused money, according to the audit, was Nancy New, the founder of a chain of private schools who used the funds to pay a speeding ticket and received as much as $6 million from the program, which her family used for a wide range of purposes including the purchase of three trucks.
TANF money was also reportedly used to advertise during an NCAA game and to purchase tickets to a college football match.
“DHS staff should immediately move to seize any property that was purchased by grantees with taxpayer money, as that property belongs to the taxpayers,” added White. “That property does not belong to the Auditor’s office, so we cannot do this for them, but it should be marked as DHS property, and DHS should use their legal authority and move quickly to seize it."
What Trump has revealed about America should embarrass us all: Our country is exceptional in some of the worst ways
May 1, 2020
By Sonali Kolhatkar, Independent Media Institute- Commentary - raw story
“America First,” has been a pronouncement of pride for President Donald Trump and millions of his supporters. Today they have gotten their wish as the United States leads the world during a global deadly pandemic, racing well past other nations in the numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths. It may not be the “first place” spot that they desire or expect. But it should come as no surprise, for anyone paying attention to the deliberate design of the U.S. economy and infrastructure could have predicted the pandemic’s impact. And indeed, our national hubris may have been our biggest weakness.
The pressure to conform to the delusions of American exceptionalism has blinded us to our vulnerabilities. We have ignored the perils of our health care system because America was too great to fail. We have looked past ever-increasing wealth inequality because the riches of the wealthy were a measure of our greatness. We have dismissed racial and gender disparities because to admit them would mar the shine of mythical America.
Over many decades, successive administrations have sucked up our collective resources in order to nurture the military and line the pockets of the ultrarich, leaving our social safety net so threadbare that we might as well be on our own. Throughout this crisis, Americans have received little guidance from the federal government beyond dangerous speculations of unproven treatments. A nation with a patchwork private/public health care system that is expensive to run and offers little protection when we need it the most was destined to fail in a widespread health crisis. Conservative forces have shaped the U.S. into a society where the notion of “survival of the fittest” guides us. And indeed, in recent weeks conservatives have even said out loud what was usually implied—that the weakest among us may well die, and that is perfectly fine as long as the stock market continues to boom.
Our national hubris has been a bipartisan affair. Even President Barack Obama tended to fall into the trap, invoking American exceptionalism often in his speeches. But as the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated with clarity, ideas of the U.S.’s superiority have essentially been delusions of grandeur. They have blinded us to the inevitable failures of an empire that invested in military jets over Medicare for All. Being the world’s wealthiest nation and having the world’s mightiest military means nothing in the face of a crisis like the one we face now—or in the face of future crises like catastrophic climate change.
It is tempting to consider that President Donald Trump’s ineptitude is what is killing so many Americans, but his negligence is deliberate. For months Trump ignored the warning signs of the virus that he was presented with by his own intelligence agencies. Months more passed since the pandemic was declared with no serious, medically guided federal plan to tackle the crisis beyond passing on responsibility to state governments and above all, a desire to reopen the economy. Trump has no plan to save actual lives. His only goal is to buoy those economic indicators that he is relying on touting as a basis for reelection.
It is in this context that the New York Times on April 23 published a report about the disappointment among outsiders at the state of America under Trump’s presidency, ravaged by the coronavirus. Titled, “‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership,” writer Katrin Bennhold lamented how the pandemic is, “perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.” Two days later the same paper published another piece on the same topic titled, “Will a Pandemic Shatter the Perception of American Exceptionalism?” In it, writer Jennifer Schuessler explores a profound “struggle to reconcile the crisis with the nation’s self-image.” But America was never exceptional in the ways that historians and self-declared pundits have imagined.
Offering a harsher and more honest view of the U.S., Calvin Woodward wrote in Associated Press one day after Bennhold’s piece was published that, “Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism.’” Woodward pithily wrote, “A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.” Perhaps the most cringe-inducing critique of American exceptionalism came from Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who wrote, that the “one emotion that has never been directed toward the U.S. until now” is “pity.”
It should embarrass all Americans that while other nations have organized well-thought-out, science-based and aggressive approaches to slowing down the virus spread, the wealthiest nation on the planet has failed so spectacularly on the public stage. It might be funny except that more Americans have died from COVID-19 than were killed during the Vietnam war.
But America’s actions have been an embarrassment well before this pandemic. Even setting aside the origins of this land’s conquest paid for by the blood of indigenous Americans, or the building of economic might on the backs of enslaved Africans, our history is marked with blood, inequality, incarceration, mass shootings, war, waste, over-consumption, and pollution—all rooted in self-righteous nationalism.
The truth is America does stand out—in some of the worst ways. We are exceptional for having survived so long without a national health program, and for continuing to tolerate obscene inequality that constantly favors the wealthy over the rest of us. This nation is exceptional for imprisoning a larger percentage of our population than any other nation and for continuing to live with the constant specter of gun violence. We are exceptional in being at war for most of the past several centuries. And of course, we are exceptional in having a population large enough to elect a president as horrifying as Donald Trump. These are truly the things that have made America exceptional.
The pressure to conform to the delusions of American exceptionalism has blinded us to our vulnerabilities. We have ignored the perils of our health care system because America was too great to fail. We have looked past ever-increasing wealth inequality because the riches of the wealthy were a measure of our greatness. We have dismissed racial and gender disparities because to admit them would mar the shine of mythical America.
Over many decades, successive administrations have sucked up our collective resources in order to nurture the military and line the pockets of the ultrarich, leaving our social safety net so threadbare that we might as well be on our own. Throughout this crisis, Americans have received little guidance from the federal government beyond dangerous speculations of unproven treatments. A nation with a patchwork private/public health care system that is expensive to run and offers little protection when we need it the most was destined to fail in a widespread health crisis. Conservative forces have shaped the U.S. into a society where the notion of “survival of the fittest” guides us. And indeed, in recent weeks conservatives have even said out loud what was usually implied—that the weakest among us may well die, and that is perfectly fine as long as the stock market continues to boom.
Our national hubris has been a bipartisan affair. Even President Barack Obama tended to fall into the trap, invoking American exceptionalism often in his speeches. But as the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated with clarity, ideas of the U.S.’s superiority have essentially been delusions of grandeur. They have blinded us to the inevitable failures of an empire that invested in military jets over Medicare for All. Being the world’s wealthiest nation and having the world’s mightiest military means nothing in the face of a crisis like the one we face now—or in the face of future crises like catastrophic climate change.
It is tempting to consider that President Donald Trump’s ineptitude is what is killing so many Americans, but his negligence is deliberate. For months Trump ignored the warning signs of the virus that he was presented with by his own intelligence agencies. Months more passed since the pandemic was declared with no serious, medically guided federal plan to tackle the crisis beyond passing on responsibility to state governments and above all, a desire to reopen the economy. Trump has no plan to save actual lives. His only goal is to buoy those economic indicators that he is relying on touting as a basis for reelection.
It is in this context that the New York Times on April 23 published a report about the disappointment among outsiders at the state of America under Trump’s presidency, ravaged by the coronavirus. Titled, “‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership,” writer Katrin Bennhold lamented how the pandemic is, “perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.” Two days later the same paper published another piece on the same topic titled, “Will a Pandemic Shatter the Perception of American Exceptionalism?” In it, writer Jennifer Schuessler explores a profound “struggle to reconcile the crisis with the nation’s self-image.” But America was never exceptional in the ways that historians and self-declared pundits have imagined.
Offering a harsher and more honest view of the U.S., Calvin Woodward wrote in Associated Press one day after Bennhold’s piece was published that, “Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism.’” Woodward pithily wrote, “A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.” Perhaps the most cringe-inducing critique of American exceptionalism came from Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who wrote, that the “one emotion that has never been directed toward the U.S. until now” is “pity.”
It should embarrass all Americans that while other nations have organized well-thought-out, science-based and aggressive approaches to slowing down the virus spread, the wealthiest nation on the planet has failed so spectacularly on the public stage. It might be funny except that more Americans have died from COVID-19 than were killed during the Vietnam war.
But America’s actions have been an embarrassment well before this pandemic. Even setting aside the origins of this land’s conquest paid for by the blood of indigenous Americans, or the building of economic might on the backs of enslaved Africans, our history is marked with blood, inequality, incarceration, mass shootings, war, waste, over-consumption, and pollution—all rooted in self-righteous nationalism.
The truth is America does stand out—in some of the worst ways. We are exceptional for having survived so long without a national health program, and for continuing to tolerate obscene inequality that constantly favors the wealthy over the rest of us. This nation is exceptional for imprisoning a larger percentage of our population than any other nation and for continuing to live with the constant specter of gun violence. We are exceptional in being at war for most of the past several centuries. And of course, we are exceptional in having a population large enough to elect a president as horrifying as Donald Trump. These are truly the things that have made America exceptional.
Home of the brave? Coronavirus epidemic reveals America's fundamental weakness
Despite America's national mythology, this crisis has revealed a weak, divided and totally unprepared nation
DAVID MASCIOTRA - salon
MARCH 21, 2020 4:00PM (UTC)
The United States of America is a weak country. All the flag-waving, patriotic speeches and obtuse declarations of superiority have long seemed overly conspicuous — and history has no sympathy for the delusional. It continually exposes the vulnerability, fragility and inanity of a nation that has the wealth, resources and human intelligence to cultivate a magnificent civilization, but repeatedly sacrifices the common interest and public good on the altar of avarice.
Our military extends itself into every inch of the planet, starting wars that it cannot win, while more than half our nation's discretionary budget in any given year is wasted on the Pentagon. Runaway militarism was useless on Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 terrorists, armed with boxcutters, brought the country to its knees. Academic and CIA experts on Osama bin Laden — the mastermind of the evil attack — agreed that one of his aspirations was to draw America into lengthy wars with ambiguous missions, depleting its treasury and morale as the days of battle and the body count grew in number. The U.S. recited its lines as if from bin Laden's script, sending thousands of troops to die and setting fire to $6 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some of that money could have saved lives had the Bush administration heeded the warnings of the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana authorities, and replaced the levees in New Orleans. Its failure to repair the weakened infrastructure protecting one of America's greatest cities was responsible for unnecessary death and destruction when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast. For several days in the summer of 2005, the world watched as the United States was helpless to save its citizens, who pleaded for help on the rooftops of flooded homes or struggled through the squalor of the Superdome – a football stadium turned makeshift shelter without sufficient food, hygienic products or medical supplies to properly care for children in the "world's last remaining superpower."
The mad-dog greed of corporate America, the finance industry, and the "too big to fail" banks coupled with nonsensical free-market fundamentalism to initiate a bipartisan deregulatory agenda and the slashing of social services. In 2008, the bill arrived. The housing market crashed: Millions of people lost their homes and many more lost their jobs. The liquidation of middle-class wealth, particularly severe for black and Latino homeowners, continues to drag the country down into a miasma of shame, rage and suspicion. While the Obama administration was successful in preventing a full-blown depression, there has been no real recovery for the 50 percent of Americans who have no savings or the millions who struggle, second by second, in the cruel category of "working poor."
The poor and working class will suffer the most pain and hardship as the entire country undergoes a lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus. There is nothing like a pandemic to put into perspective all the red, white and blue chest-pounding, exposing "American exceptionalism" as a bad joke.
Once again, the world's richest country was tragically unprepared and ill-equipped for a crisis. Insufficient testing capacities make the severity of coronavirus a mystery within America's borders, while a dysfunctionally narrow, business-oriented health care system prevents many people, including those with chronic conditions, from receiving the treatment they need.
President Trump had already failed to replace the global pandemic response team at the National Security Council after their mass resignation. He had also closed 39 of the 49 CDC offices overseas, and ended the program called Predict, which had the principal task of studying animal-borne diseases to determine which ones might go viral among humans.
American leadership has failed to summon the will to create adequate remote testing centers, build anywhere near enough ventilators, or even convince all of the nation's governors and big-city mayors to cancel public gatherings. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma has donated one million testing kits to America, and the Italians have donated 500,000. President Trump, displaying his own generosity and goodwill, attempted to bribe German scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine to sell the rights exclusively to the U.S.
Never one to miss an opportunity for promoting racism, Trump has also taken to referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus." One of his aides, showing off a psychopath's sense of humor, called it the "Kung Flu."
Deepening America's medical, financial and political wounds is the dangerous ignorance of nearly half the electorate. Only 56 percent of Americans consider coronavirus a "real threat," according to an NPR/PBS/Marist poll. NPR also reports that 60 percent of Republicans do not believe that the pandemic is a "menace." There is a strong statistical overlap between those who care little about the coronavirus, think that climate change is a left-wing hoax, and would continue to support Donald Trump if he broadcast the decapitation of his political enemies from the White House lawn.
Americans who believe in scientific evidence and adhere to a conception of the common good will have to find a way coexist with those who think the answer to every problem is more ammunition, tax cuts for the rich, and shouting about "freedom." But public education and the mass media must begin taking decisive measures to guard against widespread stupidity in future generations. A country cannot thrive when nearly half of its adults are in open revolt against reality.
Improvements to public schools and public communication require the same investment of funds and personnel as building safer infrastructure, creating a medical system that works for all its citizens, and regulating industry for the protection and prosperity of workers and consumers.
The prevalent philosophy of individualism in the United States discourages, and at times even demolishes, communal thinking. There is a close connection between the widespread social and cultural isolation that exists in so many American communities and our inability to create laws and institutions of governance that work in the common interest.
Footage of Italians in quarantine singing to each other from apartment balconies and rooftops has inspired the world. Rather than suffer alone, even when immobile, the Italian people are sharing with each other the gift of music, amplifying its beauty and faith in the possibility of human triumph over adversity.
Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the picture is a bit different. The Los Angeles Times reports that "gun sales are surging."
Our military extends itself into every inch of the planet, starting wars that it cannot win, while more than half our nation's discretionary budget in any given year is wasted on the Pentagon. Runaway militarism was useless on Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 terrorists, armed with boxcutters, brought the country to its knees. Academic and CIA experts on Osama bin Laden — the mastermind of the evil attack — agreed that one of his aspirations was to draw America into lengthy wars with ambiguous missions, depleting its treasury and morale as the days of battle and the body count grew in number. The U.S. recited its lines as if from bin Laden's script, sending thousands of troops to die and setting fire to $6 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some of that money could have saved lives had the Bush administration heeded the warnings of the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana authorities, and replaced the levees in New Orleans. Its failure to repair the weakened infrastructure protecting one of America's greatest cities was responsible for unnecessary death and destruction when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast. For several days in the summer of 2005, the world watched as the United States was helpless to save its citizens, who pleaded for help on the rooftops of flooded homes or struggled through the squalor of the Superdome – a football stadium turned makeshift shelter without sufficient food, hygienic products or medical supplies to properly care for children in the "world's last remaining superpower."
The mad-dog greed of corporate America, the finance industry, and the "too big to fail" banks coupled with nonsensical free-market fundamentalism to initiate a bipartisan deregulatory agenda and the slashing of social services. In 2008, the bill arrived. The housing market crashed: Millions of people lost their homes and many more lost their jobs. The liquidation of middle-class wealth, particularly severe for black and Latino homeowners, continues to drag the country down into a miasma of shame, rage and suspicion. While the Obama administration was successful in preventing a full-blown depression, there has been no real recovery for the 50 percent of Americans who have no savings or the millions who struggle, second by second, in the cruel category of "working poor."
The poor and working class will suffer the most pain and hardship as the entire country undergoes a lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus. There is nothing like a pandemic to put into perspective all the red, white and blue chest-pounding, exposing "American exceptionalism" as a bad joke.
Once again, the world's richest country was tragically unprepared and ill-equipped for a crisis. Insufficient testing capacities make the severity of coronavirus a mystery within America's borders, while a dysfunctionally narrow, business-oriented health care system prevents many people, including those with chronic conditions, from receiving the treatment they need.
President Trump had already failed to replace the global pandemic response team at the National Security Council after their mass resignation. He had also closed 39 of the 49 CDC offices overseas, and ended the program called Predict, which had the principal task of studying animal-borne diseases to determine which ones might go viral among humans.
American leadership has failed to summon the will to create adequate remote testing centers, build anywhere near enough ventilators, or even convince all of the nation's governors and big-city mayors to cancel public gatherings. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma has donated one million testing kits to America, and the Italians have donated 500,000. President Trump, displaying his own generosity and goodwill, attempted to bribe German scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine to sell the rights exclusively to the U.S.
Never one to miss an opportunity for promoting racism, Trump has also taken to referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus." One of his aides, showing off a psychopath's sense of humor, called it the "Kung Flu."
Deepening America's medical, financial and political wounds is the dangerous ignorance of nearly half the electorate. Only 56 percent of Americans consider coronavirus a "real threat," according to an NPR/PBS/Marist poll. NPR also reports that 60 percent of Republicans do not believe that the pandemic is a "menace." There is a strong statistical overlap between those who care little about the coronavirus, think that climate change is a left-wing hoax, and would continue to support Donald Trump if he broadcast the decapitation of his political enemies from the White House lawn.
Americans who believe in scientific evidence and adhere to a conception of the common good will have to find a way coexist with those who think the answer to every problem is more ammunition, tax cuts for the rich, and shouting about "freedom." But public education and the mass media must begin taking decisive measures to guard against widespread stupidity in future generations. A country cannot thrive when nearly half of its adults are in open revolt against reality.
Improvements to public schools and public communication require the same investment of funds and personnel as building safer infrastructure, creating a medical system that works for all its citizens, and regulating industry for the protection and prosperity of workers and consumers.
The prevalent philosophy of individualism in the United States discourages, and at times even demolishes, communal thinking. There is a close connection between the widespread social and cultural isolation that exists in so many American communities and our inability to create laws and institutions of governance that work in the common interest.
Footage of Italians in quarantine singing to each other from apartment balconies and rooftops has inspired the world. Rather than suffer alone, even when immobile, the Italian people are sharing with each other the gift of music, amplifying its beauty and faith in the possibility of human triumph over adversity.
Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the picture is a bit different. The Los Angeles Times reports that "gun sales are surging."
a country of know-nothings!!!
Holocaust
Half of Americans don’t know 6m Jews were killed in Holocaust, survey says
45% gave the correct answer, Pew Research Center survey finds
Some people believe ignorance linked to rise in antisemitism
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
the guardian
Wed 22 Jan 2020 10.42 EST
Fewer than half of American adults know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, according to a survey published ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.
45% of those asked by the Pew Research Center about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis gave the correct answer of approximately 6 million.
From multiple choice answers, 12% selected about 3 million, and 2% selected less than 1 million. Another 12% said more than 12 million Jews died in the Holocaust. One in three people (29%) said they were not sure or did not answer.
According to the survey of almost 11,000 Americans, 69% said the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. One in 10 people thought it took place between 1910 and 1930, and 2% answered between 1890 and 1910. One in 100 people thought it was later than second world war, answering 1950-1970; and 18% did not know or gave no answer.
Some people believe ignorance about the Holocaust is linked to a rise in antisemitism. There are also concerns that, as living witnesses to Nazi atrocities and the death camps dwindle in number, the Holocaust is receding in the collective memory.
The Anti-Defamation League annual audit of antisemitic incidents in the US for 2018 recorded the third-highest total since the civil rights group began publishing data 40 years ago.
According to the New York Times, a report soon to be published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University says antisemitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the three largest cities in the US – are poised to hit an 18-year peak.
Last month, a man armed with a knife forced his way into the home of a New York rabbi during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, wounding five people. In October 2018, 11 people were killed and six injured in a shooting attack at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Pew survey also found that only 43% of respondents knew that Hitler became German chancellor through a democratic political process, with one in four people believing he and his supporters violently overthrew the government.
The Pew report, What Americans Know About the Holocaust, said the findings raised an important question: “Are those who underestimate the death toll simply uninformed, or are they Holocaust deniers – people with antisemitic views who ‘claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests’?”
The researchers found some correlation between correct answers and warmer feelings among non-Jews towards Jews. Those answering at least three of the four multiple-choice questions correctly had, on average, a 67% “warmth rating” towards Jews.
January 27 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the death camp in German-occupied Poland where some 1.2 million people were killed. Up to 200 survivors are expected to attend a memorial service at the camp, and there will be commemorations around the world.
45% of those asked by the Pew Research Center about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis gave the correct answer of approximately 6 million.
From multiple choice answers, 12% selected about 3 million, and 2% selected less than 1 million. Another 12% said more than 12 million Jews died in the Holocaust. One in three people (29%) said they were not sure or did not answer.
According to the survey of almost 11,000 Americans, 69% said the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. One in 10 people thought it took place between 1910 and 1930, and 2% answered between 1890 and 1910. One in 100 people thought it was later than second world war, answering 1950-1970; and 18% did not know or gave no answer.
Some people believe ignorance about the Holocaust is linked to a rise in antisemitism. There are also concerns that, as living witnesses to Nazi atrocities and the death camps dwindle in number, the Holocaust is receding in the collective memory.
The Anti-Defamation League annual audit of antisemitic incidents in the US for 2018 recorded the third-highest total since the civil rights group began publishing data 40 years ago.
According to the New York Times, a report soon to be published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University says antisemitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the three largest cities in the US – are poised to hit an 18-year peak.
Last month, a man armed with a knife forced his way into the home of a New York rabbi during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, wounding five people. In October 2018, 11 people were killed and six injured in a shooting attack at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Pew survey also found that only 43% of respondents knew that Hitler became German chancellor through a democratic political process, with one in four people believing he and his supporters violently overthrew the government.
The Pew report, What Americans Know About the Holocaust, said the findings raised an important question: “Are those who underestimate the death toll simply uninformed, or are they Holocaust deniers – people with antisemitic views who ‘claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests’?”
The researchers found some correlation between correct answers and warmer feelings among non-Jews towards Jews. Those answering at least three of the four multiple-choice questions correctly had, on average, a 67% “warmth rating” towards Jews.
January 27 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the death camp in German-occupied Poland where some 1.2 million people were killed. Up to 200 survivors are expected to attend a memorial service at the camp, and there will be commemorations around the world.
The 10 Most, Least Educated US States
Massachusetts comes in at No. 1, Mississippi is last
By Jenn Gidman, Newser Staff
Posted Jan 20, 2020 9:35 AM CST
(NEWSER) – Looking to surround yourself with brainiacs? Some states have more of an emphasis on education than others, and WalletHub looked at the data to see which ones graduate at the top of the class. The site analyzed all 50 states in terms of educational attainment (meaning such factors as the share of adults with a high school diploma, as well as what levels of higher education others have reached) and the quality of education, including local high school graduation rates, math and reading test scores, and racial and gender gaps in getting an education. Massachusetts leads the pack, coming in first in both the "educational attainment" and "quality of education" categories. Mississippi brings up the rear.
The most educated: Gee, I don't see any Red States, i.e. Republican controlled states (New Hampshire - purple)
The least educated states: Excluding Nevada & New Mexico, the rest are all Republican controlled!!
The most educated: Gee, I don't see any Red States, i.e. Republican controlled states (New Hampshire - purple)
- Massachusetts
- Maryland
- Colorado
- Vermont
- Connecticut
- Virginia
- Washington
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- Minnesota
The least educated states: Excluding Nevada & New Mexico, the rest are all Republican controlled!!
- Mississippi
- West Virginia
- Louisiana
- Arkansas
- Alabama
- Kentucky
- South Carolina
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- Tennessee
*demograpic change in america*
THE RACIAL AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1970–2050, BASED ON DATA FROM THE STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU. THE UNITED STATES IS PROJECTED TO GROW MORE DIVERSE IN THE YEARS AHEAD. CREDIT: CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
Fourth of July's ugly truth exposed: The Declaration of Independence is sexist, racist, prejudiced
How we can embrace the underlying spirit of the Declaration of Independence — and also learn from its shortcomings
MATTHEW ROZSA - Salon
JULY 4, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)
It is painful to write about the shortcomings of the Declaration of Independence. The historic document was officially approved by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 — a mere two days after the Lee Resolution formally declared the American colonies to be independent of the British Empire. Because the American colonists ultimately prevailed in their revolution against King George III, the document has been immortalized as one of the opening salvos in the ongoing fight for human freedom that continues to this very day. Without this seminal text, every social justice movement that has followed would never have come to pass.
Yet despite its overwhelmingly positive impact on history, the Declaration of Independence was also a product of its time — and bears some of the shortcomings of its era, including sexism, racism and prejudice against Native Americans. Here is a look at the events leading up to the creation of that document, as well as involved in its actual signing, which one must inspect for a more rounded look at this period in history:
1. It did not condemn slavery.
In the original list of grievances against King George III, future President Thomas Jefferson — who co-authored the document along with future President John Adams, as well as Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Richard Sherman — wrote that "he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither."
These words were cruelly ironic coming from Jefferson, who was an unrepentant racist and a slave owner — more on that in a moment. Nevertheless, even he acknowledged that slavery was an "abominable crime" and ultimately wished to see it purged from the new country. However, since southern support for the American Revolution was critical to its success, Jefferson ultimately scrapped that passage in order to keep the colonies united against their common enemy.
Yet the story is not quite as simple as Jefferson succumbing to political expedience; he had selfish and bigoted motives for supporting slavery that, in the end, outweighed his moral and logical reasons for opposing it. In 1782, only six years after drafting the Declaration of Independence, he offered these thoughts on the differences between whites and African-Americans:
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made ... will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. ... They have less hair on the face and body.
They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
These views are not surprising coming from a man who, over the course of his life, enslaved more than 600 people.
2. It did not protect the rights of women.
Less than four months before the Declaration of Independence was ratified, Abigail Adams — the wife of future President John Adams and thus a future first lady — urged her husband to "Remember the Ladies" when contemplating the legal premises that should guide the nascent republic. Her argument deserves to be reprinted in full:
I long to hear that you have declared an independancy and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
Adams' response was, to say the least, tone deaf and unsympathetic. From patronizingly saying, "I cannot but laugh" at his wife's suggestion — to sounding like a proto-MRA in arguing that "we have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat" — Adams' response would fit right in with the modern alt-right. (To be clear, Adams lived in 1776 and was a genuine hero with courage and principle, qualities which would never be found in a member of the alt-right.)
As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient -- that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent -- that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. -- This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.
Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. I am sure every good Politician would plot, as long as he would against Despotism, Empire, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Ochlocracy. -- A fine Story indeed. I begin to think the Ministry as deep as they are wicked. After stirring up Tories, Landjobbers, Trimmers, Bigots, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholicks, Scotch Renegadoes, at last they have stimulated the to demand new Priviledges and threaten to rebell.
Needless to say, while some scholars have argued that the use of the term "men" instead of a gender neutral equivalent like "people" in phrases like "all men are created equal" was incidental, comments like those made by Adams suggest a more unfortunate explanation.
3. To the disadvantage of Native Americans, Jefferson replaced the phrase "property" with happiness when saying that human beings' basic rights include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
In theory, it is a good thing for someone to say that our inalienable rights amount to more than the acquisition of material goods, such as land and currency. And to be fair, Jefferson was almost certainly inspired by the philosopher John Locke, who wrote the following in 1690:
The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with, our real happiness: and therefore, till we are as much informed upon this inquiry as the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands, we are, by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires in particular cases.
That said, there is another interpretation of why "happiness" was replaced with "property" — one that has less to do with Enlightenment philosophy and more with ensuring that specific marginalized groups could not assert their rights. As historian Peter Garnsey wrote in his book "Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution," Jefferson's excision of the word "property" might have been partially driven by a desire to avoid legitimizing the institution of slavery — which would have certainly been a good reason — but he might have also been motivated by a less seemly sentiment.
But there were also the 'Indians' (Native Americans). American leaders could not stop settlers from taking over Indian land, nor did they want to. Jefferson writing in 1801 as President to the Governor of Virginia spoke of his dream that white farmers would 'cover the whole northern if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.' Jefferson himself together with associates had been acquiring Indian from the 1760s. As for Indians who did not cede their land peacefully, they could be forced to do so in a 'just war.' Warfare was in progress on the frontiers of Virginia just when Jefferson was preparing his draft for the Declaration of Independence — fomented, he charged, by the British. At the same time Jefferson and many other leading politicians did not claim that the Indians, though primitive peoples, had no natural rights, including the 'right of soil.' However, if there was a natural right to property, virtually all property held by descendants of European settlers would have been under suspicion. Jefferson was as inconsistent over the Indians as he was over slavery.
Considering that one of the Declaration's complaints against King George III was that he "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions," this anti-Native American theory is depressingly plausible.
Is any of this intended to suggest that we should not take pride in the Declaration of Independence? Not even remotely: It was — and continues to be — one of the most eloquent and morally moving political documents ever penned. That said, we must also remember that our Founding Fathers were not the living gods that many believe them to be. They were fallible human beings, and some of their flaws had terrible consequences for people who were not fortunate enough to be born into privileged groups. When we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, we should embrace its underlying spirit — as well as the courage of the men who were willing to risk "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" — and simultaneously learn from its shortcomings. This alone can make the spirit of 1776 relevant to the conditions of 2019 — or any other year, for that matter.
Yet despite its overwhelmingly positive impact on history, the Declaration of Independence was also a product of its time — and bears some of the shortcomings of its era, including sexism, racism and prejudice against Native Americans. Here is a look at the events leading up to the creation of that document, as well as involved in its actual signing, which one must inspect for a more rounded look at this period in history:
1. It did not condemn slavery.
In the original list of grievances against King George III, future President Thomas Jefferson — who co-authored the document along with future President John Adams, as well as Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Richard Sherman — wrote that "he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither."
These words were cruelly ironic coming from Jefferson, who was an unrepentant racist and a slave owner — more on that in a moment. Nevertheless, even he acknowledged that slavery was an "abominable crime" and ultimately wished to see it purged from the new country. However, since southern support for the American Revolution was critical to its success, Jefferson ultimately scrapped that passage in order to keep the colonies united against their common enemy.
Yet the story is not quite as simple as Jefferson succumbing to political expedience; he had selfish and bigoted motives for supporting slavery that, in the end, outweighed his moral and logical reasons for opposing it. In 1782, only six years after drafting the Declaration of Independence, he offered these thoughts on the differences between whites and African-Americans:
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made ... will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. ... They have less hair on the face and body.
They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
These views are not surprising coming from a man who, over the course of his life, enslaved more than 600 people.
2. It did not protect the rights of women.
Less than four months before the Declaration of Independence was ratified, Abigail Adams — the wife of future President John Adams and thus a future first lady — urged her husband to "Remember the Ladies" when contemplating the legal premises that should guide the nascent republic. Her argument deserves to be reprinted in full:
I long to hear that you have declared an independancy and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
Adams' response was, to say the least, tone deaf and unsympathetic. From patronizingly saying, "I cannot but laugh" at his wife's suggestion — to sounding like a proto-MRA in arguing that "we have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat" — Adams' response would fit right in with the modern alt-right. (To be clear, Adams lived in 1776 and was a genuine hero with courage and principle, qualities which would never be found in a member of the alt-right.)
As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient -- that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent -- that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. -- This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.
Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. I am sure every good Politician would plot, as long as he would against Despotism, Empire, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Ochlocracy. -- A fine Story indeed. I begin to think the Ministry as deep as they are wicked. After stirring up Tories, Landjobbers, Trimmers, Bigots, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholicks, Scotch Renegadoes, at last they have stimulated the to demand new Priviledges and threaten to rebell.
Needless to say, while some scholars have argued that the use of the term "men" instead of a gender neutral equivalent like "people" in phrases like "all men are created equal" was incidental, comments like those made by Adams suggest a more unfortunate explanation.
3. To the disadvantage of Native Americans, Jefferson replaced the phrase "property" with happiness when saying that human beings' basic rights include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
In theory, it is a good thing for someone to say that our inalienable rights amount to more than the acquisition of material goods, such as land and currency. And to be fair, Jefferson was almost certainly inspired by the philosopher John Locke, who wrote the following in 1690:
The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with, our real happiness: and therefore, till we are as much informed upon this inquiry as the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands, we are, by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires in particular cases.
That said, there is another interpretation of why "happiness" was replaced with "property" — one that has less to do with Enlightenment philosophy and more with ensuring that specific marginalized groups could not assert their rights. As historian Peter Garnsey wrote in his book "Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution," Jefferson's excision of the word "property" might have been partially driven by a desire to avoid legitimizing the institution of slavery — which would have certainly been a good reason — but he might have also been motivated by a less seemly sentiment.
But there were also the 'Indians' (Native Americans). American leaders could not stop settlers from taking over Indian land, nor did they want to. Jefferson writing in 1801 as President to the Governor of Virginia spoke of his dream that white farmers would 'cover the whole northern if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.' Jefferson himself together with associates had been acquiring Indian from the 1760s. As for Indians who did not cede their land peacefully, they could be forced to do so in a 'just war.' Warfare was in progress on the frontiers of Virginia just when Jefferson was preparing his draft for the Declaration of Independence — fomented, he charged, by the British. At the same time Jefferson and many other leading politicians did not claim that the Indians, though primitive peoples, had no natural rights, including the 'right of soil.' However, if there was a natural right to property, virtually all property held by descendants of European settlers would have been under suspicion. Jefferson was as inconsistent over the Indians as he was over slavery.
Considering that one of the Declaration's complaints against King George III was that he "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions," this anti-Native American theory is depressingly plausible.
Is any of this intended to suggest that we should not take pride in the Declaration of Independence? Not even remotely: It was — and continues to be — one of the most eloquent and morally moving political documents ever penned. That said, we must also remember that our Founding Fathers were not the living gods that many believe them to be. They were fallible human beings, and some of their flaws had terrible consequences for people who were not fortunate enough to be born into privileged groups. When we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, we should embrace its underlying spirit — as well as the courage of the men who were willing to risk "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" — and simultaneously learn from its shortcomings. This alone can make the spirit of 1776 relevant to the conditions of 2019 — or any other year, for that matter.
Here are 11 things other countries do way better than America
LARRY SCHWARTZ, ALTERNET - COMMENTARY - raw story
12 FEB 2019 AT 09:47 ET
America! Land of the free, home of the brave, and the greatest country on the face of the planet, right? A country with seemingly limitless natural resources, and according to many politicians, anointed by God herself to lead the world out of the wilderness and into a bright new age of liberty and justice for all. Too bad the road to that vision is pockmarked with so many potholes, because we haven’t raised enough taxes on people who can afford to pay to fill them.
Americans, maybe more than anyone on Earth, are guilty of the sin of hubris and excessive pride. As the great Greek poets of the ancient world have taught us, hubris can lead to some really bad outcomes.The reality is that a good portion of the rest of the world has far outpaced the United States in things like healthcare. While the U.S. has painstakingly cobbled together a convoluted insurance-friendly monster called Obamacare (remarkable mostly for how much better it is than what we had), the rest of the developed world enjoys one-payer government healthcare that outperforms the U.S. in both cost and quality of care. The proof is in the pudding; they live longer than Americans.
But healthcare is not the only way America lags behind the rest of the world. Here are 11 things other countries do better than us.
1. Food waste reduction.
In a country as bountiful as the United States, it is remarkable how many people are hungry. Almost 50 million Americans, present to some degree in every single county of the country, live in a food-insecure household. Meanwhile, while children go to bed on empty stomachs, up to 40% of the food supply, more than 20 pounds of food per person per month, is wasted. That’s $165 billion worth of food thrown out. Factor in all the water, energy and land used to produce this waste and it borders on criminal.
France has a better way. This year, national French law banned the disposal of unsold food. Instead, the food must be donated to charity or used as animal feed. Food-related businesses are now required to sign up with a charity and donate unsold food. The food must be in a state ready for consumption (to save the charities the time and money to prepare it). The law also incorporates an education program to inform schools, businesses and the general public about the food waste problem. The goal is to cut food waste in France in half by 2025.
2. College loans.
The cost of a college education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent years, as any debt-ridden college grad can tell you. A political frenzy of tax-cutting fever has hobbled monetary support for public universities, especially at the state government level, and private college tuition has reached unaffordable heights mostly due to reckless spending and administrative bloat. Caught in this upward spiral are lower- and middle-class students who now leave school with college debt approaching $30,000 on average, crippling their ability to accept lower paying but attractive jobs, relocate, or even move out of their parents’ homes.
Most developed countries scratch their heads at the idea that we must burden our children with debt in order to educate them and strengthen the nation. In countries like Germany, Iceland, Brazil, Norway, even Panama, public university tuition is free. Even in the United Kingdom, although education isn’t free, the government allows students to pay loans back based on their income, reducing the pressure of debt and allowing more freedom of choice upon completion of college. Additionally, the UK writes off the debt after 30 years if it has not been paid back. Compare that to the US, where nothing, not even bankruptcy, erases college debt.
3. Maternity leave.
We hear a lot of wistful nostalgia from the right-wing political establishment about the good ol’ days, when mothers were home taking care of their children and parents were ever-present in their lives. Yet the same politicians gnash their teeth at any hint of government help that would go a long way to realizing their nostalgic dreams. Maternity leave policy in the United States is left entirely to the whims of individual states, and in many cases, to the whims of individual employers. The federal government guarantees only unpaid leave. Meanwhile, the burden of paying bills forces many mothers to get back to work as soon as they are able.
In many other countries, maternity leave is guaranteed and even paid for. Denmark guarantees a full year of paid maternity leave, to be split between mother and father, for all public sector employees. France, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria offer four months fully paid leave. Croatia, a year. Russia, 20 weeks. Serbia, a year. And on it goes.
4. The rights of the Earth.
The recent Supreme Court decision struck a blow against clean air, allowing coal-fired power plants to emit minimal amounts of mercury and other poisonous pollutants into the atmosphere. The Environmental Protection Agency is in a constant battle against conservatives who are tirelessly working to cripple the agency’s power to limit air, water and ground pollution.
In Ecuador, they have a different perspective. In 2008, Ecuadoreans rewrote their constitution and became the first country to recognize the rights of nature to defend itself against humankind. The constitution recognized nature’s right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.” Citizens have the right, by law, to enforce nature’s rights, and nature itself can be named as the defendant in Ecuador’s court system. Nature is acknowledged not as the property of humans to do with as we please, but as an equal partner in the protection and health of the planet.
5. Wi-Fi service.
In the United States, as in much of the developed world, Wi-Fi access to the Internet is considered a private service for which we pay to use. And we pay dearly. Not only is Wi-Fi service slower in America, we also pay twice as much or more than our world counterparts. The reason for this is pretty clear. In the U.S., most of our Wi-Fi infrastructure is controlled by a very few monopolistic companies, like Time Warner and Comcast. No competition equals high prices and lousy service.
In the tiny country of Estonia, Wi-Fi access is free to all. In Estonia, you can walk outside for miles and never lose your Internet connection. And 97% of schools have Internet. Compare that to only half the schools in the United States, a country infinitely richer. Ninety-four percent of tax returns in Estonia are done online. Voting can be done online. Doctor’s prescriptions are issued online. Access to information. Banking. All this and more in a country where half the citizens literally had no phones 20 years ago.
6. Vacation time.
The United States is the only developed nation without any legally required paid holiday or vacation day. Zero. Conservatives have often argued that vacation time reduces productivity, and that in order to remain productive, American workers must outperform and out-work the rest of the world.
Then again, working constantly and productivity are not always linked. The US is the fifth most productive country, lagging behind Switzerland, Singapore, Finland and Germany, all of which mandate paid vacation and holiday time. In the European Union, every single country grants its citizens a minimum of four paid workweeks of vacation time per year. Experts have shown that productivity on the job increases after a prolonged vacation. John Schmitt, a senior economist at Center for Economic Policy Research told the business website 24/7 Wall Street, “paid vacation and holidays don’t appear to have any meaningful impact on macroeconomic outcomes.”
7. Bike friendliness.
In 2015, 150 cities were ranked for their bicycle-friendliness. Factored in, among other things, were political leadership, facilities, culture, and traffic reduction. The top city in the world for bike friendliness, no surprise, is Amsterdam, where cycling is safe, relaxing and efficient. Other cities ranking high are Copenhagen, Utrecht, Berlin, and Barcelona. Only one city on this top 20 is an American city, Minneapolis, ranked 18th. (At least during the non-frigid months.)
Studies have shown the enormous benefits of a bike-friendly environment. For every dollar spent building a new bike lane, cities save as much as $24, leading to lower health costs, reduced pollution and reduced traffic.
8. Tipping practices.
The reason that tipping in our culture has evolved is that we simply do not pay our service sector anything approaching a living wage. A hundred years ago, tipping was not common in America. We considered ourselves a classless society, and tipping pointed to a troubling attitude of a servility that was the opposite of the American ideal of class mobility. This changed with Prohibition. With the reduced revenue restaurants suffered from the elimination of alcohol service, tipping was encouraged to help servers make ends meet. The practice took off from there, and restaurant lobbyists went further, uncoupling tipped employees from minimum wage requirements. Since 1991, tipped employees’ federal minimum wage has been frozen at $2.13. In effect, the food industry has shifted the responsibility for paying its employees to consumers.
In most other developed nations, waiters, cab drivers and other service employees, who are paid decent salaries, do not expect to be tipped, and if they do, they are pleased with much less than the typical 15-20% tip Americans fork over to their service providers. In fact, in other countries, tipping can occasionally be considered an insult to an employee, as it is in Japan.
9. The metric system.
Outside of Burma and Liberia, the United States is the only country in the world not using the metric system. We got close to metrification during the Jimmy Carter years, when Congress mandated a switch to the system. However, the switch was scuttled with the election of Ronald Reagan, who deemed it too expensive and presumably un-American. Meanwhile, in an increasingly globalized economy, the refusal to go metric has begun to affect the U.S. bottom line. In a global economy, businesses expecting to prosper need to be speaking the same language, the universal language of science, medicine and commerce. The metric language.
In 1991, the Mars Climate Orbiter project, a NASA initiative to study weather on Mars, literally went up in smoke. Its orbit was too low, causing it to burn up from the friction in the Martian atmosphere. The reason behind the low orbit was eye-opening. While Lockheed Martin, a NASA subcontractor that helped design the Orbiter, was using American imperial units, the rest of the designers, from partnering countries, were using metrics. Conversion errors were made, and $328 million evaporated.
10. Belief in science.
A Gallup poll in 2014 revealed that 42% of Americans, 4 out of every 10, reject evolution. This huge swath of the country believes that God created humans just 10,000 years ago. How backward is that? Contrast that with Europe, where more than 80% of the population accepts evolution as fact. Right-wing American politicians use the rejection of science as a wedge issue to gain office and power, polarizing the country and perhaps endangering the planet, since the same Americans who reject evolution also reject the science behind climate change.
With the US lagging far behind many European and Asian countries in science and math education, in an increasingly competitive world where science and economics are intertwined, it bodes poorly for the future of the country and its standard of living.
11. Abortion rights.
Abortion is becoming an increasingly difficult medical procedure to obtain in the US. Right-wing lawmakers, who decry government intervention in the workplace or air quality control, have no objections to government intrusion into a woman’s body and personal reproductive decisions. Republicans have passed state laws making it more and more difficult to even find an abortion clinic. Some states have only a single clinic in the entire state. Clinics are closing in record numbers due to the difficulties of jumping through the hoops conservative lawmakers have set up in order to deprive women of their rights.
We all already know that most Western democracies would not dream of intruding on a woman’s right to choose, but even the tiny country of Nepal outperforms the U.S. in this area. Formerly a country that outlawed abortion outright and prosecuted women who received abortions, Nepal legalized the procedure in 2002, setting aside the issue of religion and putting women’s health front and center. From that point on, Nepal worked to integrate abortion into the rest of women’s health rights, becoming a model for the rest of the world. Abortion clinics are available in all 75 districts of Nepal, 50,000 female volunteer counselors are available to help pregnant women, abortion-inducing medications are distributed widely, and midwives are trained to perform abortions.
Americans, maybe more than anyone on Earth, are guilty of the sin of hubris and excessive pride. As the great Greek poets of the ancient world have taught us, hubris can lead to some really bad outcomes.The reality is that a good portion of the rest of the world has far outpaced the United States in things like healthcare. While the U.S. has painstakingly cobbled together a convoluted insurance-friendly monster called Obamacare (remarkable mostly for how much better it is than what we had), the rest of the developed world enjoys one-payer government healthcare that outperforms the U.S. in both cost and quality of care. The proof is in the pudding; they live longer than Americans.
But healthcare is not the only way America lags behind the rest of the world. Here are 11 things other countries do better than us.
1. Food waste reduction.
In a country as bountiful as the United States, it is remarkable how many people are hungry. Almost 50 million Americans, present to some degree in every single county of the country, live in a food-insecure household. Meanwhile, while children go to bed on empty stomachs, up to 40% of the food supply, more than 20 pounds of food per person per month, is wasted. That’s $165 billion worth of food thrown out. Factor in all the water, energy and land used to produce this waste and it borders on criminal.
France has a better way. This year, national French law banned the disposal of unsold food. Instead, the food must be donated to charity or used as animal feed. Food-related businesses are now required to sign up with a charity and donate unsold food. The food must be in a state ready for consumption (to save the charities the time and money to prepare it). The law also incorporates an education program to inform schools, businesses and the general public about the food waste problem. The goal is to cut food waste in France in half by 2025.
2. College loans.
The cost of a college education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent years, as any debt-ridden college grad can tell you. A political frenzy of tax-cutting fever has hobbled monetary support for public universities, especially at the state government level, and private college tuition has reached unaffordable heights mostly due to reckless spending and administrative bloat. Caught in this upward spiral are lower- and middle-class students who now leave school with college debt approaching $30,000 on average, crippling their ability to accept lower paying but attractive jobs, relocate, or even move out of their parents’ homes.
Most developed countries scratch their heads at the idea that we must burden our children with debt in order to educate them and strengthen the nation. In countries like Germany, Iceland, Brazil, Norway, even Panama, public university tuition is free. Even in the United Kingdom, although education isn’t free, the government allows students to pay loans back based on their income, reducing the pressure of debt and allowing more freedom of choice upon completion of college. Additionally, the UK writes off the debt after 30 years if it has not been paid back. Compare that to the US, where nothing, not even bankruptcy, erases college debt.
3. Maternity leave.
We hear a lot of wistful nostalgia from the right-wing political establishment about the good ol’ days, when mothers were home taking care of their children and parents were ever-present in their lives. Yet the same politicians gnash their teeth at any hint of government help that would go a long way to realizing their nostalgic dreams. Maternity leave policy in the United States is left entirely to the whims of individual states, and in many cases, to the whims of individual employers. The federal government guarantees only unpaid leave. Meanwhile, the burden of paying bills forces many mothers to get back to work as soon as they are able.
In many other countries, maternity leave is guaranteed and even paid for. Denmark guarantees a full year of paid maternity leave, to be split between mother and father, for all public sector employees. France, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria offer four months fully paid leave. Croatia, a year. Russia, 20 weeks. Serbia, a year. And on it goes.
4. The rights of the Earth.
The recent Supreme Court decision struck a blow against clean air, allowing coal-fired power plants to emit minimal amounts of mercury and other poisonous pollutants into the atmosphere. The Environmental Protection Agency is in a constant battle against conservatives who are tirelessly working to cripple the agency’s power to limit air, water and ground pollution.
In Ecuador, they have a different perspective. In 2008, Ecuadoreans rewrote their constitution and became the first country to recognize the rights of nature to defend itself against humankind. The constitution recognized nature’s right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.” Citizens have the right, by law, to enforce nature’s rights, and nature itself can be named as the defendant in Ecuador’s court system. Nature is acknowledged not as the property of humans to do with as we please, but as an equal partner in the protection and health of the planet.
5. Wi-Fi service.
In the United States, as in much of the developed world, Wi-Fi access to the Internet is considered a private service for which we pay to use. And we pay dearly. Not only is Wi-Fi service slower in America, we also pay twice as much or more than our world counterparts. The reason for this is pretty clear. In the U.S., most of our Wi-Fi infrastructure is controlled by a very few monopolistic companies, like Time Warner and Comcast. No competition equals high prices and lousy service.
In the tiny country of Estonia, Wi-Fi access is free to all. In Estonia, you can walk outside for miles and never lose your Internet connection. And 97% of schools have Internet. Compare that to only half the schools in the United States, a country infinitely richer. Ninety-four percent of tax returns in Estonia are done online. Voting can be done online. Doctor’s prescriptions are issued online. Access to information. Banking. All this and more in a country where half the citizens literally had no phones 20 years ago.
6. Vacation time.
The United States is the only developed nation without any legally required paid holiday or vacation day. Zero. Conservatives have often argued that vacation time reduces productivity, and that in order to remain productive, American workers must outperform and out-work the rest of the world.
Then again, working constantly and productivity are not always linked. The US is the fifth most productive country, lagging behind Switzerland, Singapore, Finland and Germany, all of which mandate paid vacation and holiday time. In the European Union, every single country grants its citizens a minimum of four paid workweeks of vacation time per year. Experts have shown that productivity on the job increases after a prolonged vacation. John Schmitt, a senior economist at Center for Economic Policy Research told the business website 24/7 Wall Street, “paid vacation and holidays don’t appear to have any meaningful impact on macroeconomic outcomes.”
7. Bike friendliness.
In 2015, 150 cities were ranked for their bicycle-friendliness. Factored in, among other things, were political leadership, facilities, culture, and traffic reduction. The top city in the world for bike friendliness, no surprise, is Amsterdam, where cycling is safe, relaxing and efficient. Other cities ranking high are Copenhagen, Utrecht, Berlin, and Barcelona. Only one city on this top 20 is an American city, Minneapolis, ranked 18th. (At least during the non-frigid months.)
Studies have shown the enormous benefits of a bike-friendly environment. For every dollar spent building a new bike lane, cities save as much as $24, leading to lower health costs, reduced pollution and reduced traffic.
8. Tipping practices.
The reason that tipping in our culture has evolved is that we simply do not pay our service sector anything approaching a living wage. A hundred years ago, tipping was not common in America. We considered ourselves a classless society, and tipping pointed to a troubling attitude of a servility that was the opposite of the American ideal of class mobility. This changed with Prohibition. With the reduced revenue restaurants suffered from the elimination of alcohol service, tipping was encouraged to help servers make ends meet. The practice took off from there, and restaurant lobbyists went further, uncoupling tipped employees from minimum wage requirements. Since 1991, tipped employees’ federal minimum wage has been frozen at $2.13. In effect, the food industry has shifted the responsibility for paying its employees to consumers.
In most other developed nations, waiters, cab drivers and other service employees, who are paid decent salaries, do not expect to be tipped, and if they do, they are pleased with much less than the typical 15-20% tip Americans fork over to their service providers. In fact, in other countries, tipping can occasionally be considered an insult to an employee, as it is in Japan.
9. The metric system.
Outside of Burma and Liberia, the United States is the only country in the world not using the metric system. We got close to metrification during the Jimmy Carter years, when Congress mandated a switch to the system. However, the switch was scuttled with the election of Ronald Reagan, who deemed it too expensive and presumably un-American. Meanwhile, in an increasingly globalized economy, the refusal to go metric has begun to affect the U.S. bottom line. In a global economy, businesses expecting to prosper need to be speaking the same language, the universal language of science, medicine and commerce. The metric language.
In 1991, the Mars Climate Orbiter project, a NASA initiative to study weather on Mars, literally went up in smoke. Its orbit was too low, causing it to burn up from the friction in the Martian atmosphere. The reason behind the low orbit was eye-opening. While Lockheed Martin, a NASA subcontractor that helped design the Orbiter, was using American imperial units, the rest of the designers, from partnering countries, were using metrics. Conversion errors were made, and $328 million evaporated.
10. Belief in science.
A Gallup poll in 2014 revealed that 42% of Americans, 4 out of every 10, reject evolution. This huge swath of the country believes that God created humans just 10,000 years ago. How backward is that? Contrast that with Europe, where more than 80% of the population accepts evolution as fact. Right-wing American politicians use the rejection of science as a wedge issue to gain office and power, polarizing the country and perhaps endangering the planet, since the same Americans who reject evolution also reject the science behind climate change.
With the US lagging far behind many European and Asian countries in science and math education, in an increasingly competitive world where science and economics are intertwined, it bodes poorly for the future of the country and its standard of living.
11. Abortion rights.
Abortion is becoming an increasingly difficult medical procedure to obtain in the US. Right-wing lawmakers, who decry government intervention in the workplace or air quality control, have no objections to government intrusion into a woman’s body and personal reproductive decisions. Republicans have passed state laws making it more and more difficult to even find an abortion clinic. Some states have only a single clinic in the entire state. Clinics are closing in record numbers due to the difficulties of jumping through the hoops conservative lawmakers have set up in order to deprive women of their rights.
We all already know that most Western democracies would not dream of intruding on a woman’s right to choose, but even the tiny country of Nepal outperforms the U.S. in this area. Formerly a country that outlawed abortion outright and prosecuted women who received abortions, Nepal legalized the procedure in 2002, setting aside the issue of religion and putting women’s health front and center. From that point on, Nepal worked to integrate abortion into the rest of women’s health rights, becoming a model for the rest of the world. Abortion clinics are available in all 75 districts of Nepal, 50,000 female volunteer counselors are available to help pregnant women, abortion-inducing medications are distributed widely, and midwives are trained to perform abortions.
Here are 5 American sex norms Europeans think are crazy
ANNA PULLEY, ALTERNET - COMMENTARY - raw story
10 FEB 2019 AT 09:11 ET
Europeans tend to see a lot of American ideals and behaviors as bizarre. In particular, they aren’t wild about our politics and our food (though they love our television and our movies). And when it comes to sex? Well, Europeans tend to view us as the land of the free, home of the batshit crazy. Below are some of the biggest sexual WTFs Europeans have about America.
1. Extreme violence in the media is fine, just don’t show a nipple.
According to reports, the average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and witness 16,000 murders on TV by the time she is 18. Not only that, but the violence is getting more brutal and sadistic, and it often goes unpunished. In video games like Grand Theft Auto, players can run over sex workers, and the violence inCall of Duty has been linked to teen suicides. While this is considered fine and normal, showing the naked or partially naked human body on TV is considered extremely taboo. When Justin Timberlake accidentally ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s costume during the Super Bowl halftime show, revealing her nipple for a fraction of a second, this not only caused a moral outrage that lasted for days, but the FCC tried to fine television network CBS $550,000 for broadcasting “indecency.” The FCC ultimately failed, but not first without going all the way to the Supreme Court. The nip slip incident became the most-searched-for thing on the Internet in 2004, and CBS actually forced Jackson to apologize to Americans. “I am really sorry if I offended anyone, that was truly not my intention,” Jackson said.
A Dutch friend who now lives in London also remarked on this disconnect between violence and nudity: “The movie Frida with Salma Hayek is rated R in the U.S. because of nudity, but in Holland it was 6 (for children 6 and older). But many violent movies are 16 in Holland and PG/PG-13 in the U.S. Why are boobs worse than death? How do boobs affect people negatively? Are they scary? Do they make people do bad things? I wanna know!”
2. Our puritan prudery.
Sex is everywhere. We can’t even sell a cheeseburger in the U.S. without overtly bonerrific images that are, frankly, confusing. Are we supposed to eat our food or have sex with it, Carl’s Jr.? And yet, we’re also so prudish that Attorney General John Ashcroft once spent $8,000 of taxpayer cash to cover up a statue’s breasts. We have spent billions on abstinence-only education programs that spread misinformation and shame teenagers into thinking sex is dirty and will ruin their lives forever. And instead of curbing the number of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, the opposite happens. Compared to European countries, most of which boast comprehensive sex ed, easy access to birth control and universal healthcare, the U.S. has alarming teen pregnancy rates—41.5 per 1,000 people, as reported by the United Nations in 2009. By contrast, the Netherlands had a teen birth rate of 5.3 per 1,000, Switzerland is 4.3 per 1,000, and Germany is 9.8 per 1,000. Europeans also have have lower STI rates, and far lower rates of HIV/AIDS.
3. Our fear of hugs.
Research has shown that non-sexual physical contact has a profound impact on people’s emotional and physical well-being. Despite this knowledge, and our hyper-sexualized tendencies, America is one of the most touch-phobic countries in the world. A global study on touch rated the United States among “the lowest touch countries studied.” In contrast, the high-touch countries include Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. Some researchers think our fear of platonic touching actually leads to violence, particularly in young males. In one study, American adolescents were shown to touch each other far less and be more aggressive toward their peers compared with French adolescents.
While there are many reasons why Europe has a much lower violent crime rate than the U.S, could a lack of healthy physical connection add to this trend? In 2012, research conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that the U.S. had a “homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000 people compared to only 0.3 per 100,000 in Iceland, 0.7 per 100,000 in Sweden, 0.8 per 100,000 in Denmark and Spain, 0.9 per 100,000 in Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, 1.0 per 100,000 in France, and 1.2 per 100,000 in Portugal and the Republic of Ireland.”
4. Our anti-abortion violence.
Though there have been a few incidents of anti-abortion-related violence elsewhere (in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, for instance), the vast majority of violence occurs right here in the good ol’ US of A. The Department of Justice amended its definition of domestic terrorism to include this type of violence last year, and it includes such incidents as destruction of property, arson, bombings, vandalism, kidnapping, stalking, assault, attempted murder, and murder. In the last 20 years or so, anti-abortion violence has killed at least eight people in the U.S., including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort. In contrast, approximately ZERO people have been murdered trying to have or facilitate a safe and legal abortion in Europe.
5. Our preference for circumcision.
Though infant male circumcision rates have declined in the U.S. in the last decade or so, circumcision remains one of the most common procedures performed in hospitals (about 1.4 million annually). In Europe, however, circumcision is rare and generally frowned upon. A 2013 resolution called male ritual circumcision a “violation of the physical integrity of children,” and was passed overwhelmingly by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Studies (both formal andinformal) have shown that women in the U.S. have strong preferences for circumcised penises, citing “visual appeal” and “sexual hygiene” as reasons for their predisposition. European women, of course, prefer their men with dong-snuggies
1. Extreme violence in the media is fine, just don’t show a nipple.
According to reports, the average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and witness 16,000 murders on TV by the time she is 18. Not only that, but the violence is getting more brutal and sadistic, and it often goes unpunished. In video games like Grand Theft Auto, players can run over sex workers, and the violence inCall of Duty has been linked to teen suicides. While this is considered fine and normal, showing the naked or partially naked human body on TV is considered extremely taboo. When Justin Timberlake accidentally ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s costume during the Super Bowl halftime show, revealing her nipple for a fraction of a second, this not only caused a moral outrage that lasted for days, but the FCC tried to fine television network CBS $550,000 for broadcasting “indecency.” The FCC ultimately failed, but not first without going all the way to the Supreme Court. The nip slip incident became the most-searched-for thing on the Internet in 2004, and CBS actually forced Jackson to apologize to Americans. “I am really sorry if I offended anyone, that was truly not my intention,” Jackson said.
A Dutch friend who now lives in London also remarked on this disconnect between violence and nudity: “The movie Frida with Salma Hayek is rated R in the U.S. because of nudity, but in Holland it was 6 (for children 6 and older). But many violent movies are 16 in Holland and PG/PG-13 in the U.S. Why are boobs worse than death? How do boobs affect people negatively? Are they scary? Do they make people do bad things? I wanna know!”
2. Our puritan prudery.
Sex is everywhere. We can’t even sell a cheeseburger in the U.S. without overtly bonerrific images that are, frankly, confusing. Are we supposed to eat our food or have sex with it, Carl’s Jr.? And yet, we’re also so prudish that Attorney General John Ashcroft once spent $8,000 of taxpayer cash to cover up a statue’s breasts. We have spent billions on abstinence-only education programs that spread misinformation and shame teenagers into thinking sex is dirty and will ruin their lives forever. And instead of curbing the number of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, the opposite happens. Compared to European countries, most of which boast comprehensive sex ed, easy access to birth control and universal healthcare, the U.S. has alarming teen pregnancy rates—41.5 per 1,000 people, as reported by the United Nations in 2009. By contrast, the Netherlands had a teen birth rate of 5.3 per 1,000, Switzerland is 4.3 per 1,000, and Germany is 9.8 per 1,000. Europeans also have have lower STI rates, and far lower rates of HIV/AIDS.
3. Our fear of hugs.
Research has shown that non-sexual physical contact has a profound impact on people’s emotional and physical well-being. Despite this knowledge, and our hyper-sexualized tendencies, America is one of the most touch-phobic countries in the world. A global study on touch rated the United States among “the lowest touch countries studied.” In contrast, the high-touch countries include Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. Some researchers think our fear of platonic touching actually leads to violence, particularly in young males. In one study, American adolescents were shown to touch each other far less and be more aggressive toward their peers compared with French adolescents.
While there are many reasons why Europe has a much lower violent crime rate than the U.S, could a lack of healthy physical connection add to this trend? In 2012, research conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that the U.S. had a “homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000 people compared to only 0.3 per 100,000 in Iceland, 0.7 per 100,000 in Sweden, 0.8 per 100,000 in Denmark and Spain, 0.9 per 100,000 in Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, 1.0 per 100,000 in France, and 1.2 per 100,000 in Portugal and the Republic of Ireland.”
4. Our anti-abortion violence.
Though there have been a few incidents of anti-abortion-related violence elsewhere (in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, for instance), the vast majority of violence occurs right here in the good ol’ US of A. The Department of Justice amended its definition of domestic terrorism to include this type of violence last year, and it includes such incidents as destruction of property, arson, bombings, vandalism, kidnapping, stalking, assault, attempted murder, and murder. In the last 20 years or so, anti-abortion violence has killed at least eight people in the U.S., including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort. In contrast, approximately ZERO people have been murdered trying to have or facilitate a safe and legal abortion in Europe.
5. Our preference for circumcision.
Though infant male circumcision rates have declined in the U.S. in the last decade or so, circumcision remains one of the most common procedures performed in hospitals (about 1.4 million annually). In Europe, however, circumcision is rare and generally frowned upon. A 2013 resolution called male ritual circumcision a “violation of the physical integrity of children,” and was passed overwhelmingly by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Studies (both formal andinformal) have shown that women in the U.S. have strong preferences for circumcised penises, citing “visual appeal” and “sexual hygiene” as reasons for their predisposition. European women, of course, prefer their men with dong-snuggies
The great American myth: The founders of the US have the society they wanted — one that keeps people like them in power
by David Korten / YES! Magazine - alternet
February 6, 2019
The founders of the United States have the society they wanted—one that keeps people like them in power.
We grow up in the United States proud of our nation’s historic role in leading humanity’s transition from monarchy to democracy. We rarely ask, however, whether the system we have truly fits the definition of democracy.
Merriam-Webster defines democracy as “government by the people.” What we have in the United States more closely resembles the Merriam-Webster definition of plutocracy, “government by the wealthy.” A nation ruled by big money is not a democracy.
The 2018 midterm elections inserted a wave of new political blood into Congress and many state houses—younger, more female, more racially and religiously diverse, less beholden to big money, and attuned to a strong public desire for change.
At the national level, the new representatives of a restless electorate encounter a system in political lockdown, at least until the next election. That makes this is a good time for a serious reality check on what will be required to achieve the democracy we thought we had and a future that truly works for everyone.
In the United States, we grow up schooled in our national mythology: our nation was created as a democracy by brave founders, who crafted a constitution that initiated a global transition from monarchy, and who were driven by a vision that makes the United States a beacon of hope and possibility for the world. We are taught that our laws now and forever must hold to the founders’ original intent.
We are not taught, and it is rarely mentioned, that the Constitution the founders crafted was designed to secure economic power for themselves, and that economic power has been the ultimate foundation of political power for all of human history.
Political power ultimately resides with those who control our access to a means of living. When that access is controlled by the few, the result is plutocracy—a reality deeply embedded in both U.S. and world history. The democratization of political power therefore depends on the democratization of economic power.
The wealthy White men who stepped forward to lead the war for America’s independence from Britain put their lives and fortunes on the line. Their leadership liberated the original 13 colonies from British rule to birth a new and independent nation. It was not, however, a totally selfless act. In so doing, they also freed themselves from deference to and taxation by the British crown, while positioning themselves to subsequently write the rules by which the new nation would govern itself. They had no intention, however, of sacrificing the privilege that came from their ownership of lands stolen from Native Americans, slaves abducted from Africa, and other commercial, manufacturing, and financial assets that gave them their distinctive social, economic, and political power and privilege.
To the contrary, they wrote the new nation’s Constitution to secure the power and privilege of men like themselves, while securing it against expropriation by any among them who might aspire to be anointed king. By establishing elections of members of Congress and a president, they precluded a hereditary monarchy. But by limiting the vote to White male property owners like themselves, they stripped political power from all but those of their own race, gender, and class.
The original Constitution thus affirmed slavery, secured the rights of property, and limited the vote to White male property owners. Voting rights for other Americans—women, Native Americans, Blacks, and those with no property, including Whites—came slowly and to this day remain to be fully secured.
We could argue about whether the resulting government ever worked for more than a minority of America’s people. Clearly a substantial majority—including most White males—do not feel it is working for them today.
In a 2018 Gallup poll on confidence in U.S. institutions, Congress—the branch of government that is supposed to best represent the will of the American people, and the branch with the power to impeach corrupt presidents and judges—came in rock bottom. Only 11 percent of those polled expressed “a great deal of confidence” or “quite a lot of confidence” in Congress. It is surely no coincidence that Congress is also the branch of government most visibly corrupted by big money political donations and the revolving door between government service and lucrative careers in lobbying for the industries they are charged with regulating.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, found that a strong majority of Americans, irrespective of political alignment, consider democratic ideals and values important and believe we fall far short in living up to them. Only 18 percent of Americans feel democracy is working “very well,” while 61 percent feel fundamental changes are needed in the design and structure of the American government. This includes the majority (68 percent) of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans. Of those that Pew identified as least politically engaged, 71 percent support significant institutional change.
These data help to explain why the U.S. ranks near the bottom among the world’s democracies in voter turnout . In the 2016 presidential election, only 55.7 percent of Americans of voting age voted, compared to recent turnout rates of 85.8 percent in Sweden (2014) and 80.3 percent in Denmark (2015). The turnout in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections was 50.3 percent, the highest in a midterm since 1914 and up from 36.7 percent in 2014. But that’s still well below the all-time highest turnout rate in any federal election: 82.6 percent in 1876.
Low turnout rates tend to reflect the mood of the country. The more you feel the system is rigged and the more difficult that system makes it for you to vote, the less likely you are to try.
We are not experiencing a failure of democracy. The failure we experience is the failure of the institutions of a plutocracy. Such a system, structured and managed to secure rule by the rich, is indifferent to the needs of the many. The unusual levels of voter and candidate enthusiasm displayed during the 2018 midterm elections showed the desire to clean up a deeply corrupted political system. But it will take far more than the modest proposals currently on the table to move beyond a two-party duopoly beholden to corporate money. My next column will look at what the transition to an authentic democracy will require.
We grow up in the United States proud of our nation’s historic role in leading humanity’s transition from monarchy to democracy. We rarely ask, however, whether the system we have truly fits the definition of democracy.
Merriam-Webster defines democracy as “government by the people.” What we have in the United States more closely resembles the Merriam-Webster definition of plutocracy, “government by the wealthy.” A nation ruled by big money is not a democracy.
The 2018 midterm elections inserted a wave of new political blood into Congress and many state houses—younger, more female, more racially and religiously diverse, less beholden to big money, and attuned to a strong public desire for change.
At the national level, the new representatives of a restless electorate encounter a system in political lockdown, at least until the next election. That makes this is a good time for a serious reality check on what will be required to achieve the democracy we thought we had and a future that truly works for everyone.
In the United States, we grow up schooled in our national mythology: our nation was created as a democracy by brave founders, who crafted a constitution that initiated a global transition from monarchy, and who were driven by a vision that makes the United States a beacon of hope and possibility for the world. We are taught that our laws now and forever must hold to the founders’ original intent.
We are not taught, and it is rarely mentioned, that the Constitution the founders crafted was designed to secure economic power for themselves, and that economic power has been the ultimate foundation of political power for all of human history.
Political power ultimately resides with those who control our access to a means of living. When that access is controlled by the few, the result is plutocracy—a reality deeply embedded in both U.S. and world history. The democratization of political power therefore depends on the democratization of economic power.
The wealthy White men who stepped forward to lead the war for America’s independence from Britain put their lives and fortunes on the line. Their leadership liberated the original 13 colonies from British rule to birth a new and independent nation. It was not, however, a totally selfless act. In so doing, they also freed themselves from deference to and taxation by the British crown, while positioning themselves to subsequently write the rules by which the new nation would govern itself. They had no intention, however, of sacrificing the privilege that came from their ownership of lands stolen from Native Americans, slaves abducted from Africa, and other commercial, manufacturing, and financial assets that gave them their distinctive social, economic, and political power and privilege.
To the contrary, they wrote the new nation’s Constitution to secure the power and privilege of men like themselves, while securing it against expropriation by any among them who might aspire to be anointed king. By establishing elections of members of Congress and a president, they precluded a hereditary monarchy. But by limiting the vote to White male property owners like themselves, they stripped political power from all but those of their own race, gender, and class.
The original Constitution thus affirmed slavery, secured the rights of property, and limited the vote to White male property owners. Voting rights for other Americans—women, Native Americans, Blacks, and those with no property, including Whites—came slowly and to this day remain to be fully secured.
We could argue about whether the resulting government ever worked for more than a minority of America’s people. Clearly a substantial majority—including most White males—do not feel it is working for them today.
In a 2018 Gallup poll on confidence in U.S. institutions, Congress—the branch of government that is supposed to best represent the will of the American people, and the branch with the power to impeach corrupt presidents and judges—came in rock bottom. Only 11 percent of those polled expressed “a great deal of confidence” or “quite a lot of confidence” in Congress. It is surely no coincidence that Congress is also the branch of government most visibly corrupted by big money political donations and the revolving door between government service and lucrative careers in lobbying for the industries they are charged with regulating.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, found that a strong majority of Americans, irrespective of political alignment, consider democratic ideals and values important and believe we fall far short in living up to them. Only 18 percent of Americans feel democracy is working “very well,” while 61 percent feel fundamental changes are needed in the design and structure of the American government. This includes the majority (68 percent) of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans. Of those that Pew identified as least politically engaged, 71 percent support significant institutional change.
These data help to explain why the U.S. ranks near the bottom among the world’s democracies in voter turnout . In the 2016 presidential election, only 55.7 percent of Americans of voting age voted, compared to recent turnout rates of 85.8 percent in Sweden (2014) and 80.3 percent in Denmark (2015). The turnout in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections was 50.3 percent, the highest in a midterm since 1914 and up from 36.7 percent in 2014. But that’s still well below the all-time highest turnout rate in any federal election: 82.6 percent in 1876.
Low turnout rates tend to reflect the mood of the country. The more you feel the system is rigged and the more difficult that system makes it for you to vote, the less likely you are to try.
We are not experiencing a failure of democracy. The failure we experience is the failure of the institutions of a plutocracy. Such a system, structured and managed to secure rule by the rich, is indifferent to the needs of the many. The unusual levels of voter and candidate enthusiasm displayed during the 2018 midterm elections showed the desire to clean up a deeply corrupted political system. But it will take far more than the modest proposals currently on the table to move beyond a two-party duopoly beholden to corporate money. My next column will look at what the transition to an authentic democracy will require.
Priorities. Priorities.
Soph0571 - DEMO UNDERGROUND
THIS is Your Country on Trump
It’s about to get really ugly, folks – but exposing all of the ugliness is about to get real.
NanceGreggs - demo underground
12/19/18
|
Children in cages
Children gunned down in schools Asylum seekers tear-gassed Nazis marching in the streets Mass shootings – up Hate crimes – up Voter suppression – up Environmental protections overturned Climate change science ignored Allies distanced – and insulted Enemies embraced – and obeyed Lowered status in the global community Lowered expectations for a country that was once a world leader Incompetent Cabinet members/appointees/advisors Indicted Cabinet members/appointees/advisors Tax-cuts only for the already wealthy Healthcare only for the already healthy Exploded deficit Exploding White House Exploding Trump-humper heads People losing their healthcare coverage People losing their farms Workers losing their jobs WH staffers losing their minds Stock market chaos White House insanity Mindless tweets Mindless policies Mindess Idiot in the Oval Office |
Law and order optional
Lawyering-up required The Wall that Mexico will never pay for The Wall that no one wants or needs The Walls that are closing-in on the “pResident” A US “pResident” laughed at by the UN A US “pResident” laughed at the world over Back-channel connections Back-stabbing co-conspirators Pipe bombers Sex, lies and audio tapes Fake news Fake views Fake Christians Fake patriots Puerto Rico ignored Shithole countries identified Cries of No collusion! The rule of law just an illusion A pussy-grabber as pOTUS A nude model as FLOTUS A “shoe designer” advising on international affairs A “real estate guy” advising on peace in the ME Everyone else is lying! Everyone else is spying! A pOTUS who’s always crying Witless tweets Covfeve treats Protestors on the streets in every land Journalists banned POTUS’s priority is still being tanned |
The swamp revitalized
Hatred re-energized Bigots re-emerge Racists reactivated Presidential obligations called-off due to rain Presidential precedent dismissed due to laziness Presidential decorum ignored due to crassness Presidential behaviour laughable, rather than laudable Forest floors that need sweeping Stealth bombers that are literally “invisible” Smocking guns Unfavourable polls that are “rigged” Unfavourable facts that are “fake” Unfavourable satire that’s somehow “illegal” THIS is your country on Trump. THIS is what we’ve become under his “leadership”. THIS is what the Republicans would have you believe is normal. THIS is what the criminals in the GOP want you to ignore – along with their having supported and enabled it for two years. Come January, the gloves are off. The days of coddling the Orange Idiot are at an end. The days of accepting lies and deceit as fact are over. The days of Republicans hiding behind the Emperor’s non-existent clothes are done. There’s a new bunch of sheriffs in town. And you can be damned sure they’re ready to do their duty on behalf of the American people – rain or shine, before noon-ish, regardless of golfing schedules and TV watching, and without FOX-News being on-board. |
400 hundred years of racism and still counting!!!
A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump
Hint: It has to do with race.
By Zack Beauchamp - vox.com
Oct 16, 2018, 2:50pm EDT
One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.
The existence of those voters has served as evidence that the most plausible explanation for what happened in 2016 — that Trump’s campaign tapped into the racism of white Americans to win pivotal states — is wrong. “How could white Americans who voted for a black president in the past be racist,” or so the thinking goes.
“Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote on the night of the election. This typically segues into an argument that Trump won by tapping into economic, rather than racial, anxiety — anger about trade and the decline of manufacturing, or the fallout from the 2008 Great Recession.
A new study shows that this response isn’t as powerful as it may seem. The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.
“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”
This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.
This isn’t just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America’s primordial divide over race — and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.
The study found strong evidence for racism — and little for economic anxiety
The three scholars who wrote the study — UCLA’s Tyler Reny, UC-Riverside’s Loren Collingwood, and Princeton’s Ali Valenzuela — drew on a database that has information on more than 64,000 American voters. Inside that huge sample, they restricted their analysis to white voters who switched their presidential vote from 2012 to 2016 (most commonly from one major party’s candidate to the other’s, but occasionally from a third party in 2012 to Clinton or Trump).
They then split the sample of white voters in two, between working-class and non-working class voters, and then tried to figure out what the vote switchers ran in common. To do so, they ran tests on three different types of question: scores on a test measuring attitudes towards racial minorities, hostility to mass immigration, and measures of economic stress (e.g., whether a person’s family income was lower or higher than the median income in the county where they lived).
The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.
Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers.
Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent. There’s just little evidence supporting the “economic anxiety” or “economic populism” explanations for the Trump surge.
“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”
These findings reveal the subtlety, and importance, of America’s racial divide
The Reny et al. findings may seem counterintuitive: How can people who wanted a black man to run the country somehow become attracted to Trump because of his racial demagoguery?
The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in 2008 and 20 points in 2012.
For another, voting for Obama once or even twice doesn’t automatically mean that someone is not prejudiced against black people or immigrants. It’s possible to support Obama in particular while maintaining overall anti-black or anti-immigrant attitudes. In those cases, some other factor, like the Iraq War catastrophe or financial collapse, may have predominated over white voters’ racial hang-ups in the 2008 and 2012 election.
The 2016 election was different.
One reason is that Obama’s second term featured a significant amount of racial conflict. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.
A second reason is that Obama’s very presence in office was racially polarizing. Michael Tesler, a scholar at the University of California-Irvine, has documented in detail how Obama’s very presence in the White House polarized America along racial lines. It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year.
Third, and arguably most importantly, the two candidates turned the election into a kind of referendum on American race relations. Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.
Clinton, for her part, positioned herself as a champion of racial justice. While Obama’s rhetoric on race was typically post-racial, positioning the country as more united than divided, Clinton got out front on issues like police violence and immigration. There are plenty of valid reasons for this — Clinton was more worried about failing to turn out minority voters, Obama was more worried about alienating skittish whites, and there was no way to respond to Trump’s campaign without tackling race head-on.
The result, though, is that racial issues became the key political dividing line in a way they were not in either 2008 or 2012.
Now, Reny et al.’s statistical analysis can’t show all of this on its own. You should never draw conclusions this large from one statistical analysis, as it could suffer from any number of problems.
However, this analysis of the election is supported by a wide and deep body of research, the vast majority of which shows that concerns about identity and race were the decisive issues in the 2016 election. This was true in the Republican primary and the general; it’s also consistent with research on far-right parties in Europe whose xenophobic appeals are similar to Trump’s. There is a complete lack of statistical evidence, by contrast, for the “economic anxiety” theory.
American politics are likely to only get more polarized on racial lines. Trump and Trumpism are, for the time being, the core of the Republican Party; the Republican message on race and immigration will match his as such. California Rep. Duncan Hunter, for example, is running a nakedly anti-Islam reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a Mexican-Arab Christian by background).
The implications, both in 2018 and in the long term, could be significant. Reny et al. compare this period to the post-civil rights era, a period where the historically Democratic South transformed into modern-day red America primarily in backlash to the Democratic embrace of civil rights:
History suggests that significant changes in voting across party lines, particularly for the presidency, precede changes in party identities, the basis for realignments. This sequence of events played out during the Southern realignment (i.e., Democrats voting for GOP presidential candidates but maintaining their party attachment) and here we provide evidence that it may be happening again after two terms with a black president and during an era of mass demographic change due to immigration. Racial conservatives and those with the most punitive immigration views are moving right and were the most likely to switch to Trump in 2016. Our data suggest the same is happening in the opposite direction as those with racially liberal or pro-immigration views may be sorting into the Democratic Party.
This prediction may or may turn out to be accurate. But it’s plausible, and there’s no use burying our heads in the sand by pretending this is about class when it isn’t.
The existence of those voters has served as evidence that the most plausible explanation for what happened in 2016 — that Trump’s campaign tapped into the racism of white Americans to win pivotal states — is wrong. “How could white Americans who voted for a black president in the past be racist,” or so the thinking goes.
“Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote on the night of the election. This typically segues into an argument that Trump won by tapping into economic, rather than racial, anxiety — anger about trade and the decline of manufacturing, or the fallout from the 2008 Great Recession.
A new study shows that this response isn’t as powerful as it may seem. The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.
“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”
This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.
This isn’t just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America’s primordial divide over race — and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.
The study found strong evidence for racism — and little for economic anxiety
The three scholars who wrote the study — UCLA’s Tyler Reny, UC-Riverside’s Loren Collingwood, and Princeton’s Ali Valenzuela — drew on a database that has information on more than 64,000 American voters. Inside that huge sample, they restricted their analysis to white voters who switched their presidential vote from 2012 to 2016 (most commonly from one major party’s candidate to the other’s, but occasionally from a third party in 2012 to Clinton or Trump).
They then split the sample of white voters in two, between working-class and non-working class voters, and then tried to figure out what the vote switchers ran in common. To do so, they ran tests on three different types of question: scores on a test measuring attitudes towards racial minorities, hostility to mass immigration, and measures of economic stress (e.g., whether a person’s family income was lower or higher than the median income in the county where they lived).
The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.
Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers.
Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent. There’s just little evidence supporting the “economic anxiety” or “economic populism” explanations for the Trump surge.
“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”
These findings reveal the subtlety, and importance, of America’s racial divide
The Reny et al. findings may seem counterintuitive: How can people who wanted a black man to run the country somehow become attracted to Trump because of his racial demagoguery?
The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in 2008 and 20 points in 2012.
For another, voting for Obama once or even twice doesn’t automatically mean that someone is not prejudiced against black people or immigrants. It’s possible to support Obama in particular while maintaining overall anti-black or anti-immigrant attitudes. In those cases, some other factor, like the Iraq War catastrophe or financial collapse, may have predominated over white voters’ racial hang-ups in the 2008 and 2012 election.
The 2016 election was different.
One reason is that Obama’s second term featured a significant amount of racial conflict. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.
A second reason is that Obama’s very presence in office was racially polarizing. Michael Tesler, a scholar at the University of California-Irvine, has documented in detail how Obama’s very presence in the White House polarized America along racial lines. It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year.
Third, and arguably most importantly, the two candidates turned the election into a kind of referendum on American race relations. Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.
Clinton, for her part, positioned herself as a champion of racial justice. While Obama’s rhetoric on race was typically post-racial, positioning the country as more united than divided, Clinton got out front on issues like police violence and immigration. There are plenty of valid reasons for this — Clinton was more worried about failing to turn out minority voters, Obama was more worried about alienating skittish whites, and there was no way to respond to Trump’s campaign without tackling race head-on.
The result, though, is that racial issues became the key political dividing line in a way they were not in either 2008 or 2012.
Now, Reny et al.’s statistical analysis can’t show all of this on its own. You should never draw conclusions this large from one statistical analysis, as it could suffer from any number of problems.
However, this analysis of the election is supported by a wide and deep body of research, the vast majority of which shows that concerns about identity and race were the decisive issues in the 2016 election. This was true in the Republican primary and the general; it’s also consistent with research on far-right parties in Europe whose xenophobic appeals are similar to Trump’s. There is a complete lack of statistical evidence, by contrast, for the “economic anxiety” theory.
American politics are likely to only get more polarized on racial lines. Trump and Trumpism are, for the time being, the core of the Republican Party; the Republican message on race and immigration will match his as such. California Rep. Duncan Hunter, for example, is running a nakedly anti-Islam reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a Mexican-Arab Christian by background).
The implications, both in 2018 and in the long term, could be significant. Reny et al. compare this period to the post-civil rights era, a period where the historically Democratic South transformed into modern-day red America primarily in backlash to the Democratic embrace of civil rights:
History suggests that significant changes in voting across party lines, particularly for the presidency, precede changes in party identities, the basis for realignments. This sequence of events played out during the Southern realignment (i.e., Democrats voting for GOP presidential candidates but maintaining their party attachment) and here we provide evidence that it may be happening again after two terms with a black president and during an era of mass demographic change due to immigration. Racial conservatives and those with the most punitive immigration views are moving right and were the most likely to switch to Trump in 2016. Our data suggest the same is happening in the opposite direction as those with racially liberal or pro-immigration views may be sorting into the Democratic Party.
This prediction may or may turn out to be accurate. But it’s plausible, and there’s no use burying our heads in the sand by pretending this is about class when it isn’t.
funnies and charts
By Leaps And Bounds, U.S. Leads The World In Number Of School Shootings
by JakeThomas
the intellectualist
5/21/18
Top 10 Signs the U.S. Is the Most Corrupt Nation in the World
Juan Cole / Informed Comment - truthdig
FEB 22, 2018
Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly “corrupt” always imply that the United States is not corrupt. This year’s report from Transparency International puts the US on a par with Austria, which is ridiculous. All kinds of people from politicians to businessmen would go to jail in Austria today if they engaged in practices that are quite common in the US.
While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $18 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.
1. A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes a predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones, as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.
2. The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other mega-rich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what Federal taxes are, folks, services–roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws–things that everyone benefits from and which won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.
One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime the top one percent has gone from holding 25% of the privately held wealth under Eisenhower to 38% today.
3. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. The campaign season should be shortened to 3 months (did we really need 2 years to get an outcome in which a fool like Trump is president?), and Congress should pass a law that winners of primaries don’t have to pay for political ads on tv and radio.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.
American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.
4. Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren’t sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the fossil fuels billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Virtually the entire Republican Party resists the firm consensus of all respected scientists in the world and the firm consensus of everybody else in the world save for a few denialists in English-speaking countries. This resistance to an urgent and dangerous reality comes about because they are bribed to take this stance. Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.
4. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Scott Pruitt, a Manchurian candidate from Big Oil, has single-handedly demolished the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of polluting industry. This assault on the health of American citizens on behalf of vampirical corporations is the height of corruption.
6. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.
7. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.
8. The National Security Agency’s domestic spying was a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn’t have defended this indefensible invasion of citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren’t making money on it.
9. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.
10. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the constitution.
So don’t tell the global South how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.
While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $18 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.
1. A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes a predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones, as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.
2. The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other mega-rich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what Federal taxes are, folks, services–roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws–things that everyone benefits from and which won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.
One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime the top one percent has gone from holding 25% of the privately held wealth under Eisenhower to 38% today.
3. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. The campaign season should be shortened to 3 months (did we really need 2 years to get an outcome in which a fool like Trump is president?), and Congress should pass a law that winners of primaries don’t have to pay for political ads on tv and radio.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.
American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.
4. Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren’t sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the fossil fuels billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Virtually the entire Republican Party resists the firm consensus of all respected scientists in the world and the firm consensus of everybody else in the world save for a few denialists in English-speaking countries. This resistance to an urgent and dangerous reality comes about because they are bribed to take this stance. Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.
4. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Scott Pruitt, a Manchurian candidate from Big Oil, has single-handedly demolished the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of polluting industry. This assault on the health of American citizens on behalf of vampirical corporations is the height of corruption.
6. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.
7. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.
8. The National Security Agency’s domestic spying was a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn’t have defended this indefensible invasion of citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren’t making money on it.
9. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.
10. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the constitution.
So don’t tell the global South how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.
Here are 9 things Americans just don’t understand — compared to the rest of the world
Alex Henderson, AlterNet - raw story
10 FEB 2018 AT 08:00 ET
To hear the far-right ideologues of Fox News and AM talk radio tell it, life in Europe is hell on Earth. Taxes are high, sexual promiscuity prevails, universal healthcare doesn’t work, and millions of people don’t even speak English as their primary language! Those who run around screaming about “American exceptionalism” often condemn countries like France, Norway and Switzerland to justify their jingoism. Sadly, the U.S.’ economic deterioration means that many Americans simply cannot afford a trip abroad to see how those countries function for themselves. And often, lack of foreign travel means accepting clichés about the rest of the world over the reality. And that lack of worldliness clouds many Americans’ views on everything from economics to sex to religion.
Here are nine things Americans can learn from the rest of the world.
1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
The modern-day Republican Party would have us believe that those who promote universal healthcare are anti-free enterprise or hostile to small businesses. But truth be told, universal healthcare is great for entrepreneurs, small businesses and the self-employed in France, Germany and other developed countries where healthcare is considered a right. The U.S.’ troubled healthcare system has a long history of punishing entrepreneurs with sky-high premiums when they start their own businesses. Prior to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, many small business owners couldn’t even obtain individual health insurance plans if they had a preexisting condition such as heart disease or diabetes—and even with the ACA’s reforms, the high cost of health insurance is still daunting to small business owners. But many Americans fail to realize that healthcare reform is not only a humanitarian issue, it is also vitally important to small businesses and the self-employed.
In 2009, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a study on small businesses around the world and found that “by every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors.” People in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and other European countries are more likely to be self-employed—and the study concluded that universal healthcare is a key factor. According to CEPR’s study, “High healthcare costs discourage small business formation since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded healthcare systems.”
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
For decades, social conservatives in the U.S. have insisted that comprehensive sex education promotes unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. But in fact, comprehensive sex education (as opposed to the abstinence-only programs that are common in the American Bible Belt) decreases sexual problems, and the data bears that out in no uncertain terms. Public schools in the Netherlands have aggressive sex education programs that America’s Christian Right would despise. Yet in 2009, the Netherlands had (according to the United Nations) a teen birth rate of only 5.3 per 1,000 compared to 39.1 per 1,000 in the U.S. That same year, the U.S. had three times as many adults living with HIV or AIDS as the Netherlands.
Switzerland, France, Germany and many other European countries also have intensive sex-ed programs and much lower teen pregnancy rates than the U.S. Still, far-right politicians in the U.S. can’t get it through their heads that inadequate sex education and insufficient sexual knowledge actually promote teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases instead of decreasing them.
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense
No matter how severe the U.S.’ decline becomes, neocons and the Tea Party continue to espouse their belief in “American exceptionalism.” But in many respects, the U.S. is far from exceptional. The U.S. is not exceptional when it comes to civil liberties (no country in the world incarcerates, per capita, more of its people than the U.S.) or healthcare (WHO ranks the U.S. #37 in terms of healthcare). Nor is the U.S. a leader in terms of life expectancy: according to the WHO, overall life expectancy in the U.S. in 2013 was 79 compared to 83 in Switzerland and Japan, 82 in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada and 81 in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Austria and Finland.
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
When it comes to mass transit, Europe and Japan are way ahead of the U.S.; in only a handful of American cities is it easy to function without a car. New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, DC are among the U.S.’ more mass transit-oriented cities, but overall, the U.S. remains a car culture—and public transportation is painfully limited in a long list of U.S. cities. Many Americans fail to realize that mass transit has numerous advantages, including less air pollution, less congestion, fewer DUIs and all the aerobic exercise that goes with living in a pedestrian-friendly environment.
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
Christianity in its various forms can be found all over the developed world. But the U.S., more than anywhere, is where one finds a far-right version of white Protestant fundamentalism that idolizes the ultra-rich, demonizes the poor and equates extreme wealth with morality and poverty with moral failings. The problem with hating the poor in the name of Christianity is that the Bible is full of quotes that are much more in line with Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ayn Rand—like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25) and “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
In the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, becoming proficient in two or three foreign languages is viewed as a sign of intellect and sophistication. But xenophobia runs so deep among many neocons, Republicans and Tea Party wingnuts that any use of a language other than English terrifies them. Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, was bombarded with hateful responses from Republicans when he recommended that Americans study foreign languages from an early age. And in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran an ad in South Carolina attacking Mitt Romney for being proficient in French.
In February, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin in Vermont received equally clueless responses when she wrote to a state senator suggesting that Vermont adopt a Latin motto in addition to its English-language motto (not as a replacement). The wingnuts went ballistic, posting on the Facebook page of a local television station that if the girl wanted to speak Latin, she should move to Latin America.
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 53% of Americans approved of labor unions while 71% favored anti-union “right to work” laws. Union membership is way down in the U.S.: only 6.6% of private-sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, belonged to unions in 2014 compared to roughly 35% in the mid-1950s. The U.S.’ overall unionization rate (factoring in both public-sector and private-sector workers) is 11.1%, which is quite a contrast to parts of Europe, where overall union rates range from 74% in Finland and 70% in Sweden to 35% in Italy, 19% in Spain and 18% in Germany. That is not to say unionization has not been decreasing in Europe, but overall, one finds a more pro-labor, pro-working class outlook in Europe. The fact that 47% of Americans, in that Gallup poll, consider themselves anti-union is troubling. Too many Americans naively believe that the 1% have their best interests at heart, and they fail to realize that when unions are strong and their members earn decent wages, that money goes back into the economy.
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
The U.S. continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to maternity leave. Paid maternity leave is strictly voluntary in the U.S., where, according to the organization Moms Rising, 51% of new mothers have no paid maternity leave at all. But government-mandated maternity leave is the norm in other developed countries, including the Netherlands (112 days at 100% pay), Italy (140 days at 80% pay), Switzerland (98 days at 80% pay) and Germany (98 days at 100% pay).
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive
In February 2015, the Emnid Polling Institute in Germany released the results of a poll that addressed economic and political conditions in that country: over 60% of the Germans surveyed believed that large corporations had too much influence on elections. ThE survey demonstrated that most Germans have a healthy distrust of crony capitalists and oligarchs who take much more than they give. Meanwhile, in the U.S., various polls show a growing distrust of oligarchy on the part of many Americans but with less vehemence than in the German Emnid poll. A 2012 poll by the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that while 62% of American voters opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, only 46% strongly opposed it. And in a 2012 poll by the Corporate Reform Coalition, most Americans agreed that there was too much corporate money in U.S. politics—although only 51% strongly agreed.
Here are nine things Americans can learn from the rest of the world.
1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
The modern-day Republican Party would have us believe that those who promote universal healthcare are anti-free enterprise or hostile to small businesses. But truth be told, universal healthcare is great for entrepreneurs, small businesses and the self-employed in France, Germany and other developed countries where healthcare is considered a right. The U.S.’ troubled healthcare system has a long history of punishing entrepreneurs with sky-high premiums when they start their own businesses. Prior to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, many small business owners couldn’t even obtain individual health insurance plans if they had a preexisting condition such as heart disease or diabetes—and even with the ACA’s reforms, the high cost of health insurance is still daunting to small business owners. But many Americans fail to realize that healthcare reform is not only a humanitarian issue, it is also vitally important to small businesses and the self-employed.
In 2009, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a study on small businesses around the world and found that “by every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors.” People in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and other European countries are more likely to be self-employed—and the study concluded that universal healthcare is a key factor. According to CEPR’s study, “High healthcare costs discourage small business formation since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded healthcare systems.”
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
For decades, social conservatives in the U.S. have insisted that comprehensive sex education promotes unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. But in fact, comprehensive sex education (as opposed to the abstinence-only programs that are common in the American Bible Belt) decreases sexual problems, and the data bears that out in no uncertain terms. Public schools in the Netherlands have aggressive sex education programs that America’s Christian Right would despise. Yet in 2009, the Netherlands had (according to the United Nations) a teen birth rate of only 5.3 per 1,000 compared to 39.1 per 1,000 in the U.S. That same year, the U.S. had three times as many adults living with HIV or AIDS as the Netherlands.
Switzerland, France, Germany and many other European countries also have intensive sex-ed programs and much lower teen pregnancy rates than the U.S. Still, far-right politicians in the U.S. can’t get it through their heads that inadequate sex education and insufficient sexual knowledge actually promote teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases instead of decreasing them.
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense
No matter how severe the U.S.’ decline becomes, neocons and the Tea Party continue to espouse their belief in “American exceptionalism.” But in many respects, the U.S. is far from exceptional. The U.S. is not exceptional when it comes to civil liberties (no country in the world incarcerates, per capita, more of its people than the U.S.) or healthcare (WHO ranks the U.S. #37 in terms of healthcare). Nor is the U.S. a leader in terms of life expectancy: according to the WHO, overall life expectancy in the U.S. in 2013 was 79 compared to 83 in Switzerland and Japan, 82 in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada and 81 in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Austria and Finland.
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
When it comes to mass transit, Europe and Japan are way ahead of the U.S.; in only a handful of American cities is it easy to function without a car. New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, DC are among the U.S.’ more mass transit-oriented cities, but overall, the U.S. remains a car culture—and public transportation is painfully limited in a long list of U.S. cities. Many Americans fail to realize that mass transit has numerous advantages, including less air pollution, less congestion, fewer DUIs and all the aerobic exercise that goes with living in a pedestrian-friendly environment.
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
Christianity in its various forms can be found all over the developed world. But the U.S., more than anywhere, is where one finds a far-right version of white Protestant fundamentalism that idolizes the ultra-rich, demonizes the poor and equates extreme wealth with morality and poverty with moral failings. The problem with hating the poor in the name of Christianity is that the Bible is full of quotes that are much more in line with Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ayn Rand—like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25) and “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
In the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, becoming proficient in two or three foreign languages is viewed as a sign of intellect and sophistication. But xenophobia runs so deep among many neocons, Republicans and Tea Party wingnuts that any use of a language other than English terrifies them. Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, was bombarded with hateful responses from Republicans when he recommended that Americans study foreign languages from an early age. And in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran an ad in South Carolina attacking Mitt Romney for being proficient in French.
In February, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin in Vermont received equally clueless responses when she wrote to a state senator suggesting that Vermont adopt a Latin motto in addition to its English-language motto (not as a replacement). The wingnuts went ballistic, posting on the Facebook page of a local television station that if the girl wanted to speak Latin, she should move to Latin America.
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 53% of Americans approved of labor unions while 71% favored anti-union “right to work” laws. Union membership is way down in the U.S.: only 6.6% of private-sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, belonged to unions in 2014 compared to roughly 35% in the mid-1950s. The U.S.’ overall unionization rate (factoring in both public-sector and private-sector workers) is 11.1%, which is quite a contrast to parts of Europe, where overall union rates range from 74% in Finland and 70% in Sweden to 35% in Italy, 19% in Spain and 18% in Germany. That is not to say unionization has not been decreasing in Europe, but overall, one finds a more pro-labor, pro-working class outlook in Europe. The fact that 47% of Americans, in that Gallup poll, consider themselves anti-union is troubling. Too many Americans naively believe that the 1% have their best interests at heart, and they fail to realize that when unions are strong and their members earn decent wages, that money goes back into the economy.
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
The U.S. continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to maternity leave. Paid maternity leave is strictly voluntary in the U.S., where, according to the organization Moms Rising, 51% of new mothers have no paid maternity leave at all. But government-mandated maternity leave is the norm in other developed countries, including the Netherlands (112 days at 100% pay), Italy (140 days at 80% pay), Switzerland (98 days at 80% pay) and Germany (98 days at 100% pay).
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive
In February 2015, the Emnid Polling Institute in Germany released the results of a poll that addressed economic and political conditions in that country: over 60% of the Germans surveyed believed that large corporations had too much influence on elections. ThE survey demonstrated that most Germans have a healthy distrust of crony capitalists and oligarchs who take much more than they give. Meanwhile, in the U.S., various polls show a growing distrust of oligarchy on the part of many Americans but with less vehemence than in the German Emnid poll. A 2012 poll by the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that while 62% of American voters opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, only 46% strongly opposed it. And in a 2012 poll by the Corporate Reform Coalition, most Americans agreed that there was too much corporate money in U.S. politics—although only 51% strongly agreed.
The 5 Most, Least Educated US States
Mississippi ranks last
By Arden Dier, Newser Staff
Updated Jan 27, 2018 12:20 PM CST
(NEWSER) – A good education often brings greater chances of employment as well as higher income potential—two perks that residents of Mississippi and West Virginia might be at a disadvantage of attaining. That’s based on a list of the most and least educated states in the US, compiled by Wallet Hub, which puts those two at the bottom. Here are the top five in each category, with a score out of 100, based on quality of education and the educational attainment of adults 25 and older:
Most educated (with score out 100):
Most educated (with score out 100):
- Massachusetts: 82
- Maryland: 76.5
- Connecticut: 72
- Vermont: 71
- Colorado: 70
- Mississippi: 21
- West Virginia: 22
- Louisiana: 23
- Arkansas: 27
- Alabama: 31
CREDIT: MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE
THIS IS AMERICA
Americans have learned nothing since November 2016
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2:45 PM - Dec 10, 2017
