Category: Missouri

March 9, 2022

Missouri Lawmaker Wants to Ban Residents’ Travels to Other States for Abortions

A Republican lawmaker in Missouri is hoping to ban residents in her state from traveling to other states to obtain abortion services through an enforcement mechanism that is similar to that of Texas’s restrictive abortion ban.

State Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R) has attached amendments to a number of abortion bills that are currently being considered within the state legislature, with hopes that her amendment will become law should one of those measures pass. Her proposal would allow any state resident to file a lawsuit against any individual who helps a Missouri resident get an abortion — even if that abortion takes place outside of state lines.

This enforcement strategy is similar to that of an anti-abortion law in Texas, which bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy by incentivizing residents in the state to sue abortion providers for large fines.

There is only one abortion clinic in Missouri that is currently providing services, a Planned Parenthood location in St. Louis. Thousands of residents travel out of state to get abortions each year. The state also has an 8-week ban on abortions on the books, although that law is currently on hold as it is being litigated in courts. However, Missouri still forbids medical providers from performing abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy.

The language in Coleman’s amendment would allow residents to sue clinics that help Missourians obtain abortions — from the doctors who actually perform the procedure to clinic staff who arrange appointment schedules.

Abortion rights activists say that Coleman’s amendment is unconstitutional, as it enforces state law on individuals who are not residents of Missouri, and is incongruent with interstate commerce rules. Olivia Cappello, the press officer for state media campaigns at Planned Parenthood, described Coleman’s proposal as “wild” and “bonkers.”

But other abortion advocates warn that all bets are off, especially when it comes to the current iteration of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has allowed the Texas law to stay in place while it goes through the appeals process, and is weighing whether to overturn abortion rights that have been recognized for nearly five decades.

“If you think this Supreme Court won’t find that a state’s interest in potential fetal life outweighs a pregnant person’s due process right to travel, you haven’t been paying attention,” wrote Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy at Rewire News Group. “This Court is lawless and DGAF.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
November 23, 2021

District That Banned LGBTQ Books Relents After Pressure From Students, ACLU

A school district in Kansas City, Missouri, has retreated from a policy of banning LGBTQ-themed books after a group of students and other organizations — including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — demanded an end to the practice.

The North Kansas City School District, responding to complaints from parents, removed two books earlier this year: All Boys Aren’t Blue, a book by George M. Johnson that recollects his experience as a queer, Black teenager, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, a book about her experiences with her father who she later learns is gay.

In a letter sent directly to the district, the ACLU said that students had the right to access these books.

“Students must be free to access library books — without discrimination or censorship — that are LGBTQ+ affirming as well as books that provide an inclusive and accurate history of racism,” the letter from the organization read.

The matter was discussed at a school board meeting on Monday evening, where over a dozen students from the district spoke out against the district’s actions.

Parents who take issue with these or other books shouldn’t be able to dictate what students who are not their children can have access to, these students said.

“I see no wrong in telling your child not to read a book,” one of those students said, according to a report from local television station KMBC. “However, to tell every child that is a violation to the rights of students.”

The district relented as a result, and agreed at the meeting to return the books to the shelves of the high school library.

The victory in the North Kansas City School District is emblematic of right-wing challenges many districts, school administrators and teachers are facing across the country, as conservative parents wage complaints over books in school libraries that teach or discuss experiences from Black and/or LGBTQ persons. Many LGBTQ advocates are trying to counter attempts to suppress these books and narratives, including students, teachers and librarians themselves.

Writing for Truthout earlier this month, author Henry A. Giroux, who is also the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department, explained that such book bans, which are being pushed by Republican politicians, are “vehicle[s] for white supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision and support for curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism and a brutal policy of racial exclusion.”

“The banning of books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance to the Nazi book burning, represents a startling vision of the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy and its willingness to resurrect totalitarian practices linked to earlier periods of censorship, repression, terror and state violence,” Giroux said.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 15, 2021

Cori Bush Slams GOP Governor for Threat to Prosecute Reporter: “Shame on You”

Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has become the subject of widespread criticism for accusing a journalist of hacking after the journalist pointed out a data vulnerability on the state government’s website.

On Thursday, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter wrote that over 100,000 educators’ Social Security numbers (SSN) were easily viewable through the HTML source code on a website run by the state’s education department. The reporter notified the government, giving them time to address the vulnerability and scan other government-run websites for similar issues before publishing the story.

Not long after the article was published, Parson accused the reporter of being a “hacker” without evidence and promised to seek criminal prosecution. “This administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians,” Parson said at a press conference.

Parson continued to imply that the Post-Dispatch journalist had some sort of ulterior motive, claiming the reporter was “acting against the state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.” Ironically, his threats to the journalist are bringing far more attention to the story than it would have gotten otherwise.

As many reporters and people familiar with basic computer functions have pointed out, the journalist didn’t participate in anything close to resembling hacking. Rather, he accessed information that is public on every webpage: the source code, which can be accessed easily via the “view source” functionality. By pointing out the flaw in the website, he likely helped avert disaster for the state’s educators’ by protecting their personal information — not vice versa, as Parson erroneously claimed.

This type of data vulnerability is a well-known mistake, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis told the Post-Dispatch. The professor added that it was “mind boggling” to see it still happening on a government website, even though this type of cybersecurity error has been around for at least a decade.

Lawmakers and journalist organizations were dismayed at the governor’s direct attack on a member of the press.

“Let’s make this clear: It was [Governor Parson] who failed to secure teachers’ SSNs. There’s no ‘hacking’ here. There’s an effort to criminalize journalists,” wrote Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri. “Shame on you, Governor.”

“Using journalists as political scapegoats by casting routine research as ‘hacking’ is a poor attempt to divert public attention from the government’s own security failing,” Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told The Washington Post, adding that Parson’s threats were “absurd.”

Though many people pointed out the simplicity of the data vulnerability to the governor after his threats on Thursday, Parson only doubled down on his statements in tweets later that day. “We want to be clear, this DESE hack was more than a simple ‘right click,’” he lied. “This data was not freely available, and by the actors own admission, the data had to be taken through eight separate steps in order to generate a SSN.”

Parson’s statements are easily debunked; according to the original article, “the newspaper found that teachers’ Social Security numbers were contained in the HTML source code of the pages involved.” Not only is it unclear what “steps” Parson is talking about, the source code of websites is freely available — one can even view it on a smartphone browser.

Though Parson’s motivations are undetermined, the threats are part of disturbing and ongoing attempts by Republicans to discredit the media at large, years after Donald Trump coined the term “fake news.”

“Trump’s most effective ploy has been to destroy the credibility of the press,” CPJ wrote in a 2020 report.

During his presidency, Trump reportedly asked then-Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey to prosecute journalists who reported on leaks. He also repeatedly attacked the media for portraying him in a negative light and embarrassing his administration.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 10, 2021

Missouri’s GOP Governor Forced to Expand Medicaid Access Following Court Ruling

A Missouri judge has ruled that state lawmakers, including Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson, can no longer deny adults who are newly eligible for Medicaid from accessing the program.

Cole County Judge Jon Beetem, who had initially ruled in favor of allowing Parson and other Republicans the ability to restrict eligible participants earlier this year, changed his ruling after the state Supreme Court had found the legal arguments he had favored were improperly accepted. In his opinion published on Tuesday, Beetem said he was changing his initial finding “in accordance with the Mandate of the Supreme Court of Missouri.”

The state Supreme Court’s ruling had been a unanimous one.

Beetem’s new ruling also requires the state to treat newly eligible Medicaid participants similarly to those who are already in the program, and forbids the state from offering different tiers of benefits to Medicaid recipients.

The ruling on Tuesday affirms a referendum outcome from August 2020, which saw more than 53 percent of Missourians vote in favor of expanding the state’s Medicaid program in accordance with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the outcome of that vote was hailed at the time by health advocates as a promising step forward, Republicans in the state have since tried to block the expansion, through court challenges and legislative actions.

But those challenges would no longer remain obstacles to individuals getting Medicaid coverage.

“People who make up to 138 percent of [the] federal poverty level [in Missouri] can start applying now,” wrote St. Louis Public Radio correspondent Jason Rosenbaum. “It will take some time to get enrolled, but they can’t be denied coverage. Medicaid expansion in Missouri has arrived.”

Parson, reacting to the order on Tuesday, said he would “follow the law.” But he also expressed doubts over his and other lawmakers’ ability to find funding for the program, stating that one of the ways he could do so might be to lessen the benefits that Medicaid recipients in his state receive.

“We don’t have the funding to support it right now. So we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to do that, you know, whether we’re going to dilute the pool of money that we have now for the people that’s on the program, and just how we’re going to move forward,” Parson said.

Those comments from Parson suggest that the slashing of Medicaid benefits may become the next major political battle on health care in the state.

With Missouri now officially legally bound to expand access to Medicaid, 38 states plus Washington, D.C. have now adopted Medicaid expansions. Twelve states, however, have opted out of doing so since the ACA became law more than 10 years ago. (States were given the opportunity to opt out of the expansion because of a federal Supreme Court ruling on the law in 2012.)

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, hundreds of studies have shown positive outcomes from states’ Medicaid expansion, including greater access and utilization of care, healthcare affordability, and even improvements to states’ economies. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2019 suggested that thousands of lives — around 19,000 in total — have been saved due to states deciding to opt into expanding their Medicaid programs through the ACA. Conversely, around 15,000 lives have been lost because states have refused to accept funding to expand their programs, that same study found.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion

A county coroner in the state of Missouri is honoring requests from family members to alter the cause of death on the death certificates of their loved ones who have died from COVID — an action that, if replicated in other areas, could be disastrous results for purposes of tracking the true toll of the pandemic in the United States.

The 11 COVID deaths out of a total of 30 in Macon County, Missouri — which has a population of about 15,000 — that have been wrongly categorized are a small enough number to be statistically insignificant. However, some have rightly argued that actions like these are probably responsible for the current total number of COVID deaths in the U.S. being undercounted.

Speaking to The Kansas City Star on the matter, Macon County Coroner Brian Hayes said he altered the cause of death on at least six certificates at the request of family members. Instead of COVID, he listed a different condition such as pneumonia as the cause of death. Or, as he put it, in some cases saying that a death occured because “grandma had one lung and smoked all her life.”

The reasons for these requests appear to be politically motivated, as these Macon County residents don’t want to admit that their loved ones died of a virus that many in the country have tried to downplay, explained Hayes, who is a Republican.

“A lot of families were upset. They didn’t want COVID on the death certificates,” Hayes told the newspaper. “I won’t lie for them, it’s gotta be true, but I do what pleases the family.”

The admission by Hayes that he changes coroner reports at the request of families suggests that coroners in other Republican-dominated parts of the country may also not be recording COVID deaths as they should be. Reporting on Hayes’s actions, journalist Andrew Jeong from The Washington Post wrote that his undercount “comes amid broader recognition that the number of covid fatalities in the United States is probably higher than the official tally of 614,000.”

Indeed, researchers at the University of Washington estimated in July that the number of cases of coronavirus alone in the U.S. is likely undercounted by as much as 60 percent. The true tally of deaths in the country could be as high as 900,000.

Missouri, like much of the nation, is experiencing troubling increases in its coronavirus infection and hospitalization rates. The state is currently sixth in the nation in terms of how many residents have COVID-19 on a per capita basis, with 46 out of every 100,000 individuals in the state currently testing positive for it. It’s also fifth in hospitalization rates compared to the rest of the country, with its daily hospitalization number reaching 2,053 residents, on average, as of this week — an increase of 34 percent from where that rate was just two weeks ago.

Residents aren’t doing as much as they can to protect themselves from the virus, with only 42 percent of the state being vaccinated at this time, a rate that makes it the 13th worst state in the nation on that metric. Additionally, less than half of the state (49 percent) has received at least one dose of any of the vaccines that are available for protection against coronavirus.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 21, 2021

GOP Legislators in Missouri Oppose Vaccine as State Becomes COVID Hotspot

Amid the current surge in COVID-19 cases in Missouri, a recent Facebook conversation between two Republican state lawmakers is telling.

Around Independence Day, State Rep. Bill Kidd, from the Kansas City suburbs, revealed that he has been infected by the coronavirus.

“And no, we didn’t get the vaccine,” he wrote in a post that has since been deleted. “We’re Republicans ”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Taney County, home to the tourist destination of Branson, commented on the post by falsely claiming that the virus had been developed by top government scientist Anthony Fauci and billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates. They “knew what was coming,” Seitz wrote.

“The jury is still out on the ‘vaccine’ (who knows what’s in that),” he wrote.

As the number of coronavirus infections rises around the country, lawmakers like Kidd and Seitz have adopted responses that trouble many health officials. In Tennessee, Republicans legislators threatened to shut down the state health department, saying it was targeting minors for mass vaccinations without the consent of parents. In Ohio, lawmakers allowed a doctor to testify at a legislative hearing last month that coronavirus vaccines could leave people magnetized (they can’t). During a hearing in the Montana Senate, a senator said he had read articles about “putting a chip in the vaccine.” (There are no chips in vaccines.)

Just as with his insistence that he won the election, former president Donald Trump’s attitudes about COVID-19 hold great sway with his supporters. Trump routinely bashed Fauci and infectious disease experts throughout the pandemic and questioned the severity of the coronavirus.

He also strongly carried Missouri’s southwest corner in the November election. While Trump beat Joe Biden by 15.4 percentage points statewide, in rural Taney County, the margin was 57.8 points.

Those supporters now tend to oppose efforts to get everyone vaccinated, believing they are being led by Democrats, said Ken Warren, a professor of political science at Saint Louis University who tracks state and local politics. “It’s a sad reality,” he said. “We can’t get together on anything, even fighting COVID.”

Such attitudes are accelerating an anti-vaccine sentiment that has run strong in the state legislature for years, particularly with lawmakers from the area of Missouri now facing increased infection rates. In 2018, Republican state Rep. Lynn Morris, a pharmacist from southwest Missouri, pushed a proposal to prohibit discrimination against unvaccinated children. Public school children are required to be vaccinated against several diseases, but families can claim a medical or religious exemption. The Legislature took up a similar proposal in 2019. Each failed.

Late last year, state Rep. Suzie Pollock, a Republican from south-central Missouri, proposed a bill to prohibit discrimination against people who choose not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. She claimed the vaccine against the virus had “been rushed” and that its efficacy was “in question,” myths that have been relentlessly amplified by right-wing media.

The bill did not advance, but Gov. Mike Parson signed into law a related bill blocking local governments from requiring proof of coronavirus vaccination for people seeking to access transportation systems or other public services.

It’s not enough for some. “Now people are pushing back even against the idea of private employers like hospitals and health care providers telling their employees you have to be vaccinated,” said state Rep. Shamed Dogan, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs. “I think that some of the legitimate concerns of government overreach have turned into this broader resistance to any vaccination, which is something I don’t agree with.”

Late in this year’s legislative session, Pollack pushed a proposal that would allow more parents to opt out of vaccinating their children against diseases including polio, measles and mumps. Pollock insisted she was not against vaccines, but said that people should have the freedom to choose. The House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee voted 10-6 in favor of the bill.

The full House defeated it on April 28 in a 79-67 vote.

“There is a tremendous skepticism about the good that government can do,” said Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield and director of the Meador Center for Politics & Citizenship there.

Ponder said many residents of southwest Missouri question the motives behind the policies that governments are pushing and show “a tremendous skepticism about information.” He added, “People don’t believe the vaccines are working. People don’t believe the federal government isn’t going to come down here and … basically strong-arm them into taking a vaccine.”

Indeed, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deployed a two-person “surge response” team to southwest Missouri this month to combat an outbreak attributed to the dangerous delta variant, both Parson and U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, from south-central Missouri, tweeted opposition to federal agents going door to door to compel vaccines, something President Joe Biden’s administration said it never had any intent to do.

On Sunday, Springfield Mayor Ken McClure told CBS’ Face the Nation that his community was “being hurt” by rampant vaccine misinformation. He said people were sharing “health-related fears, what it might do to them later on in their lives, what might be contained in the vaccinations. And that information is just incorrect.”

Taney County is near the heart of the surge of the delta variant, which health officials say spreads more easily than earlier versions of the virus. The county is leading the state with the highest rate of coronavirus cases over the past seven days, according to Missouri health department data. Surrounding counties have similarly high rates, raising alarms for federal health officials.

Despite the spike, just 28% of Taney County’s residents are fully vaccinated, below the state average of 40%.

Seitz, who once owned a newspaper that promoted Branson’s entertainment industry, boasted in an interview that the Ozark tourist town was doing gangbuster business after a year of being mostly shut down.

“There were 27,000 people at our July 3 celebration,” he said, noting that he attended with U.S. Rep. Billy Long and “he said something like, ‘I’m so glad to see there are very few chin diapers in the crowd.’ The roar was huge … we’re so happy not to be forced by government to either wear a mask or take a vaccine.”

Seitz said he had no business telling his constituents how to live. The media has shifted its focus from deaths to the raw numbers of cases, he said, glossing over that most people who catch the virus don’t die. While 600,000 American deaths have been attributed to COVID-19, Seitz questioned whether people were dying from the disease or from existing health problems: “If a person is grossly overweight and caught a very virulent virus, did they die because they were in very ill health or did they die because of the virus?”

Seitz falsely claimed that COVID vaccines have not been tested and are unsafe. He backed down on his comment about Fauci on Kidd’s Facebook post, acknowledging that the virology expert did not create the coronavirus but asserting that he had been engaged for years in experiments to make viruses more dangerous or transmissible. Fauci has insisted the U.S. government did not participate in experiments that could have caused the pandemic.

Seitz said he had nothing against people who take the vaccine or wear masks. It’s their choice, he said. He said it wasn’t his job to keep people safe, but to keep people free.

“I haven’t had the flu even since 1994,” he said. “Why would I take a vaccine? … My life was normal for the past year, very few instances of wearing a mask, and so forth, and I’m just fine.”

Betsy Fogle, who recently completed her first session as a Democratic state representative from Springfield, said it was “fascinating kind of watching the narrative and the rhetoric” in the state capital of Jefferson City surrounding COVID-19, “and then watching it all get politicized and polarized. And then seeing that real-life impact that has on our neighbors back in Springfield when our hospitals are full and our hospital CEOs are begging people to get vaccinated and people just aren’t doing it.”

She said there was a mentality among Republican leaders “that COVID is a hoax, or that vaccines are a hoax, and that trickles down.”

She said she has several constituents who didn’t get vaccinated “because they think that this is a joke, and then these people reach out a month later to say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t listen.’”

Kidd, the Republican from the Kansas City area, posted almost two weeks after his initial Facebook post that he was seeking prayers because he was “having a difficult time with COVID” and “really sick.” Kidd posted again on Thursday that he was “doing better” after the virus “kicked my butt.” He did not respond to a message from a reporter.

Fogle said she hoped Kidd recovered, “but that’s the frustrating part about it, is that our hospitals, our doctors, our people who are in charge of making these decisions are telling us how severe it is, and we refuse to accept that severity.”

She said she makes daily calls to everyone she knows who isn’t vaccinated “and what I hear is, ‘No, it’s my right, it’s my body, it’s my choice, like, stop bringing this up.’ And it’s hard to win those arguments.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 18, 2021

Disgraced Former Governor Claims He’s Been Exonerated, But the GOP Isn’t So Sure

Prior to his inauguration, Donald Trump predicted “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.”

A few weeks later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated that Trump’s inaugural ceremony had drawn the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” Photos from the National Park Service seem to contradict this claim, as do statistics on public transportation ridership, as well as estimates of the number of television viewers.

During a “Meet the Press” interview, Chuck Todd asked Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway why Spicer would attest to such a “provable falsehood.” Conway responded that Spicer had given “alternative facts” — thereby coining a new term for “facts” that aren’t true.

In May 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate possible connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. While the report that was eventually released did “not conclude that the President committed a crime,” it plainly stated that “it does not exonerate him.” Nonetheless, Trump tweeted that there was “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed this untruth by repeating that the Mueller report had provided Trump “a complete and total exoneration.”

Using “alternative facts” to claim “exoneration” has since been parroted by other politicians. Disgraced former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, for instance, insists that he has “been completely exonerated” after the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC) dismissed all but two of the complaints directed at his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. However, not being charged with a crime is not the same as being “exonerated.”

While a consent order states that “the MEC found no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Eric Greitens, individually, and no evidence that Governor Greitens knew of the … violations,” as a result of the investigation, the “Greitens Campaign agreed to pay fines totaling over $178,000,” which isn’t exactly an sign of guiltlessness.

Furthermore, similar to how Trump has emphasized the part of the Mueller report that did “not conclude that [he] committed a crime,” while ignoring that “it [did] not exonerate him,” Greitens has latched onto the “no evidence of any wrongdoing” part of the consent order to profess his unconditional absolution.

For instance, when conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt brought up the former governor’s “multiple allegations of misconduct,” Greitens maintained that he’d “been fully exonerated” as the MEC “found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”

When Hewitt, a lawyer and law professor, pressed Greitens about conflating the MEC investigation of campaign violations with the GOP-led investigation by the Missouri legislature that culminated in a bipartisan report detailing graphic sexual allegations, Greitens continued to defend his innocence.

Since that interview, Hewitt has stated that Greitens is “a deeply-flawed individual” and that it would be “a doomed race” if he emerged as the victor of the upcoming Republican primary for retiring Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat, which has been under GOP control since 1987.

In addition to Hewitt, many other prominent conservatives have openly doubted Greitens’s electoral prospects. For instance, six-term Rep. Vicky Hartzler frets that Greitens’s “problems in the past … could jeopardize [Missouri] from staying in strong, conservative Republican hands.”

Karl Rove, the political strategist often credited with George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, argues that “[a]nybody who breaks his marriage vows and conducts multiple affairs and has one with his hairdresser and ties her up in the basement of his own home and takes pictures of her … that’s not a winning message for Republicans.”

With a straight face, Greitens shamelessly declares that “[w]hen we’re able to look back with pride, we can look forward with confidence.” Since the advent of “alternative facts,” politicians like Trump and Greitens have shown a willingness to move beyond bending the truth towards peddling a parallel version of it.

During his term as president, Trump made more than 30,000 misleading statements. Greitens has followed in the footsteps of such dishonesty by promoting baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Instead of attending the Missouri Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Days event or a Missouri Cattlemen’s Association fundraiser, Greitens gallivanted off to Arizona in search of bamboo-laced ballots. He argues that there should be similar audits in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Greitens admits that his support for Trump is “more than a catch phrase.” This is because Greitens’s campaign rests upon his self-declared “exoneration,” which — like Trump’s self-declared “exoneration” — rests upon “alternative facts.” As such, the rehabilitation of Greitens’ political career is reliant upon accepting the upside-down reality that Trump has built. One consequence of this is that while other Senate hopefuls can focus on campaigning locally, Greitens is forced to chase conspiracies in other states in order to convincingly maintain the illusion that he has become entangled within.

According to Greitens, “[r]ight now, our country needs fighters,” and he’s “here to fight.” Given his own history of running from a fight by resigning as governor, rather than face the prospect of being impeached by his own party, it appears that after four years of “alternative facts,” even Greitens is confused about what’s true.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 3, 2021

Missouri Supreme Court voids ‘paycheck protection’ bill

A 2018 law adding sweeping changes to how labor organizations — exempting, however, public safety unions — conduct business was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court Tuesday.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision rendering the GOP-backed HB 1413 null for violating public employees’ right to collective bargaining “through representatives of their own choosing.” It also said the law violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause by exempting public safety labor organizations.

The post Missouri Supreme Court voids ‘paycheck protection’ bill appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
May 3, 2021

Missouri GOP Lawmakers Block Expansion of Medicaid, Despite Voter Referendum

Republican lawmakers in Missouri are refusing to fund an expansion of the state Medicaid program that constituents approved in a vote last year, a move that will likely spur legal challenges in the months ahead.

In August, voters in Missouri were asked whether they supported expanding Medicaid eligibility as laid out in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Though the vote was somewhat close, more than 53 percent of voters said they supported the expansion, with less than 47 percent saying they opposed it.

The expansion would cover an additional 230,000 residents of the state, Politico reported at the time.

Thirty-nine states and D.C. have adopted measures to expand Medicaid since the ACA became law in 2010, with 12 states refusing to do so. Of those 39, however, two states — Oklahoma and Missouri — adopted expansion through a referendum vote but have not implemented it yet.

In spite of the outcome of the ballot initiative, Republican lawmakers last week stripped provisions from the state budget that would fund the expansion, essentially defying the will of voters.

During debate on the provision last week, some Republicans said that it was up to Missourians themselves to get insured through their places of work, implying that increasing Medicaid expansion would encourage laziness in the workforce.

“I’m sorry, if you’re a healthy adult, you need to get a job,” State Senator Andrew Koenig, who leads the Ways and Means Committee in Missouri, said.

Democratic lawmakers blasted Koenig’s assertions as out of touch with reality, noting that many who would qualify under the expansion of coverage are employed.

“We have a working class that cannot afford for-profit health insurance, and I’m one of those people, that could be one illness or one injury away from bankruptcy,” Democratic State Senator Brian Williams retorted. “And those are people who go to work every single day.”

Koenig also ignored the fact that not everyone with a job gets insurance, as only 52 percent of the workforce in Missouri currently receives employer-based health insurance. Meanwhile, more than 1-in-10 residents (10.1 percent) are uninsured, higher than the national rate (9.2 percent), a gap that could be closed by increasing eligibility requirements for Medicaid.

Others in the GOP have attempted to frame the issue as a fiscal problem. In an interview that was published over the weekend, Senate President Pro Tempore Dave Schatz, a Republican, complained that the expansion of Medicaid was too expensive to push forward on.

“The social services, senior services, that portion of the budget is about 46 percent of our state’s budget,” Schatz said. “That’s a very, very large program, and continues to grow.”

Increasing the number eligible to the program would only cost a small fraction of the state’s budget — about $1.9 billion in total (Medicaid spending in Missouri is about $10.1 billion). Of that amount, more than 9-in-10 dollars would be provided by federal funds, with the state only paying for $130 million in additional costs.

The expansion of eligibility for all residents with household incomes at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level would be a drastic change for the state. Currently, Missouri doesn’t allow any childless adults to qualify for its Medicaid program, and families with children can only qualify if they make less than 21 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family with two parents and a single child, for example, eligibility is cut off after the household income exceeds $5,400 per year.

Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, has the final say on whether the eligibility requirements will be expanded starting on July 1. In a tweet discussing the issue, Parson indicated his office was still undecided.

“We will assess our options and legal requirements on how to move forward with Medicaid expansion, once the budget is finalized,” Parson wrote.

If Parson doesn’t expand eligibility requirements, it will likely lead to lawsuits from those who expected to be eligible as a result of the referendum last year, said Jim Layton, a former official within the state’s attorney general’s office.

“The [state] constitution says people up to this level of income qualify in Missouri for Medicaid and that’s just what we have to live with,” Layton said in an interview with Fox 4 in Kansas City this past week. “The question will be when someone gets online or goes in an office on July 1 and says, ‘I wasn’t eligible on June 30 but today I’m eligible.’”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 16, 2021

Self-Emancipation Continues To Rise At The St. Louis City Justice Center

In the early morning hours of April 4, 2021, a day that many Christians recognized as Resurrection Sunday, detainees, at the St. Louis City Justice Center moved in the spirit of insurrection to challenge their oppressors and well documented repression at the jail. After the first major rebellion at the jail grabbed national attention on February 6, 2021, government bureaucrats in collaboration with “activists” of the social justice state scrambled to mystify what is really happening to detainees at the city’s jails through sham reports and pseudo-independent investigations.

The attempt to paper over the status quo of cruelty and inhumanity exacted on detainees in the aftermath of the February 6th jail uprising has proved unsuccessful.

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April 11, 2021

Endorsed by Trump Allies, Disgraced Former Missouri Governor Will Run for Senate

Missouri has embarrassingly made international headlines several times as of late. In January 2018, then-Gov. Eric Greitens admitted to having an affair and was subsequently probed for blackmail and assault. That February, he was formally charged. That April, a bipartisan report was released by the Missouri House Special Investigative Committee on Oversight, which detailed graphic allegations against the former governor. This prompted Missouri’s then-Attorney General Josh Hawley to call on Greitens to “resign immediately.”

The following month, Greitens ultimately did resign, after having served just under 17 months of his 48-month term. The crowning achievement of Greitens’s short tenure was the passage of a “right-to-work” bill, which ended up being rejected by Missourians in a statewide referendum.

Hawley, meanwhile, ladder-climbed his way to the U.S. Senate, then made international headlines himself by becoming the first U.S. senator to say he’d dispute the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Later, Hawley fist-pumped supporters of former President Donald Trump into a violent frenzy, accepted no responsibility for any of the chaos that ensued, and then cried foul when a private business decided it didn’t want to publish his book. Former Missouri Sen. John Danforth now regards supporting Hawley as “the biggest mistake [he’s] ever made in [his] life.”

Since leaving office in the wake of scandal, Greitens has sought to rehabilitate his image in hopes of returning to politics. He rejoined the Navy (thanks to an intervention by then-Vice President Mike Pence), he donated N95 masks to the Columbia Fire Department (which ended up being faulty) and he hosted a television show (which few have heard of). Shortly after U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election in 2022, Greitens quickly threw his hat into the ring. He has since been endorsed by various Trump sycophants, including Rudy Giuliani.

Today, Hawley claims that he stands by his 2018 call for Greitens’s resignation, yet also admits that he’ll “support the Republican nominee…whoever it is.” Despite being former rivals, the two do have a lot in common: Both are chasing after Trump supporters, and both have a history of questionable fundraising tactics. Hawley, for instance, sent out funding pleas at the same time that extremists were storming the U.S. Capitol, and it wasn’t too long ago that Greitens was courting dark money and improperly dipping into a charity donor list.

Throughout most of the 20th century, Missouri was regarded as a bellwether state, as Missourians accurately voted for the winner in nearly every presidential election. In the last few decades, however, Missouri has turned from purple to a deep red. Still, Democrats do occasionally win state-wide races, particularly when their opponents help out. In 2012, for instance, Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill was able to retain her seat against Republican Todd Akin after he sparked controversy by making a comment regarding “legitimate rape.” McCaskill was later unseated by Hawley in 2018.

The controversy surrounding Greitens may end up costing Republicans a seemingly “safe” seat.

Some conservative commentators fear that Greitens might end up being Todd Akin 2.0. In other words, the controversy surrounding Greitens may end up costing Republicans a seemingly “safe” seat. In this case, Greitens winning the Republican primary would probably be advantageous for progressives, as it could provide Democrats with an opening to grow, or at least retain, their Senate majority (once one factors in the two independents that caucus with Democrats, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote).

On the other hand, if Greitens wins the Republican primary and Democrats can’t rally around a strong candidate, Missouri could end up making international news again by electing a disgraced alleged blackmailer to serve, as senator, alongside an agitator of the Capitol attack. Instead of a bellwether indicating the American political climate, Missouri could become a funhouse mirror reflecting a perverse distortion of American politics.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 5, 2021

St. Louis Justice Center Inmates Rise Up Again, Demand Hearings

St. Louis, MO – St. Louis police responded to the city’s downtown jail Sunday night after inmates broke windows, set fires and threw debris onto the street below Sunday night.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department sent out an all-points bulletin across city police radios Sunday night after inmates on the third floor of the City Justice Center reportedly covered cameras. A short time later, inmates began breaking the windows and throwing things onto the street. At around 9:30 p.m., smoke was pouring out of the broken windows.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s Civil Disturbance Team was among the officers responding to the scene Sunday night.

By around 10:20, the inmates had moved away from the windows, and police officers could be seen inside the windows looking around with flashlights in hand.

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March 15, 2021

Federalism Is Killing Us

Deference to state governments has severely undermined public health efforts during the pandemic and deepened geographic inequality in the United States.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 10, 2021

Housing Justice Group Puts Power Back In Tenants’ Hands

Brandy Granados’s road to activism began in November 2018 when the heater in her Kansas City, Missouri, apartment exploded. She went without heat for two months during a winter that included multiple blizzards. She continued to pay rent, she said, but in response her landlord didn’t fix the heater; instead he tried to evict her and her children.

Desperate for help, she was connected with Tara Raghuveer, an area native who had returned after graduating from college with the goal of solving residents’ housing insecurity. “I figured I could either just sit there and be mad about my situation, or I could do something about it,” Granados said.

She was able to fight off the first eviction attempt in court, but the landlord removed her to retake possession of the house. She ended up in a homeless shelter for three months. The loss of her home has left her son suffering from anxiety and trauma.

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March 9, 2021

KC Tenants’ Month Of Activism Broke The System

Daniel Halferty was behind on rent. “When I made a partial payment in October, [my landlord] texted me, berating me.”

Halferty had been hunting for a job since April, but with a history of cancer and traumatic brain injury, he was cautious about finding a job that would be fairly safe from COVID-19.

Halferty started his new job at the end of November, and made a payment plan to catch up on past-due rent. That was fine with his landlord, Ellis Real Estate, until Halferty asked to delay just 2 weeks, so he could prevent his utilities from being shut off. Then his landlord stopped communicating.

“They just cut out all communication to me, and then Christmas Eve, we had the notice from the lawyer on our door that we were going to be sued for $2,925. They had 30 days to collect the payment and get the apartment back.”

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February 7, 2021

St. Louis Inmates Take Over Units After Weeks Of Complaints

More than 100 inmates at the St. Louis City Justice Center took over two units of the jail early this morning, shattering fourth-floor windows and setting small fires as they called out jubilantly to a crowd of supporters who gathered on the street below.

The uprising began around 2:30 a.m., and detainees held control of the units for more than six hours before teams of city sheriff’s deputies and police regained custody.

For weeks, tensions have been high at the downtown jail. Inmates staged two protests in late December and early January to complain about COVID-19 protocols and other conditions in the facility, where the majority of the city’s detainees are now housed.

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