I never intended to be a single mum. Indeed, when I turned 38 and had notched up 10 years without a partner, I investigated having a baby by myself and very quickly decided not to. It wasn’t the medical intervention or cost that put me off, it was the knowledge that trying to raise a child alone would be horrendously difficult and expensive and would almost certainly mean giving up my career for less demanding work that I could fit around being a full time, solo mum. I also wasn’t at all sure I was up to meeting the emotional needs of a child on my own. So no: not for me, I reluctantly decided.
As it turned out I met a wonderful man just after my 39th birthday and, a couple of years later, we were married with a beautiful baby girl. My late life miracle was just that for six years or so – a miracle of unexpected joy and family life. And then my husband began to get very sick.
He’d warned me when we met. He was a “bad bet”, he said, having barely survived childhood cancer and the treatment that, back in the 1980s, was almost as brutal as the disease. Massive doses of radiation had left him with significant damage to his heart valves, vascular system and other key organs. He survived on a cocktail of medication. His health was never good in all the time we were together, but secondary cancer was defeated while I was pregnant, and a quadruple bypass and heart valve replacement were successful when our daughter was just six months old. We had a good half decade after that.
But in early 2020, during Melbourne’s first pandemic lock down, my beloved entered a spiral of ill health that saw him spend at least 70 % of his time in hospital over the next three years – a hospital we were unable to visit due to the necessary protocols around Covid-19. His multiple, complex health problems began to cascade, and he lost a foot, then a lower leg, to amputation, and then the use of his other leg due to a blood clot which caused massive nerve damage.
He fought on, in a cycle of months spent in hospital and a couple of weeks at home before every next challenge. In the middle of a once in a century pandemic, his immune system struggled with the slightest infection. Last July his heart began to fail again and only experimental surgery pulled him through.
Finally, after five unexpected months at home with us over summer, he developed sepsis from a relatively innocuous skin infection and, despite fighting valiantly again to stay with us, he died of a massive brain haemorrhage in early February this year.
It was four days before his 51st birthday.
Our daughter is nine years old.
Being a single mother to a young child is, as I had suspected all those years ago, incredibly challenging. It crept up on me over the years my husband was ill and absent for weeks and months at a time, so it’s not a sudden shock to not have him here to help. Nor is it “hard” because I have so much love and gratitude for our daughter. But it’s very, very difficult.
A nine year old child can’t be left alone for a moment, obviously. I can’t pop out to the shops if I’m out of milk. I can’t make casual plans outside school hours. I can’t stay back at work unexpectedly if needed. Interstate, overnight work travel has become virtually impossible.
There’s no-one else to read stories at bedtime or help with homework or take her to swimming lessons or weekend activities.
Our income has been cut in half but the mortgage has not, so there’s no money for cleaners or regular babysitters. I have no time for anything other than work, parenting and domestic labour. I am constantly exhausted and emotionally drained. I’m worried about money and every interest rate rise requires a new calculation of what needs to be cut from our already much changed lives. And there’s no-one to share the emotional load – no-one who loves her as I do, who shoulders half the worries or shares the many joys and milestones.
And, of course, we are grieving. We will always be grieving.
Yet I’m lucky. I have a well paid job, with heaps of flexibility. I work long hours but I can do a lot of them after my daughter goes to bed or while she’s at weekend or after school activities (I’m pretending to watch every basketball shot while secretly writing this essay in the notes function on my phone). I can work from home a couple of days so she’s not in before- and after-school care for up to 20 hours a week. I can do all this because I established a career before I became a mum.
Believe me, I count my blessings.
Because most single mums aren’t so lucky. A few become sole parents by choice, but more often it’s through abandonment or bereavement. Most have their kids at a much younger age than I did, so they haven’t established a career they have some control over, with an above-average salary: they’re juggling casual shifts at minimum wage jobs that they must fit around their kids’ needs. Most are living in private rental accommodation with ever-escalating costs and no security. It’s hard enough to be a sole parent without struggling in grinding poverty.
So the Albanese Government’s decision this week to restore Parenting Payment Single to sole parents until their youngest child turns 14 was the element of this budget that made me weep with relief.
I’m not on the payment myself – I wouldn’t still have a mortgaged home if I were – but for around 57,000 sole parents, 52,000 of whom are women, and 110,000 kids whose households will be moved off JobSeeker, the increase of over $175 a fortnight is life-changing and long overdue.
It largely reverses a policy enacted by John Howard in 2006 as part of his disastrous Welfare to Work programme. As part of this punitive approach to social security, and at the same time as increasing family tax benefit for households with a stay-at-home-mum, Howard decreed that single parents would be “incentivised” to look for paid work when their youngest child turned 6, and pushed onto the much lower unemployment benefit and when that child turned 8. In typical Howard style, he masked the impact of this cruel and ideological policy by “grandfathering” the payment for anyone already in receipt of the PPS. It was nakedly ideological: if you “choose” to have a baby without a man, from now on you’ll be punished.
It was perhaps the greatest mistake and betrayal of women by the Gillard Government when, in pursuit of a fabled budget surplus, it ended the grandfathering of the PPS changes and pushed tens of thousands of single parent families into abject poverty overnight – infamously, on the same day she gave her lauded misogyny speech to the Parliament.
Then-cabinet minister Anthony Albanese was rumoured to be so incensed by this decision that he considered quitting the front bench. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that now-Prime Minister Albanese, famously raised by a single mother on sickness benefits, has moved in his first full budget to fix that mistake.
Credit must go here to the remarkable Terese Edwards who, as the head of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, has fought for this change for well over a decade. Thanks also to Anne Summers, who used her considerable influence with the government to push this through, and to Sam Mostyn and other members of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, which made it a core recommendation of its advice to the government this year. (Read Terese’s recent article for BroadAgenda here.)
It’s undoubtedly the centrepiece of what is arguably the most women- friendly budget in Australian history.
Single parenting just got a little bit easier for those on income support payments. Picture: By Jelena Stanojkovic
As well as an increase in their fortnightly income support payments, single parents moving off JobSeeker and onto the PPS will be able to earn an extra $569.10 per fortnight, plus an extra $24.60 per additional child, before their payment stops.
Alongside this decision is the move to scrap the punitive ParentsNext program that forced the mothers of pre-school children to engage in meaningless activities to demonstrate that they “deserved” income support. Good riddance to such a nasty, ineffective program.
There is also additional money to support the National Pan to End Violence against Women and Children, bringing the total committed to women’s safety since October last year to $2.29 billion.
And there’s an historic commitment of $11.3 billion to give a 15% pay rise to aged care workers – almost 90% of whom are women, and who receive among the lowest wages for some of the most important work in our society. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of residential aged care residents are women, too.
This is all underpinned by a huge investment in early childhood education and care – lifting the rebate to 90% for low and middle income households and investing another $72.4 million in skills development for early childhood education and care workers – again, more than 90% of whom are women.
All these measures will make a material difference to the lives of Australian women – especially single mums. That’s not to say that life as a sole parent on income support will become easy: the PPS itself is still a payment below any measure of the poverty line. But combined with increased rent assistance, cheaper childcare, the removal of some punitive welfare measures and a significant lift in the amount they can earn before losing benefits – coupled with better paid job prospects in the care economy – this is a budget that has deliberately stopped punishing single mothers and their kids, and restored meaningful support to help them build better futures.
All in all, the outcome of the 2023 budget means it’s just possible than even single mums without the great privileges I have will also, finally, be able to start to count their blessings.
The post Happy Mother’s Day! A women-friendly budget appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
I shed a tear this week when I learned of the death of Father Bob Maguire, then I revived my soul to give thanks for the inspiration he has given me. Father Bob was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church who lived in Melbourne and believed that his prime task was, not to give …
The post FATHER BOB appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
A Manchester coroner has ordered an inquest into the death of Luke Brooks. Luke died after developing breathing difficulties linked to his “heavily mould-infested” rented accommodation.
Luke lived in Oldham, not so far away from the Rochdale social housing flat where two-year-old Awaab Ishak died after prolonged exposure to black mould, as a coroner’s court recently ruled.
London Renters’ Union tweeted a stark message:
We cannot allow another life to be lost from unsafe housing.
Until the government holds private landlords to account, we will continue to take action against dangerous conditions in our communities.https://t.co/oD5wpjpyEh
— London Renters Union (@LDNRentersUnion) April 6, 2023
Coroner Joanne Kearsley – who recently presided over Awaab Ishak’s inquest – ruled that there should be an investigation into Luke Brooks’ death.
27-year-old year old Luke lived with his parents in their rented accommodation. They told the Manchester Evening News that he was a “fit lad” and a talented artist.
Luke developed a rash before his death, and complained of difficulty breathing. He developed fatal pneumonia, which caused acute respiratory distress syndrome. The coroner’s court found provisionally that this was due to mould at his home.
Luke’s family have lived at the property for eight years. They complained to the council about the state of the accommodation. Environmental health officers visited last November.
The landlord was instructed to make some improvements, but crucially they were not told to address the mould issue. This is despite the inspectors finding mould in Luke’s room.
Luke died just weeks before the inquest into Awaab’s death. Steve Topple previously wrote for the Canary:
The coroner ruled that Awaab died due to mould exposure that RBH failed to deal with. The housing association repeatedly ignored Awaab’s family’s desperate pleas for help. Since the coroner’s verdict, RBH has sacked its boss after he refused to resign.
The bottom line is this housing association committed what some people are saying is corporate manslaughter against him.
Topple described how RBH initially blamed the mould in Awaab’s house on his family. Their response was clearly racist. The barrister for the Ishak family said that:
At first, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing said that [the cause of the mould] was due to the ritual bathing practices of the family, or the cooking practices that are common among some cultures, all with no evidence.
In Luke’s case, the environmental health officers found mould in his room, when they visited in November. However, they chose not to order the landlord to deal with it. They clearly felt it was ok for Luke to live in mouldy accommodation. This is a classist attitude that devalues the lives of renters. It’s an attitude that places more importance on the rights of landlords to make a profit, than on the health of their tenants.
One of the police officers who accompanied the environmental health officer said – in evidence at the Coroner’s Court – that Luke’s room was “untidy” and there were “animals present”. These remarks reek of classism: the implication being that we shouldn’t be blaming the landlord for the mould, but blaming Luke for how he kept his room.
The inquest into Luke’s death will examine whether his landlord bears criminal responsibility and whether the council should have intervened.
Luke’s family are private renters, while Awaab lived in social housing. But the underlying reasons for both their deaths stem from the state. Luke and Awaab – like many of us – were forced to live in unsafe conditions by the classist, racist society that we live in. Authorities allowed Luke to die because of classism, while RBH is responsible for Awaab’s death due to its institutional racism, and its classism, too.
If you want to fight back against your housing conditions, then you might want to join a renters’ union. Check out the Acorn, Living Rent, and London Renters’ Union websites, and get organised.
The featured image is of mould in a rented flat, via screenshot/ITV News
By Tom Anderson
This post was originally published on Canary.
Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz and other far-right members of the House GOP, Republican lawmakers are intensifying their push to establish new work requirements for millions of people who receive Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, an effort that progressives slammed as a cruel attack on the poor.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have rallied around work requirements as a key demand as they use the ongoing debt ceiling standoff as leverage to pursue steep spending cuts and other policy changes.
“The debate in some ways resembles the Republican-led campaign against so-called welfare queens in the 1990s, when a politically resurgent GOP—then under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich—secured a dramatic restructuring of the government’s social safety net,” the Post noted. “The resulting overhaul, enacted by President Bill Clinton, slashed cash benefits for millions of Americans in ways that GOP leaders now cite as a model.”
In a February letter to President Joe Biden, Gaetz (R-Fla.) and four other House Republicans favorably cited the 1996 welfare reform law—which doubled extreme poverty—as an example of bipartisan cooperation that should be replicated to avert a catastrophic debt default.
During a press conference last month, Gaetz cast his call for tougher work requirements as an attempt to extract a “broader contribution” from “couch potatoes,” which is often how Republicans demean people who receive federal food aid and other benefits—even though most who get such assistance work.
“The legislators that want new work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid are the same ones working to eliminate the estate tax so that billionaire heirs never have to work a day in their lives,” the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that supports tax hikes on the rich, tweeted Tuesday. “It’s not about work, it’s about hurting the poor.”
A recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that legislation introduced by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) would strip Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from more than 10 million people, including 4 million children.
Research has repeatedly shown that SNAP work requirements, which add significant complexity and administrative burdens to the process of obtaining benefits, aren’t effective at boosting employment.
“SNAP recipients who can work, do work,” Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said Tuesday. “Yet they do not earn enough to escape poverty. Taking away SNAP doesn’t help anyone find work, it just makes them hungry and ensures the cycle of poverty continues.”
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) echoed his colleague, writing on Twitter that “adding draconian hurdles to receive food assistance and benefits makes it harder for people to get back on their feet, not easier.”
“The GOP should call it what it is—a cut to benefits,” he added.
“Republicans still haven’t released a budget, but they’re continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families.”
As for Medicaid, state experiments with work requirements have proven disastrous. In Arkansas, a state that briefly imposed work requirements on Medicaid recipients during the Trump era before a judge intervened, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage due to the rules.
Some Republicans, including Gaetz and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), want to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients nationwide, a move that would compound massive coverage losses stemming from the recent end of pandemic protections.
In February, Gaetz unveiled the Medicaid Work Requirements Act, which would mandate that adults deemed “able-bodied” work at least 120 hours a month, volunteer for at least 80 hours a month, or take part in a work training program for at least 80 hours a month to remain eligible for Medicaid benefits.
“Republicans still haven’t released a budget, but they’re continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families,” tweeted the Senate Budget Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
In a statement to the Post on Tuesday, White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa indicated that Biden will oppose adding new work requirements to SNAP and Medicaid as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling.
“The president has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose healthcare,” said Kikukawa. “That’s why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome, bureaucratic requirements.”
As the GOP ramps up its assault on SNAP and other critical programs, members of the Senate Democratic caucus are urging the Biden administration to do everything in its power to bolster and expand federal food aid, which was slashed for many families earlier this year when pandemic-related enhancements lapsed.
In a letter to the heads of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Social Security Administration (SSA) earlier this week, a dozen Senate lawmakers called for action to remove “administrative burdens that create barriers to food security” for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients.
“SSI recipients are low-income people at least 65 years old, or blind or disabled adults or children,” the lawmakers wrote. “To help alleviate food insecurity, SSA and USDA must create a seamless path to ensuring that SSI recipients and applicants can obtain SNAP benefits, one with minimal administrative burden. SNAP is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and SNAP benefits translate to fewer people in poverty and a healthier population.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
With global finance leaders set to gather in Washington, D.C. this week for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Oxfam is warning rich countries against using accounting gimmicks to artificially inflate their global climate funding commitments.
The international humanitarian group estimated in an analysis released Monday that low- and middle-income nations will need an additional $27.4 trillion at minimum by 2030 to “fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change”—as well as addressing the damage already inflicted by intensifying extreme weather and other consequences of fossil fuel use.
Interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other powerful central banks have compounded the financial struggles of poor nations as debt servicing costs rise, putting critical public investments at risk.
“But despite the dire economic situation facing the poorest countries today, and much political discussion of the trillions needed to tackle poverty, inequality, and climate change, there is no indication that rich countries are willing to pay the true price of a fair and sustainable future,” Oxfam said Monday. “In fact, there is a risk that rich-country finance ministers meeting in Washington this week will celebrate progress on reforms that deliver just 0.1% of the climate and social spending gap in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs) between now and 2030. And that they will do so through financial wizardry that doesn’t cost them a cent.”
The group pointed specifically to the recent replenishment process for the International Development Association, a member of the World Bank Group ostensibly dedicated to aiding poor nations with grants and loans.
“Although IDA20 saw a record replenishment in 2021, this was not a result of increased donor contributions. In fact, donor contributions declined and the increased allocation was only achieved through the financial wizardry of ‘balance sheet optimization,’” Oxfam noted. “Now, with IDA20 commitments again being frontloaded due to mounting crises, there are fears that IDA is facing a ‘financial cliff’ in the near future.”
Oxfam also criticized “green bonds” and other such “financial innovations” that—while positive-sounding and potentially beneficial on the margins—ultimately provide minimal benefit relative to what’s necessary to help avert climate catastrophe in nations that did the least to cause the crisis.
“If rich countries were serious about investing in people and planet, they would go beyond financial wizardry,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International’s incoming interim executive director. “It’s time for governments to find their moral fiber and tax the richest, so we can stave off climate catastrophe and lift everyone out of poverty.”
Oxfam’s analysis suggests several policy steps for wealthy countries, including actually meeting their existing aid commitments to poor nations and ending “the accounting trickery of siphoning off large amounts of aid to spend in donor countries on things like in-country refugee costs and vaccine donations”; committing to a “debt swap” whereby rich nations would borrow $11.5 trillion to help fund climate costs in low- and middle-income countries; and pledging new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).
The group also called on rich nations to pursue “steep and progressive tax increases on the incomes of the super-rich, on property, land, and inheritance, and on the profits of the wealthiest companies, especially windfall profits, as well as on fossil fuels and on financial transactions.”
“If rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms there would be more than enough money to go round,” Oxfam said. “We cannot allow the richest countries to argue they ‘cannot afford’ to raise the trillions needed for social and climate spending in the poorest countries. It is clear that mobilizing this money would simply take political will.”
\u201cAs poor countries cope with a climate crisis they did little to cause, the pandemic’s impacts, + widespread poverty even in normal times, rich countries say they don’t have the money to do anything about it.\n\nAmazing new Oxfam briefing shows this is false\nhttps://t.co/YAxhWyXPkp\u201d— Tim Hirschel-Burns (@Tim Hirschel-Burns) 1681145368
The new analysis comes as the World Bank is preparing to confirm Ajay Banga, a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO chosen by the U.S., as its new president, replacing an outgoing leader who has come under fire for climate denial.
In recent weeks, as E&E News reported Monday, the World Bank has outlined changes that would “free up roughly $5 billion annually over the next 10 years, mainly through a slight relaxation of the bank’s rules for how much risk it can assume.”
“Specifically, it would lower the bank’s so-called equity-to-loan ratio from 20% to 19%, which would allow it to increase its lending with the same amount of shareholder money,” the outlet noted. “Critics have called the plan underwhelming, saying it’s still too vague and risk-averse. Some argue that the equity-to-loan ratio could be lowered further without jeopardizing confidence in the bank’s lending ability, making additional lending capacity available.”
Oxfam said Monday that it is “essential that the World Bank and IMF also step up their ambition” during this week’s talks.
“The World Bank’s own analysis shows that extreme economic inequality is a barrier to poverty reduction—yet the current goal on ‘shared prosperity’ is weak and ineffective,” said Behar. “We need to see far more ambition from a global body tasked with fighting poverty.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A new study paints a bleak financial picture for LGBTQ+ adults in the United States: Many respondents don’t have a checking or savings account, are unable to pay their bills in full, and are worried about affording basic necessities and health care. The research, organized by the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research (CLEAR) and the Movement Advancement Project, found that many of the…
Last week, Republicans in the North Dakota Senate killed a bill that would have expanded a program to provide children living close to the federal poverty line access to meals at school for free. The vote was met with outcry over its cruelty, as one Senate Republican asked, “Is [children going hungry] the problem of the state of North Dakota?” This week, 13 of the Republicans who voted to kill the…
Content Warning: This article contains reference to suicide.
Almost half of all children of colour in Wales and England are living in poverty right now, according to research from campaigning organisation the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). On top of that, new figures show the extent of the over-policing of kids of colour.
CPAG has recently released statistics saying that:
48% of children from black and minority ethnic groups live in poverty
In total, 4.2 million children in England and Wales are currently living in poverty. That’s 29% of young people. This is an increase of 350,000 since last year.
Stark stats:
29% of kids are growing up in poverty
48% of kids in Black & minority ethnic families are in poverty
42% of kids in households with 3+ kids are in poverty
44% of kids in lone-parent families are in poverty
71% of kids growing up in poverty live in a working family pic.twitter.com/iArUlewJta— Child Poverty Action Group (@CPAGUK) March 23, 2023
CPAG also calculated that 450,000 fewer kids would be in poverty if child benefit was increased by just £10 a week. The group argued that the government should extend the provision of free school meals, and scrap the two-child cap. The cap means that families don’t receive any extra Child Tax Credit or Universal Credit if they have more than two children.
CPAG Chief executive Alison Garnham said in a statement:
Children pay the highest possible price for poverty – they pay with their health, their well-being and their life chances. Our research shows the country also pays a heavy financial price.
On top of this, the UK’s systematic racism discriminates against children of colour in a whole multitude of additional ways. The same weekend as CPAG released its figures on child poverty, news broke of fresh findings that Black children are 11 times more likely to experience being strip-searched by police than their white peers. This reflects the massive over-policing that Black people have to endure in the UK.
The Children’s Commissioner found that police had strip-searched at least 2,847 children between 2018 and 2022. 38% of these children were Black, despite them making up less than 6% of the population.
The Canary previously reported how police strip-searched a Black schoolgirl, known as Child Q, while she was on her period. Cops and teachers carried out the search on the child because they were looking for cannabis. The Children’s Commissioner’s statistics show that Child Q was far from alone.
The Canary‘s Sophie Purdy-Moore suggested some ways that we could protect children from degrading, unnecessary strip-searches. She wrote :
Teachers – don’t invite police onto school grounds. Police are not equipped to prevent harm or to deal with the complex social issues that impact children’s lives. Their job is to criminalise.
For the rest of us, this means resisting the presence of police in schools and intervening in every police stop we witness on the streets. It means withdrawing consent from all forms of policing. And it means demanding funding for specialist services that support vulnerable children and young people.
It’s not just in schools that Black kids have to endure degrading searches. Met police officers strip-searched Olivia, a 15-year-old dual-heritage autistic child at a London police station. Olivia was also on her period at the time of the strip-search. Four Met police officers are currently under investigation for the incident.
Both Olivia and Child Q experienced significant psychological harm as a result of these intrusive searches. Olivia made an attempt to take her own life following the incident.
These two sets of figures expose the racism at the heart of our society, and illustrate two of the ways it affects the lives of people of colour. Kids of colour are much more likely to face economic disadvantages. On top of that, they are forced to deal with the actions of a police force that is institutionally racist, too.
You can learn more about the grassroots campaign to end strip searches here, and also find out about CPAG’s campaign for teachers about ‘the cost of a school day’ here.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Katie Crampton (WMUK), cropped to 770x403px, CC BY-SA 4.0
By Tom Anderson
Tell us about your own personal backstory that led you to write “Hard to Bear”.
During our journey to complete our family, I experienced seven pregnancy losses. Obviously during that time I did a lot of reading in my quest to figure out why my body couldn’t do what I needed it to do. Being open about it publicly meant a lot of other people made disclosures to me about their own experiences. But I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it until our family was complete.
Once we decided that it was, I started reading again. And I realised that while I had some answers, I also had a lot of questions. And there was a huge amount of work and unpacking to be done in this space. And I thought there was no one better than me to do it, with the lived experience but also the ability to put that aside where necessary and wear my journalism hat to approach the issue with a forensic eye, while never losing sight of the human element.
There were so many OMG moments that just stopped me in my tracks. Like the moment I realised we had no idea how many people are actually having miscarriages in this country. Absolutely no idea.
You’ve long been vocal about the silence around miscarriage. Unpick this for us. Why the societal shame and silence? How does your book try to change this?
One thing that drives me crazy in this space is acknowledgement of the silence without understanding of why it exists and where it comes from. So that’s a big part of the book; unpacking it so we can move forward. We have a multitude of issues that feed this silence.
Miscarriage exists at the intersection of two things we find incredibly uncomfortable in Western society: grief and menstruation. Also it’s wrapped up in Judeo-Christian tradition, abortion and misogyny.
It certainly wasn’t always this way. I also do a lot of digging around other cultures that treat and talk about it completely differently. I really do find it fascinating.
Your book is also funny. Why does humour play a role here?
I’m Jewish and I draw on a long cultural tradition of irony, satire, self-deprecation and Black humour. There absolutely is a lot of humour in this book, where appropriate. I want people to enjoy reading it to whatever degree that’s possible, without struggling under the weight of a heavy topic. We can acknowledge the sadness of something while still finding ways to smile along the way.
Your book delves into the science (in addition to telling personal stories). Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. What do we know about why it happens and how it can be prevented?
I guess that’s a core part of the book: there is far too much we don’t know. And the things we do know aren’t properly explained to the people birthing the babies or their partners or families. For instance, environmental factors are a huge risk factor. But we don’t talk about it. Also, poverty. Nutrition.
And as in medicine so often, there are often factors overlaying each other that increase your risk profile. I do examine some of the factors that can contribute, both the commonly known ones and the ones we’re not talking about. But if there was more extensive testing and funding for research, we’d know far more.
Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)
How does “medical misogyny” play into this?
We know through the work of journalists and authors like Gabrielle Jackson (Pride and Prejudice) and Kylie Maslen (Show Me Where It Hurts) that medical misogyny affects almost all aspects of medical care for women or people with uteruses.
This was acknowledged by the medical journal The Lancet when it wrote that the era of just telling women to try again after miscarriage is over. This issue affects up to 150,000 Australian families each year (and could be higher, we don’t know). We are decades past the time when we should have started talking about it openly.
Conversely, what do you have to say about the need medical kindness around instances of miscarriage?
The Australian medical system is not fit for purpose. It is stretched far too thin. And consecutive governments want to fix it with band-aids, if at all, rather than giving it an overhaul and structuring it from the presence.
Where there are medical and allied health practitioners who do want to do better (and there are many of them), often they are restricted by structural barriers. And the other thing I would say is that where medical practitioners do express kindness and compassion – I can tell you from the hundreds of patients I’ve spoken to – it is remembered and valued for the rest of our lives.
What role does hope have in this discourse?
This book is aimed at being fully accessible and fully inclusive. We are a village. We have to lift up parents whose journey to children isn’t easy and give them hope. Through sharing my story and doing this research, that’s what I want to do. Otherwise, I’m sharing for the sake of sharing and that’s just not my jam.
Equally, hope must be felt in our fight to change the system. Because otherwise what’s the point? This book is absolutely a book of hope that aims to improve the experiences of my children and theirs. We can do it. We absolutely can.
The post Tackling our deep discomfort with miscarriage appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
If you grew up in America, then you almost definitely have heard some variation of the refrain: “America is the greatest country in the world.”
It’s an idea that’s so commonplace that it’s more or less taken for granted. We boast of inventions like the airplane, the light bulb, the internet, and even the humble chocolate chip cookie. We are home to some of the best universities in the world and most of the largest corporations.
But when we look more closely at other metrics, America’s position as the top country in the world is called into question. There are many such metrics, but perhaps none more important than life expectancy.
According to a report released last year by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can now expect to live 76.4 years. Life expectancy in the US has dropped off in recent years; as life expectancy in other wealthy countries rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued to decline in the US. All in all, the US now ranks 53rd among 200 countries in life expectancy. Citizens of all developed countries suffer from things like heart disease, cancer, and liver disease, but Americans suffer more and, as a result, live shorter lives.
Countries where life expectancy is the highest ( > 82 years) include places like Japan, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. What are these countries doing differently than the US, you may ask? Why are their citizens living longer?
It all comes down to one word: inequality. The US is not poorer than any of these countries – year after year, we have the highest GDP in the world. And on a per-capita basis, we’re consistently in the top 10, far from 53rd in the world. But the difference between the US and other developed countries is that we do a much poorer job sharing wealth (and all the benefits that come with it) among our citizens. Among developed countries, the US has one of the highest rates of inequality, both in terms of wealth and income – and we can, unfortunately, see that disparity in health and life expectancy as well.
Just because the average American life expectancy is 76.4 years doesn’t mean that all Americans can expect to live that long. It’s sad, but in America how long you live has a lot to do with how much money you have. People with high incomes can live 10 to 20 years longer than people with low incomes, even if they live just miles apart in the same metro area. For example, rich residents in Columbus, Ohio can expect to live close to 85 years while poor residents in the very same city typically live just 60 years.
This trend applies to a host of other social outcomes besides life expectancy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson made this case in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They found that countries with low inequality consistently outperformed those with high inequality not only in life expectancy but in literacy rates, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness, and social mobility. (With high inequality, the US was among the lowest performers in all of these metrics.) It was not GDP or overall levels of wealth that mattered for these social outcomes; it was instead how wealth was distributed that made the difference.
Inequality is not just an abstract concept or a set of numbers – it’s a real-world phenomenon that has tangible effects on the way that ordinary people live (or don’t live) their lives. And we are clearly not doing very well in the US on this front compared to the rest of the world. Americans shouldn’t go around boasting about living in the greatest country on Earth when our citizens are quite literally not living as long as their neighbors.
But all hope is not lost. Our situation in the US is not in any way an inevitability. Inequality is a choice. We certainly can’t bring about change overnight, but, if we keep at it, we can bring about change.
What can be done to turn the tide? It’s simple: follow the example of our neighbors with less inequality and orient our economic policy around reducing the gap between those at the top and everyone else. We can do that by raising taxes on rich people like us, just as President Biden proposed in his latest budget, to limit extreme wealth. We can also lift up the bottom by raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and investing in a strong social safety net that keeps all Americans afloat.
The policy possibilities are limitless. Our only limit is a lack of political will. We truly believe that the United States can and should be the greatest country in the world – after all, we’re not called “Patriotic” Millionaires for nothing. But the American Dream that was once a shining light for all is fading. If we want to revive it, we need to start fighting against the inequality that is holding us back.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Starting with next year’s Oscars, the Academy will require that a film meet two of the four inclusion standards above to be eligible for a best picture nomination.
Read the full Hollywood Reporter article here.
Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) has been caught selling drivers’ personal information without their consent and without the option for them to opt-out. Last year alone, the BMV made around $25 million from selling personal information.
Read the full article here.
The disappearance of the $1 slice in NYC is an unwelcome development for many reasons. (details) For example, so many of the homeless women I’ve helped over the years have relied on 2 Bros. Pizza for quick, affordable meals.
“The schemes of the devil…” (Ephesians 6:11)
(watch a short video here)
Click here for a one-minute video that will end this post with a smile!
The post Female Urinals, Extra-woke Hollywood, Privacy Violations, Mouse Brain Cells, Pizza & Disneyland first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Starting with next year’s Oscars, the Academy will require that a film meet two of the four inclusion standards above to be eligible for a best picture nomination.
Read the full Hollywood Reporter article here.
Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) has been caught selling drivers’ personal information without their consent and without the option for them to opt-out. Last year alone, the BMV made around $25 million from selling personal information.
Read the full article here.
The disappearance of the $1 slice in NYC is an unwelcome development for many reasons. (details) For example, so many of the homeless women I’ve helped over the years have relied on 2 Bros. Pizza for quick, affordable meals.
“The schemes of the devil…” (Ephesians 6:11)
(watch a short video here)
Click here for a one-minute video that will end this post with a smile!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
More than a dozen House Republicans are expected to release legislation Tuesday that would impose more harsh work requirements on certain recipients of federal food aid, a clear signal that the GOP intends to target nutrition assistance in critical debt ceiling, budget, and farm bill talks.
Led by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), the measure would “expand the age bracket for able-bodied [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients without dependents, who have to meet complicated work requirements,” according to Politico, which obtained a copy of the bill ahead of its official introduction.
Johnson’s legislation, which currently has 14 Republican co-sponsors, would broaden the SNAP work requirement age bracket for able-bodied adults without dependents to 18 to 65, adding 16 years to the current age ceiling of 49, Politico reported. Former President Donald Trump previously proposed raising the age ceiling to 62.
Under SNAP rules, people categorized as able-bodied adults without dependents are only allowed to receive federal food benefits for three months during any three-year period when they aren’t employed or taking part in work training, a restriction that experts and advocates have long decried as cruel and punitive.
“Essentially, this is a time limit—which disproportionately affects people of color—that takes SNAP away when people aren’t working, withholding food as a punishment for not having a stable job,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes.
Most adult SNAP recipients already work, though they are often precarious, low-wage jobs with poor benefits.
While Johnson and other Republicans claim their support for more stringent SNAP work requirements stems from a desire to boost employment, research has repeatedly shown that they are ineffective at doing so. Work requirements do, however, succeed at booting many people off the program.
States are currently allowed to request waivers for the SNAP benefit time limits, but Johnson’s bill would constrain the federal government’s ability to grant such requests, Politico reported.
“These guys talk about states’ rights all the time, except when it comes to poor people,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said in response to the GOP bill.
None— (@)
Johnson’s legislation comes as food insecurity is mounting across the U.S. after emergency SNAP benefit expansions lapsed earlier this month, slashing benefits for tens of millions of people amid high food prices. The cuts—the result of an end-of-year deal in Congress—have been dramatic for many, costing families hundreds of dollars per month in food aid.
“These enhanced benefits were a lifeline for millions—many of whom will now go hungry,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “And Republicans want to cut these programs even further.”
Politico reported that while Democratic lawmakers are publicly voicing opposition to the Republican Party’s latest attack on food benefits, “some House Democrats are quietly raising alarms about their lack of plans to push back on the GOP proposals.”
“We need to be prepared for a showdown on food security—and right now, we’re not ready,” one unnamed House Democrat told the outlet.
Anti-hunger campaigners are pushing Democrats to protect food benefits and fight for a permanent SNAP expansion during upcoming farm bill negotiations.
But as Slate’s Alexander Sammon wrote last week, “the lack of willingness to fight for SNAP when it was already expanded is not a heartening sign.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Programme spent £2.7bn between 2016 and 2021 but is fragmented and lacks a clear rationale, report says
Britain’s aid programme to India is fragmented, lacks a clear rationale and does little to counter the negative trends in human rights and democracy in the country, the government’s aid watchdog has found.
The findings are likely to be used by those who claim the UK government risks using its aid programme to deepen its relationship with India, including seeking free trade deals, rather than attempting to reduce poverty, which is the statutory purpose of UK aid.
My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I’ve written about B before. She’s a homeless woman I knew through my project. But here’s a little reminder of her backstory:
B lost both her legs in a subway accident. When I met her, she was living in a medical homeless shelter and panhandling daily in a wheelchair. B has four kids who, for a while, were living with her ex. It was not a good scenario. Very long story short: The State eventually took the kids away from him and temporarily placed them with B’s mother.
As I got to know B, I genuinely cared for her as a friend. We both looked forward to chatting whenever I’d bring packages full of supplies geared to fit her specific needs. I bore witness to B’s journey and encouraged her as she dealt with mean-spirited passers-by and with a mountain of obstacles, e.g. housing, child services, medical bureaucracy, lawyers, etc.
There’s one story about her I haven’t yet shared, so here goes…
As I did my best to console her, B told me she was missing her Dad.
Quick story: Before her accident, she lived in a house with her kids and extended family — including her Dad. B would be cooking in the kitchen and hear him enter because his steps made a very distinct sound when he entered (something to do with the design of the floor, I think). He’d often hug her and remind her that he was proud of how she looked out for everyone.
After her Dad died, she recalled being in the kitchen — cooking a family meal with tears streaming down her face. Suddenly, she heard a familiar sound. Her Dad, she believed, had just “entered” the kitchen. B told me that she experienced a hug.
That day when I found her crying in her panhandling spot, she wished so badly she could feel her Dad’s hug again.
 |
As she’s telling me this sad tale, a young man approaches seemingly out of nowhere. White guy, slim, maybe mid-20s — totally underdressed for the cold weather. As he walked over to B, I scoped him out.
He was not wearing a jacket, wore sandals but no socks, and seemed to be empty-handed. What I mean is that no one walks down a Manhattan street without some combination of keys, wallet, and phone on them. He had none of these items and the pockets of his lightweight sweatpants showed no sign of holding anything.
While I was doing this protective/detective work, the young man was asking B if he could pray with her. She looked over at me and then said “yes” to the stranger. He reached out to take her hand as I warily watched. He picked up on my skepticism and smiled — extending his other hand to me. Suddenly, I reluctantly found myself in a prayer circle.
The young man did not recite a formal prayer. Rather, he freestyled about [wait for it] B’s father. I don’t recall the exact words but it was something like, “I sense an older man, your father maybe. He’s looking out for you. Things look bad now but he wants you to know he’s watching and a big change is coming.”
My jaw dropped and B sobbed.
After sharing a few more words, the young man said to B, “I hope that helped.” He thanked us for indulging him, turned, and basically vanished into the midday crowd.
B and I stared at each other for quite some time.
When I eventually pointed out all the odd things I had noticed about the young man, B smiled and cried at the same time. “Thank you, Daddy,” was all she said as she looked upward.
Coda: In a matter of fewer than two months, the social system wheels were suddenly and unexpectedly churning in her favor. B was soon reunited with her children, fitted for prosthetic legs, and off the streets.
The post That Time a Homeless Woman’s Prayer was Answered… first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As of Wednesday, around 30 million people across the United States will have their family’s food assistance slashed, despite high prices and expert warnings about a “hunger cliff.”
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were initially increased at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although Republicans in 18 states had already ended the emergency allotments (EAs), households in the other 32 states along with Washington, D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have continued to receive them.
However, the increased SNAP benefits are set to end Wednesday because of the omnibus spending package from December—federal lawmakers traded the temporary pandemic-era boost for a permanent program to feed children in the summer.
“Poverty is a policy choice in this country.”
“We’re really going to struggle,” Deanna Hardy, a mother of two in Marshfield, Wisconsin, told ABC News. “We’re going to have to end up going back to cheaper items like noodles and processed stuff because the meat, the dairy, fruits, and veggies. It’s expensive.”
“I don’t think the cuts could have happened at a worse time,” added Hardy—whose family relies on a fixed income and will see their benefits drop from $960 to $200 per month. “When the extra payments began, food prices were nowhere near where they are now.”
As Tracy Roof, an associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond, recently wrote for The Conversation:
Many advocates for a stronger safety net say that SNAP benefits are too low to meet the needs of low-income people. They are warning of a looming hunger cliff—meaning a sharp increase in the number of people who don’t get enough nutritious food to eat—in March 2023, when the extra help ends.
At that point, the lowest-income families will lose $95 in benefits a month. But some SNAP participants, such as many elderly and disabled people who live alone and on fixed incomes and who only qualify for the minimum amount of help, will see their benefits plummet from $281 to $23 a month.
A trio of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) experts pointed out earlier this month that “a study estimated that EAs kept 4.2 million people above the poverty line in the last quarter of 2021, reducing poverty by 10%―and child poverty by 14%―in states with EAs at the time. The estimated reduction in poverty rates due to EAs was highest for Black and Latino people.”
CBPP president Sharon Parrott warned Axios Tuesday that the cuts will “allow very high levels of poverty to remain in the country.”
Noting the outlet’s report, Public Citizen President Robert Weissman declared that “a decent society would not let this happen.”
\u201cExpanded SNAP benefits end today and will push 32 million Americans off a \u201chunger cliff.\u201d\n \nBut hey! It\u2019s all good because, according to Moody\u2019s Analytics, people not being able to buy food will reduce inflation. \ud83d\ude44https://t.co/nOby2GVNpw\u201d— Patriotic Millionaires (@Patriotic Millionaires) 1677612540
The looming cuts are a reminder that “poverty is a policy choice in this country,” Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy executive director for the Center for Law and Social Policy, told Axios. “For a while, we decided we were going to make a different policy choice.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) agreed and demanded action by federal lawmakers.
“Tomorrow, SNAP benefits will drop back to pre-pandemic levels,” she tweeted. “That means $171 less each month for 520,000 Washington families struggling to make ends meet. Ending these increased benefits will cause more food insecurity and poverty.”
“It’s unacceptable,” Jayapal added. “Poverty and hunger are policy choices. It’s time we step up and do more.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction.
On the night of January 7th, Tyre Nichols was two minutes from home when members of that squad pulled him over. Probable cause: reckless driving (if you believe the official story). Five Scorpions, all of them trained use-of-force specialists, proceeded to take turns hitting him with everything they had, including boots, fists, and telescopic batons.
The 29-year-old photographer died three days later. Cause of death? “Excessive bleeding due to severe beating.” A body-cam snuff film of sorts was later released, showing some of Nichols’s last moments. The video transcripts speak for themselves.
Officer to Tyre:
“You’re gonna get your ass blown the fuck up. Oh, I’m gonna knock your ass the fuck out!”
Tyre to officers:
“OK. You guys are really doing a lot right now…”
— “Lay down!”
— “Stop! I’m just trying to go home.”
— “Spray him! Spray him!”
— “Stop! I’m not doing anything.”
— “Tase him! Tase him!”
Tyre cries out:
“Mom! Mom!”
Officer to Tyre:
“Watch out! I’m gonna baton the fuck out of you!”
— “Dude, hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Mom…”
Plainclothes Paramilitaries
Welcome to America’s emerging predator state.
Memphis is anything but an outlier. There are thousands of “elite” teams like that city’s Scorpion unit and they come in all calibers, shapes, and sizes. They range from specially trained teams in small-town police departments to sprawling “anti-crime” squads in big cities like Atlanta and New York, not to mention federal tactical units like the Border Patrol’s BORTAC and counter-terrorism task forces like the one that killed Manuel Terán in Georgia last month.
Beyond the scary names, such specialized units tend to share some other characteristics. In their warlike tactics, their strategic outlook, and their often-violent subculture — if not always in their uniforms — they are virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts in the military. In their “wars” on crime, drugs, and terror, they work with a similar playbook imported from U.S. combat missions overseas but seemingly stripped of any reference to the rules of war.
They conduct themselves, in other words, as plainclothes paramilitaries in America’s urban war zones (or what they like to call “hot spots”). Like Army Special Operations forces, they are regularly charged with the execution of “time-sensitive,” “clandestine,” and often “unilateral” missions — with or without the support of the local population — using “assurance, deterrence, and coercion” to fight the enemies of the state and exert control over “hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments.”
What’s more, these units operate with a legal guarantee of “qualified immunity” for violence against civilians. In other words, despite the recent Memphis exception, they normally have near-total impunity when it comes to violent offenses which, had they been committed in another country, might be classified as war crimes, crimes of aggression, or even crimes against humanity.
For offenses of this nature, the United States is itself an international hot spot. In the course of a given year, according to one recent study, our law enforcement agencies were responsible for 13% of all fatalities caused by the police globally, even though Americans make up just 4% of the world’s population. And as investigative journalism has revealed, specialized units like the Scorpions are responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of those deaths.
Take the New York City Police Department. Since 2000, its own use-of-force reports show that nearly one in three police killings have been by non-uniformed officers, especially “anti-crime” plainclothes units with paramilitary training and a long-standing reputation for terrorizing communities of color.
Nearly a decade before the slaying of Tyre Nichols, there was, for instance, the murder of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old street vendor, “neighborhood peacekeeper,” and father of six. His life was snuffed out thanks to a police chokehold after he was stopped for selling “loosies,” unlicensed cigarettes, on a Staten Island street corner in the summer of 2014. (In the end, the only person to serve jail time in Garner’s death was the young filmmaker of color who had the courage to record the encounter.)
Like the officers in the South Bronx who gunned down Amadou Diallo outside his home as he reached for his wallet, the ones in Queens who sprayed Sean Bell with 50 bullets on his wedding day, and the ones in Brooklyn who opened fire on a mentally ill man named Saheed Vassell in 2018, those responsible for Garner’s murder were members of the infamous “anti-crime” units whose work would become a blueprint for Scorpion-style policing.
The force’s predatory philosophy is often summed up in a single sentence lifted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1936 (satirical) short story, “On the Blue Water.” Officers of the peace have been known to quote it, to wear it to work, and to plaster it on the walls of their precincts: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
In the words of one New Yorker, a nurse from Crown Heights who witnessed the killing of Vassell, “The undercovers think they have the authority to do anything they want. They hunt [people] — like us black people — down… They act tough… like they’re from a gang. But they’re only like that because they have a badge.”
A History of Violence Against Women
In December 2019, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, rolled out its version of the Scorpion unit. It was labeled the Place-Based Investigations Squad (PBI) and put under the aegis of its police department’s Criminal Interdiction Division.
Following paid consultations with “problem-oriented” academics and police executives from other cities, the Louisville Metropolitan department implemented a then-little-known practice called “Place-Based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories,” or PIVOT. In the end, this would prove but a variation on an already all-too-familiar theme of hot-spot policing first pioneered by “police scientists” in Minneapolis some 30 years before George Floyd’s murder. (In fact, the use of the term “hot spots” can be traced back to the early years of World War II.)
Under this model, police assets were to be specially directed toward a handful of hot spots or “chronically violent urban locations.” That such places were home to populations of disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and immigrant Americans will no longer shock anyone; nor that they overlapped strikingly with areas of concentrated impoverishment and “planned abandonment”; nor that an influx of heavily armed strangers was undoubtedly the last thing such communities needed from the government. All of this was beside the point. The “marginal deterrent effect” — the minimal difference such hot-spot policing purportedly made in the calculations of would-be criminals — was enough to keep most critics quiet.
Three months after the rollout, the Place-Based Investigations Squad would play an integral part in the police raid that took the life of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman and emergency-room technician at the University of Louisville, accused of no crime, but executed anyway by three Louisville police officers standing in the hallway of her own home. Officers from the PBI Squad had requested and obtained five search warrants with “no-knock” clauses, including one for Ms. Taylor, acting on what one would later call a “gut feeling.”
Within moments of the officers’ arrival at her apartment on the night of March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor lay dying, felled by six of 32 shots fired into her home. It would be 20 minutes before she even received medical attention — 15 minutes too late to save her life. Although four officers have now been federally charged for civil rights violations, and three stand accused of lying on the affidavit they used to secure the warrants, a grand jury ultimately failed to return a single indictment for the officers who opened fire.
That night in 2020, Ms. Taylor joined a long litany of Black women, robbed of their lives while simply trying to live them by those supposedly tasked with their protection. According to the latest count, some 280 women have been slain in encounters with law enforcement over just the past five years. Researchers have found that women made up nearly half of all police-initiated contacts and Black women were three times more likely than white ones to experience the use of force during a police-initiated stop.
“Elite” police units have played an outsized role in such state-sanctioned femicides.
Take the case of India Kager, 27, a Navy vet killed by a tactical team in Virginia Beach in 2015, as she sat in her car with her four-month-old baby in the back. Or consider Atlanta’s RED DOG (short for “Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia”) Unit. On November 21, 2006, plainclothes officers from that narcotics squad — having lied under oath to obtain a no-knock warrant — barged into the home of Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old grandmother, and promptly gunned her down. Drugs were then planted near her body in a sorry attempt at a cover-up.
Disbanded or Rebranded?
We’ve been here before: Officers are charged with second-degree murder. Sweeping reforms are promised. Controversial units are “deactivated,” their officers reassigned to other bureaus.
We saw this with the Amadou Diallo protests and the New York Police Department’s Street Crimes Unit in the early 2000s. We saw it with Atlanta’s RED DOGs after the killing of Kathryn Johnston. We saw it with Louisville’s PBI Squad in the months following the murder of Breonna Taylor — and we’re seeing it now in the aftermath of the assault on Tyre Nichols.
Count on this, however: as time passes and attention subsides, reforms are abandoned, charges are dropped, or the defendants found not guilty by juries of their peers. And special ops teams are rebranded and brought back to life under different names.
Today, Atlanta’s “Titans” have replaced the “RED DOGs” of old, while the very police executive who ran the old unit, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, was made commissioner of the Memphis police department. The city of Memphis has also sought guidance from Ray Kelly, who was New York police commissioner during a particularly trigger-happy period in that department’s history (including the deaths of Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Ramarley Graham, and Kimani Gray).
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, himself a veteran of a plainclothes police unit, is touting his “Neighborhood Safety Teams” (along with another elite strike force inherited from his predecessors, the “Strategic Response Group”) as the basis for a whole new approach to policing. In truth, they are simply picking up where the Street Crimes Unit left off. The only real differences: longer guns, modified uniforms, and body cameras that can be turned on or off at will.
The names change, but the strategy (such as it is) remains the same and the body counts only climb higher.
“Collateral Damage” and the War at Home
Yet such police killings are not truly local matters. The final piece of the puzzle is the national security state, itself a predatory entity and the source of much of the surplus that supplies the police with significant military-grade weaponry and the bipartisan consensus that keeps the dollars flowing.
Local police agencies would not have anything like the arsenals they have today — ones that would be the envy of many of the world’s militaries — without the largesse of the Pentagon’s popular 1033 program. For years, it has been arming police departments around the country in a distinctly military fashion, sometimes even with weapons directly off the battlefields of this country’s distant wars. Thanks to that program, the Memphis police department has managed to obtain a significant stockpile of high-powered rifles and multiple armored personnel carriers, while the State of Tennessee alone has received $131 million worth of weaponry from the Department of Defense.
Meanwhile, paving new ground, the Special Operations Bureau of the San Francisco Police Department has procured unmanned, remotely piloted killer robots with names like TALON and DRAGON RUNNER. It is now advertising its intent to use them as a “deadly force option” in criminal apprehensions and other incidents like “riots, insurrection, or potentially violent demonstrations.”
None of this would be possible without the support of politicians from both parties. The 2023 budget agreed upon by both parties, for instance, promises $37 billion in new spending on law enforcement — with double-digit percentage increases in discretionary funding for local police departments, above and beyond the nearly $1 trillion for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. As a “moral statement,” that document bears a striking resemblance to its predecessors, backing the blue with billions of public tax dollars, while bearing witness to the priorities of a government on the warpath against enemies domestic and foreign.
Zooming out, we can see this kind of predatory policing for the national crisis it really is.
In recent decades, according to a definitive study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, more than 30,000 American civilians have lost their lives in encounters with law enforcement, a figure perhaps best compared to the rates of “collateral damage” in war-torn places like Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, or the Sahel. And whatever we call them, “elite” units like the Scorpions have played a leading role in that carnage. From their basic training to their advanced technology and heavy weaponry, they are increasingly cast as the protagonists in what has become America’s homeland theater of war, producing content of spectacular violence as this country’s war machine turns inward.
At a time when significant crossover can be seen between law enforcement and the white nationalist militia movement, it should be obvious that police departments are, among other things, playing a dangerous game with democracy. With Donald Trump and his crew still going full Blue Lives Matter and the Biden administration failing to pass meaningful police reform, count on another bloody harvest of police violence in 2023 and 2024. In the event of sustained civil conflict, there is little mystery about which side some elite police units would choose to fight on or who would find themselves in the scopes of their semi-automatic rifles.
Still, the predator state is not invincible, nor is its ascendancy inevitable. After all, the claims of police departments to legitimacy rest upon the support of elected officials who remain vulnerable to popular pressure, while the very existence of such paramilitary units depends on their access to the public purse. In a very real sense, then, they can still be fired, or at least defunded.
For now, in the absence of consequences, the hunt for humans goes on uninterrupted and that’s likely to continue as long as so many Americans remain willing to put up with it.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.
These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty and segregation of the inner cities; America’s Gospel of Instant Gratification; commercial TV; school sports; the restlessness of American society itself; its ingrained anti-intellectualism and ambivalence toward knowledge; youth’s distrust of the adult world and the school; youth culture and its rejection of tradition; technology’s negative impact on learning; Facebook; the eclipse of reading; youth’s literal-mindedness; its lack of intellectual curiosity; its inability to ask significant questions; its disinclination to develop a critical mind; the system of American education itself.
To repeat, these are factors over which teachers have no control, but which have an enormous impact upon student learning or not learning. The issue of teacher responsibility for student performance must be placed within this broader social context of what has been happening outside the American classroom for the last 40 years. Only in this way will the discussion about student learning become more realistic, and honest, and why singling out teachers alone distorts the true nature of both the problem and its solution.
When there are too few teachers in a school, and those few are overwhelmed by large classes and have no time to provide individualized attention for students — many of whom come to school deeply troubled and alienated with any number of emotional and psychological problems having nothing to do with the school — is it any wonder that students find it hard to focus and learn?
The emotional, familial, and social problems of many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help that the paltry resources of the school cannot begin to address them. These underfunded schools often lack even the essential services of counselors, social workers, and nurses because of draconian budget cuts.
What makes matters still worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being annually denied billions in vitally needed tax dollars diverted to charter schools, with no accountability as part of a right-wing political agenda. This is nothing less than the nationwide destruction of public schools by privatizing them for personal gain and rewarding charter-friendly legislators and governors with campaign contributions taken from that same taxpayer funding that should be going to support public-school students. And if that weren’t enough, insult is then added to injury when these cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for carrying on in the face of impossible odds.
Rather than blaming these woefully underfunded public schools for “failing” their children, one should consider the war zone within which many of these schools are located: decaying neighborhoods, virtual armed camps where students must live amidst gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness. How can one realistically expect children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.
The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.
It is for this reason that blaming the “failure of schools,” as suggested by the film Waiting for Superman, is a willful distortion of what inner-city schools are up against thanks to this entrenched policy of government neglect, which the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge, let alone examine. This polemic against America’s inner-city public schools is a bare-faced lie that conceals the real reason for the “failure” of these schools: the deep and ingrained class and racial divisions in our nation’s history as borne out by city riots over the past 50 years. What is happening in the seething cauldron of our inner cities is hardly conducive to students learning.
How much easier to wax moralistic and blame public schools as the villains, the helpless victims of these racist policies of social injustice, rather than these policies themselves — or even to change them! But what politician would dare take this on! That would mean real moral leadership and honest reform, not the crowd-pleasing posturing of pseudo-reform that demonizes teachers and blames them for the responsibility that government abdicated decades ago. It is the systemic culture of poverty and segregation that accounts for the lack of student progress within our inner cities, not teachers who can do only so much given government’s washing its hands of the inner city.
The solution to these appalling conditions of inner-city poverty is not moral exhortation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington and state capitals — a new Marshall Plan. Those who sit at the Table of the Mighty have always known that this is the only answer to these seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities. What is wanting, as always, is the political will. Instead of hectoring teachers to do more and more with less and less, genuine reform will only begin when government redirects its resources to rebuild our nation’s inner cities and support the public schools within them.
If we can find billions to bail out big banks and billions more for dubious military adventures abroad, we certainly can find billions to invest in our own people and children! If we really cared about our children and their chances for a good education, we would move heaven and earth to ensure that this happens. Children are our only real immortality, and if we don’t care about them, whom do we care for? What are we about as a nation? What are we about as human beings?
But, then, it’s always more profitable to Haliburtonize the cities abroad we destroy in war only to later rebuild them than to turn our own cities into environments worthy of the dignity of the human beings who live there, and where schools and schoolchildren can flourish. Until that happens, talk of reform will be dismissed by teachers as empty, self-serving political bombast, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but sound bites for the six o’clock news, launching pads for those with aspirations to higher office or the White House.
Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these inner-city schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes, and offer rich and diversified programs that will challenge and help them to grow as students and persons. Preaching self-help rhetoric of feel-good uplift to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today smacks of imposing guilt trips on these victims of government inaction.
Until those in power dare to show true leadership by helping the poor rather than protecting the rich, until they live up to their oath of office by caring for all our citizens and not just the few; until they use their power to effect positive change rather than undermining teachers who work against hopeless odds to do the impossible, until this happens, we won’t be Waiting for Superman, but Waiting for Godot.
The silence of public officials about these decades of government neglect — the true cause of the plight of our inner cities and their public schools — is only all-too-understandable, because they would be indicting the very system they represent. Instead, they condemn the first responders — teachers — who daily must pick their way through the smoldering debris of past inaction. In their attempt to appease a public clamoring for quick-fix solutions to longstanding problems, politicians cast about for scapegoats, a measure always more convenient, and popular, and cheaper, than addressing root causes, which would mean real reform.
It is the perennial stock-in-trade tactic of those who would rather demagogue the burning issues of the day by deflecting public attention from underlying structural causes, because they lack the moral courage of facing the truth, the mark of true statesmen and women.
It is a strange sort of paradox that a nation which demands improved public schools is unwilling to pay for them. Indeed, it even remains silent when governors and legislators annually cut billions from public-school budgets and give this funding to charter schools, which refuse to have their books audited, are not public schools, and cherry-pick every child who applies to them.
For too long, the teaching profession in America has been dismissed as an intellectual proletarian class, much as the Romans viewed their educated Greek prisoners of war, whom they enslaved and brought back to Rome as tutors for their children. Teachers are routinely reviled for the important work they perform as unworthy of a professional salary, despite years of experience and advanced degrees. And, yet, they continue to educate on behalf of a nation that begrudges what it pays them. No wonder students doubt the value of learning, when they see that many in the trades earn more than their teachers. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson students learn in our schools.
Yet teachers continue to educate while politicians break down their authority with sustained public criticism and then wonder why teachers command little respect. Nowhere in the world are teachers held in such low esteem as in America, an eloquent testimony to our national character. Yet teachers continue to educate those whom past centuries never dreamt capable of being educated — everyone, and then these teachers, beset on all sides by misunderstanding, budget cuts, public vilification, and lack of parental support, are routinely condemned when they don’t succeed!
And, finally, teachers must now endure the crowning indignity of a punitive evaluation, a weapon wielded by politicians who have the temerity to claim, after decades of government inaction, that teachers themselves are the problem, and, depending on their students’ test scores, they’ll be one step closer to losing their jobs!
Children should be tested by their teachers on material taught by their teachers, and teachers should be evaluated by their school administrators as they always have been in the past. To do otherwise is sheer lunacy since standardized testing, as is well known, doesn’t measure teacher effectiveness, but the parental income and home environment of students as research clearly shows.
The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. Teachers alone are expected to overcome the effects of poverty, segregation, and racism upon students who live within the demoralized world of the inner cities.
In desperate holding actions, hoping against hope for government to come to the rescue, teachers never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by that same government, which, rather than thanking them for their heroic efforts against impossible odds, now turns on them for “failing their students.”
The post Why America Demonizes its Public-School Teachers first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.
These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty and segregation of the inner cities; America’s Gospel of Instant Gratification; commercial TV; school sports; the restlessness of American society itself; its ingrained anti-intellectualism and ambivalence toward knowledge; youth’s distrust of the adult world and the school; youth culture and its rejection of tradition; technology’s negative impact on learning; Facebook; the eclipse of reading; youth’s literal-mindedness; its lack of intellectual curiosity; its inability to ask significant questions; and its disinclination to develop a critical mind.
To repeat, these are factors over which teachers have no control, but which have an enormous impact upon student learning or not learning. The issue of teacher responsibility for student performance must be placed within this broader social context of what has been happening outside the American classroom for the last 40 years. Only in this way will the discussion about student learning become more realistic, and honest, and why singling out teachers alone distorts the true nature of both the problem and its solution.
When there are too few teachers in a school, and those few are overwhelmed by large classes and have no time to provide individualized attention for students — many of whom come to school deeply troubled and alienated with any number of emotional and psychological problems having nothing to do with the school — is it any wonder that students find it hard to focus and learn?
The emotional, familial, and social problems of many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help that the paltry resources of the school cannot begin to address them. These underfunded schools often lack even the essential services of counselors, social workers, and nurses because of draconian budget cuts.
What makes matters still worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being annually denied billions in vitally needed tax dollars diverted to charter schools, with no accountability as part of a right-wing political agenda. This is nothing less than the nationwide destruction of public schools by privatizing them for personal gain and rewarding charter-friendly legislators and governors with campaign contributions taken from that same taxpayer funding that should be going to support public-school students. And if that weren’t enough, insult is then added to injury when these cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for carrying on in the face of impossible odds.
Rather than blaming these woefully underfunded public schools for “failing” their children, one should consider the war zone within which many of these schools are located: decaying neighborhoods, virtual armed camps where students must live amidst gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness. How can one realistically expect children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.
The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.
It is for this reason that blaming the “failure of schools,” as suggested by the film Waiting for Superman, is a willful distortion of what inner-city schools are up against thanks to this entrenched policy of government neglect, which the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge, let alone examine. This polemic against America’s inner-city public schools is a bare-faced lie that conceals the real reason for the “failure” of these schools: the deep and ingrained class and racial divisions in our nation’s history as borne out by city riots over the past 50 years. What is happening in the seething cauldron of our inner cities is hardly conducive to students learning.
How much easier to wax moralistic and blame public schools as the villains, the helpless victims of these racist policies of social injustice, rather than these policies themselves — or even to change them! But what politician would dare take this on! That would mean real moral leadership and honest reform, not the crowd-pleasing posturing of pseudo-reform that demonizes teachers and blames them for the responsibility that government abdicated decades ago. It is the systemic culture of poverty and segregation that accounts for the lack of student progress within our inner cities, not teachers who can do only so much given government’s washing its hands of the inner city.
The solution to these appalling conditions of inner-city poverty is not moral exhortation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington and state capitals — a new Marshall Plan. Those who sit at the Table of the Mighty have always known that this is the only answer to these seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities. What is wanting, as always, is the political will. Instead of hectoring teachers to do more and more with less and less, genuine reform will only begin when government redirects its resources to rebuild our nation’s inner cities and support the public schools within them.
If we can find billions to bail out big banks and billions more for dubious military adventures abroad, we certainly can find billions to invest in our own people and children! If we really cared about our children and their chances for a good education, we would move heaven and earth to ensure that this happens. Children are our only real immortality, and if we don’t care about them, whom do we care for? What are we about as a nation? What are we about as human beings?
But, then, it’s always more profitable to Haliburtonize the cities abroad we destroy in war only to later rebuild them than to turn our own cities into environments worthy of the dignity of the human beings who live there, and where schools and schoolchildren can flourish. Until that happens, talk of reform will be dismissed by teachers as empty, self-serving political bombast, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but sound bites for the six o’clock news, launching pads for those with aspirations to higher office or the White House.
Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these inner-city schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes, and offer rich and diversified programs that will challenge and help them to grow as students and persons. Preaching self-help rhetoric of feel-good uplift to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today smacks of imposing guilt trips on these victims of government inaction.
Until those in power dare to show true leadership by helping the poor rather than protecting the rich, until they live up to their oath of office by caring for all our citizens and not just the few; until they use their power to effect positive change rather than undermining teachers who work against hopeless odds to do the impossible, until this happens, we won’t be Waiting for Superman, but Waiting for Godot.
The silence of public officials about these decades of government neglect — the true cause of the plight of our inner cities and their public schools — is only all-too-understandable, because they would be indicting the very system they represent. Instead, they condemn the first responders — teachers — who daily must pick their way through the smoldering debris of past inaction. In their attempt to appease a public clamoring for quick-fix solutions to longstanding problems, politicians cast about for scapegoats, a measure always more convenient, and popular, and cheaper, than addressing root causes, which would mean real reform.
It is the perennial stock-in-trade tactic of those who would rather demagogue the burning issues of the day by deflecting public attention from underlying structural causes, because they lack the moral courage of facing the truth, the mark of true statesmen and women.
It is a strange sort of paradox that a nation which demands improved public schools is unwilling to pay for them. Indeed, it even remains silent when governors and legislators annually cut billions from public-school budgets and give this funding to charter schools, which refuse to have their books audited, are not public schools, and cherry-pick every child who applies to them.
For too long, the teaching profession in America has been dismissed as an intellectual proletarian class, much as the Romans viewed their educated Greek prisoners of war, whom they enslaved and brought back to Rome as tutors for their children. Teachers are routinely reviled for the important work they perform as unworthy of a professional salary, despite years of experience and advanced degrees. And, yet, they continue to educate on behalf of a nation that begrudges what it pays them. No wonder students doubt the value of learning, when they see that many in the trades earn more than their teachers. Perhaps this is the biggest lesson students learn in our schools.
Yet teachers continue to educate while politicians break down their authority with sustained public criticism and then wonder why teachers command little respect. Nowhere in the world are teachers held in such low esteem as in America, an eloquent testimony to our national character. Yet teachers continue to educate those whom past centuries never dreamt capable of being educated — everyone, and then these teachers, beset on all sides by misunderstanding, budget cuts, public vilification, and lack of parental support, are routinely condemned when they don’t succeed!
And, finally, teachers must now endure the crowning indignity of a punitive evaluation, a weapon wielded by politicians who have the temerity to claim, after decades of government inaction, that teachers themselves are the problem, and, depending on their students’ test scores, they’ll be one step closer to losing their jobs!
Children should be tested by their teachers on material taught by their teachers, and teachers should be evaluated by their school administrators as they always have been in the past. To do otherwise is sheer lunacy since standardized testing, as is well known, doesn’t measure teacher effectiveness, but the parental income and home environment of students as research clearly shows.
The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. Teachers alone are expected to overcome the effects of poverty, segregation, and racism upon students who live within the demoralized world of the inner cities.
In desperate holding actions, hoping against hope for government to come to the rescue, teachers never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by that same government, which, rather than thanking them for their heroic efforts against impossible odds, now turns on them for “failing their students.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
“Selma is sacred ground. It is, in a very real sense, the delivery room where the possibility of a true democracy was born. It is no place to play or to be for political pretense. Either you’re serious or not. If you’re coming, come on Sunday, the actual day of remembrance. If you’re coming, come with a commitment to fight for what these people were willing to give their lives for.”
That’s the message that faith and rights leaders sent in a Monday letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and members of Congress ahead of the anniversary of Bloody Sunday—when white police officers violently assaulted civil rights advocates, including future Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The sign-on letter is led by the co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis—along with former Democratic Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Touré, Rev. Mark Thompson, Rebecca Marion, and Rev. Carolyn Foster. It is open for signature on the Repairers of the Breach website.
“#SelmaIsSacredGround, not a place for political pretense.”
“This is a critical year in the life of our country,” the seven initial signatories wrote. “On the one hand, the president and progressive members of Congress have fought to pass policies that have lifted up Americans in many ways. From Covid relief measures to infrastructure investments to child tax credits that lifted millions of children out of poverty (for a brief moment) to the appointment of the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, we can celebrate some real progress.”
“But, on the other hand, with a Democratic president and control of the House and Senate for two years, Democratic leadership was unable to raise the federal minimum wage,” they continued, also noting that a few obstructionist Democrats repeatedly helped Senate Republicans block efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act by supporting the filibuster.
That obstruction, they explained, enabled “regressive legislative bodies across the nation to pass more voter suppression bills than any time since Jim Crow and to go through another round of dangerous redistricting, which nullifies the potential power of progressive voting coalitions by stacking and packing votes in certain districts to predetermine outcomes before any vote is cast.”
\u201cAhead of the 58th anniv. of Bloody Sunday, @brepairers is joined in this call by Rev. Liz Theoharis @liztheo, Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Toure, Rev. Mark Thompson @ministter, Rebecca Marion, Board Chair, Bridge Crossing Jubilee, Rev. Carolyn Foster of the @AlabamaPPC, and others.\u201d— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II) 1676925038
Highlighting research that shows tens of millions of Americans face some form of voter suppression, the letter leaders argue that if Biden and other politicians plan to visit Selma—which was recently devastated by a tornado—for the Bloody Sunday anniversary, they should “declare that the fight for voting rights and the restoration of what they marched across that bridge for is not over.”
The letter also demands urgent action on living wages and investments in rural areas, stressing that millions of people—particularly in Southern states—live “in poverty and low-wealth conditions” and remain “uninsured or underinsured at a time when we have more people on healthcare than ever before,” three years into the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Those of us who are planning to be in Selma to honor the struggle for voting rights and economic justice should be willing to protest and engage nonviolently if politicians attempt to do moral harm to the memory and the sacredness of what happened on Bloody Sunday,” declares the letter. “This is no time for foolishness, photo-ops, and flaky commitments.”
“Let us be clear: To honor the memory of Bloody Sunday is to work for the full restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the passage of the original For the People Act that John Lewis helped to write, not the bill that was watered down by Joe Manchin,” the letter continues, calling out the pro-filibuster West Virginia Democrat infamous for thwarting his own party’s agenda.
“To commemorate Bloody Sunday,” the letter adds, “is to commit to raising of the minimum wage to a living wage, to ensuring that every American has adequate healthcare, and to enacting economic development that touches poor and low-wealth communities.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is our nation’s most effective tool for combating hunger. It plays a critical role in reducing poverty, improving health and economic outcomes, supporting people who are paid low wages, and serving as the first line of defense against hunger during economic downturns. Access to SNAP provides families with the money they need to purchase groceries, freeing up their limited resources to spend more on other basic needs such as housing, utilities, and medical and child care.
As the Senate Agriculture Committee prepares to hold a hearing on nutrition programs in the 2023 farm bill, there are a few important points to consider.
SNAP is highly effective at reducing hunger and is a powerful anti-poverty tool, especially during times of economic downturn. SNAP reduces hunger by as much as 30 percent and is even more effective among children. Studies have shown that hunger among children fell by roughly one-third after their families received SNAP benefits for six months. Hunger was poised to soar early in the COVID-19 pandemic, but SNAP’s structure and policy changes made it easier for families to access SNAP during this period. Hunger stayed level in 2020 — unlike during the Great Recession, when hunger surged from 11.1 percent to 14.7 percent. SNAP also narrowed racial disparities during the pandemic: from late December 2020 through December 2021, the share of people who didn’t have enough to eat fell 7.8 percentage points for Black adults and 6 percentage points for Hispanic adults, compared to 3.1 percentage points for non-Hispanic white adults.
SNAP helps a broad range of people with low incomes, including children, older adults, people with disabilities, and veterans.
SNAP is linked to improved outcomes for education, economic security, and self-sufficiency. When children are hungry, their performance at school suffers. SNAP is linked to improved educational attainment and higher rates of school completion. One study found that test scores among students in SNAP households are highest for those receiving benefits two to three weeks before the test. This suggests that SNAP can help students learn and prepare for tests — and that when benefits run out and families are struggling to afford groceries, children’s ability to learn is diminished. Similarly, children who received SNAP benefits when they were younger have improved labor market outcomes in adulthood.
SNAP is associated with improved health outcomes and lower medical costs. SNAP helps families with low incomes afford healthier foods and is linked to improved health outcomes over the long term. SNAP participants are more likely to report excellent or very good health than low-income people who don’t participate in SNAP. SNAP is also linked to lower medical costs; some studies show an association between SNAP participation and a reduction in health care costs by as much as $5,000 per person per year.
SNAP is an important support for workers. Finally, and key in some of the conversations happening now, SNAP is an important support (not a hindrance) for workers who are paid low wages and for those looking for work. No one can work when they are hungry. SNAP helps fill the gaps for workers with low and inconsistent pay, and it helps people afford food for themselves and their families during periods when they are looking for work. Most SNAP participants who can work do so. But many of the jobs most common among SNAP participants, such as service or sales jobs, often pay low wages and don’t offer regular work hours or benefits like paid sick leave. This makes it difficult for workers to earn sufficient income to provide for their families and may contribute to volatility due to high job turnover. SNAP supplements these workers’ low pay, helps smooth out income fluctuations due to irregular hours, and helps workers when they temporarily lose employment, enabling them to buy food and use their limited resources on other necessities. For millions of working people, work does not itself guarantee steady or sufficient income to provide for their families. SNAP responds by providing workers and their families with supplementary income to buy food.
While there are some areas where we should make improvements to SNAP, we must remember that it is critical to protect — not weaken — the program while looking for opportunities to strengthen it in a bipartisan bill.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
We get an update from Damascus, Syria, on last week’s devastating earthquakes, as the United Nations warns the death toll in Turkey and northwest Syria will top at least 50,000. The U.N. also says the earthquake rescue phase is “coming to a close” and that efforts are expected to turn to providing shelter, food and care to survivors. Millions have been left homeless by the deadly quakes that…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Recently, Maryland swore in its first Black governor, Wes Moore, in a “historic” ceremony cemented with a tearful introduction by Oprah Winfrey and a hand on Frederick Douglass’ Bible. The Black elite flocked to fill the rooms of the inauguration to witness the third elected Black governor in U.S. history. Yet, this “first Black” gubernatorial win is history repeating itself.
African/Black communities have witnessed “first Blacks” consistently continuing over-policing, surveillance, criminalization and austerity policies.
As Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organization Ujima People’s Progress Party understands,
The Black middle-class’ allegiance to capitalism, and not Black liberation, has largely led the Black political leadership class to function as a comprador misleadership class over the Black majority of working peoples on behalf of the capitalist parties, and political machines they are members of.
For nearly a century, radical African/Black people have criticized elements of the African/Black community as being designed to serve as buffers to ruling class elements. Whether discerned as “neocolonial,” “the comprador class,” or “the Black Misleadership Class,” this sector has evaded accountability to the masses of African/Black people, while using their Black identity as cover for self-serving opportunism.
Moore first became famous for his 2010 bestselling memoir, The Other Wes Moore, an inspirational story of two boys with the same name and ties to Baltimore City. In interviews, Moore is depicted as a Black boy from an economically struggling background who became formally educated, rising to become a U.S. military veteran, and thus a socioeconomically developed Black man. The framing of his “life story,” as told through the book, not only helps manufacture an Obama-like image, politically. But in juxtaposition to the “other Wes Moore,” it leaves room to question how this narrative will affect his policies.
It remains unclear if Moore had been raised in Baltimore City. Yet, as the backdrop of Moore’s life story, the city has been central to his platform on crime. The Public Safety and Criminal Justice page on wesmoore.com states, “Violent crime is on the rise across Maryland and people are dying in our streets.” The solutions presented, however, will be nothing short of a plan to continue what former Governor Larry Hogan started in his campaign to “refund the police,” which increased resources for state law enforcement agencies following the 2020 uprisings.
Citing an “ineffectiveness of leadership,” Moore ignores that not only is Baltimore City already occupied with an array of federally funded police directives, it has just received an additional $7.9 million in federal funds to “fight crime.” This funding is a part of the Biden administration’s $350 million American Rescue plan to “fund the police,” as he enthusiastically announced in his 2022 State of the Union address. Unsurprisingly, in 2022, 1,192 people were killed by police, exceeding any other year in U.S. history. Also, Moore has ignored the existing consent decree issued in 2017, acknowledging the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, and specific provisions of federal statutory law.
“The BPD has access to the Department of Defense (DOD) 1033 program budget. They also train with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) through the ‘deadly exchange program’ and continue to receive federal agents through Trump’s 2020 Operation Relentless Pursuit policy,” says Petros Bein, member of the Baltimore City Wide Alliance of the Black Alliance For Peace (BAP-Baltimore). “This is in addition to the approved privatized policing for universities, like Johns Hopkins, engulfing Black communities.”
These continued failed approaches to “crime” have only proven that added resources, as well as changes in policy or the law, will not contribute to public safety. Moore cannot “rebuild and strengthen relationships between communities and law enforcement agencies” by “increasing accountability and transparency” in a city in which the police department constantly violates its consent decree. Nor should funding community-policing initiatives that “recruit diverse officers that reflect the diversity of communities they serve” be taken seriously. The recent death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee (a city also operating under Operation Relentless Pursuit) has been the most illuminating example of the fallacy of Black faces occupying these spaces to the benefit of the African/Black community.
Policies that address crime in an over-policed city cannot be presented in the abstract. As the country celebrates a “first Black” governor, Maryland continues to imprison more African/Black people, per capita, than any other state. Moore needs to provide more specifics to explain what will be done and how this builds or departs from existing efforts to return control of the Baltimore City Police Department from the federal government to Baltimore City.
“Wes Moore’s connections with Mayor [Brandon] Scott’s office and the city design/city planning committee will shape or harm what’s happening in Baltimore. With no control over the city’s policing, Moore’s decisions directly affect the most marginalized of us,” acknowledges BAP-Baltimore core member, Kimya Nuru Dennis.
The Democratic Party has been able to depict Moore as a trusting solution for Maryland, in general, and for African/Black people, specifically. His socioeconomic status, as well as that of his donors, indicates to BAP-Baltimore what will undoubtedly shape whose voices matter most in prioritizing health, education, and safety-based policies and laws.
The lack of equitable housing that causes displacement, as well as food deserts, and low wages, have been pressing issues in Maryland. African/Black elected officials have not resolved the economic and social crisis facing the African/Black working class of Baltimore City. Instead, their lack of solutions have resulted in the overt criminalization and over-policing of African/Black communities. Police are constantly and consistently well-funded and well-resourced. BAP-Baltimore understands police are used to enforce the status quo of white power and colonial control over the lives of African/Black and other oppressed nations of people. This comes as the city has increasingly privatized and priced out our people. More police funding, while ignoring the causes of crime, cannot resolve the ongoing dilemma facing the African/Black working class in Baltimore City.
The post New Maryland Governor Wes Moore: Another “First Black” in a Colonial System first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.
Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. This year’s report, “Survival of the Richest,” offered a striking vision of global poverty from the trenches of the pandemic years. Imagine this as a start: in the last two of those years, the world’s richest 1% captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth, or twice that of the bottom 99%. Put another way, this planet’s billionaires have collectively “earned” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for obvious reasons) $2.7 billion every one of the last 730 days. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, at least 115 million people fell into “extreme poverty,” with billions more hanging on by a tenuous thread. By 2030, Oxfam reports, the world could be facing the “largest setback in addressing global poverty since World War II.”
The truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.”
The grim realities laid out in the report left me wondering: What kind of cooperation were they talking about at Davos? Did they mean a collaboration among all global communities? (Not likely!) Or did they mean the continued partnership of economic elites intent, above all else, on protecting their own wealth? And what of fragmentation? Amid increasing warfare and beneath the ongoing fracturing of democracies (including our own, thanks in part to a billionaire whose name I hardly need mention), nations, and long-held international arrangements, do they recognize the deepest fragmentation of all, that caused by so much needless suffering and inexcusable gluttony?
Poverty Amid Plenty
Here in the United States, it’s the same story: untold wealth and shocking want, even as House Republicans are threatening to slash programs like Medicare and Social Security just weeks into a new congressional session. Today, in one of the richest nations in the world, nearly half the population is either poor or a single $400 emergency away from poverty. The moral and cognitive dissonance of such a reality can be difficult to fathom, as can the numbers. At a time when the U.S. economy is valued at nearly $25 trillion and the wealth of the three richest Americans exceeds $300 billion, at least 140 million people strain to meet their basic needs and face the daily threat of economic ruin thanks to one pay cut, layoff, accident, extreme storm, or bad medical diagnosis.
Over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks out of the paychecks of their workers, so much so that the average CEO now makes 670 times more than his or her employees. It tells you how far we’ve come that, in 1965, that number was “just” 20 times more. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year) has remained remarkably low, hurting not only those who earn it, but millions of other workers whose employers use it as the floor for their own pay scales. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had kept up with the economy’s overall productivity over the last half-century, it would now be $22 an hour, or close to $50,000 a year.
All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the U.S. economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat — politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.
America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.
Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plus in personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. As a result (as I wrote in 2021 with Astra Taylor), “millions of Americans aren’t just poor; they have less than nothing. The American dream is no longer owning a house with a white picket fence; it is getting out of debt. In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people now aspire to have zero dollars.”
The view looks very different from the top. The first two years of the pandemic marked the most unequal recession in modern American history, with the wealth of the country’s 651 billionaires actually increasing by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of that year, he was joined by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. At Amazon, where the median pay in 2020 was about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made that year to his own endangered workers and would still have had well over $100 billion left.
As an anti-poverty organizer, I’m regularly asked if we can afford to end poverty, even as politicians and economists cite the specter of scarcity to justify inaction or even outright anti-poor policies. Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.
Don’t be fooled. We’re not living in a time of insufficiency, but in a golden age of plenty amid grotesque poverty, of abundance amid unbearable forms of abandonment.
To Tackle Poverty, Tackle Wealth
Despite the capacity to wipe out poverty altogether, antipoverty advocacy generally operates within two interdependent philosophical frameworks: mitigation and charity. The first assumes that poverty is indeed a permanent feature of our economy best alleviated by job-training programs, fatherhood initiatives, and work requirements, but never to be abolished outright. The second approaches poverty as a sad social condition that exists on the margins of society and treats poor people as, at best, pitiable and, at worst, pathological. Together, those two frameworks funnel billions of dollars in charitable and philanthropic giving to explicitly apolitical measures directed downstream from the source of poverty.
While such giving does indeed help many impoverished people meet immediate needs, it does very little to confront poverty in its fullness or why it exists in the first place — and in most cases, the help is inadequate given the need. No wonder the wealthy tend to be the biggest proponents of mitigating poverty through charity, because to fundamentally address the problem would also mean addressing the unequal distribution of political power in our world.
Oxfam’s new report is a good place to explore this, since it not only critiques inequality, but offers possible solutions to the nightmares such a situation creates, above all increasing tax rates on the wealthy, which right now are mind-numbingly low. Consider this statistic: “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of about 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%.”
To counter this, Oxfam proposes that worldwide taxes on the income of the richest 1% be raised to at least 60% (with even higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires). They also suggest that taxes on the wealthy be levied in such a way that their number would be dramatically reduced and their wealth redistributed to meet the needs of the poor.
Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s executive director, explained it this way:
“Taxing the super-rich is the strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy. We need to do this for innovation. For stronger public services. For happier and healthier societies. And to tackle the climate crisis, by investing in the solutions that counter the insane emissions of the very richest.”
A New and Unsettling Force
People often ask me for a plan to end poverty. Usually that means they want to know what policy positions and prescriptions to advocate for, a line of inquiry on which I have plenty of thoughts. As a start, I refer them to the fulsome agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign (that I co-chair), including our demands for fair tax policy. But long ago, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an approach to lifting the load of poverty that goes far beyond any single program or policy.
Some months before the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, having been endlessly asked for an itemized list of demands, King answered this way:
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program. What is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen… The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”
The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest legislative victories. At the time, King pointed out that, beneath the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, areas in which they had made significant gains, millions of Black people remained locked in poverty in the South, as well as across the country, as did so many others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. King himself was surprised to learn that poor white people actually outnumbered poor Black people nationally. Taking that into consideration, he counseled that the movement had to make an evolutionary leap from “civil rights to human rights” and from “reform to revolution.”
This may not be the King whom the nation chooses to remember every mid-January in glitzy speeches by politicians who vehemently oppose the very positions for which he gave his life. In fact, this year, on that very commemorative day, I couldn’t help but think of the words of poet Carl Hines:
“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
But the truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.” Years of experience, and the guidance of others, had convinced him that the next chapter of the struggle required a mass movement of a breadth and depth not yet awakened. As he came to see it, strategically speaking, the unity of the poor would be the Achilles heel of a society desperately in need of restructuring. If poor people could unite to form a new political alliance across the lines that historically divided them, they would be uniquely positioned to lead a broad and powerful human-rights movement that confronted militarism, racism, and economic exploitation together.
The same is no less true today. To end poverty, our smartest and most innovative ideas have to be brought to the table. The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
— Michael Parenti
Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY the one percent who are tax dodgers, tax sheltering criminals:
Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.1 In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.
In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.
Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.
You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?
How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?
The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:
Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!
Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.
This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.
But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.
There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.
Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.
Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.
Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.
Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.
As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.
This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:
The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad
On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.
During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.
This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)
You’d never know that istory talking to linemen or bus driver or high school teacher or city council or …. And youth in college or in high school who will never get to read this article and discuss: “How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine”
A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.
Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.
Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)
The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The media and politicians are shocked to find out British Gas has been breaking into customers’ homes to install prepayment meters. Of course, if they’d bothered to listen to poor people they would have realised that energy firms have been doing this since 1954.
As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, energy supplier British Gas has announced that it would no longer “force-fit” prepayment meters in the homes of customers who are behind on their bills. Energy companies in the UK can obtain court warrants that allow them to enter people’s homes and fit the pay-as-you-go meters. Customers are then at risk of companies cutting their gas supply off if they fail to top them up.
However, an undercover investigation by the Times newspaper looked into this. It found that contractors working for British Gas sent debt collectors to “break into” homes and “force-fit” meters. Some of the customers the report identified had “extreme vulnerabilities”. Journalist Paul Morgan-Bentley went undercover with British Gas and exposed its practice. He noted that the company was breaking into the homes of disabled people:
Others who've had these meters force-fit for British Gas in recent weeks include a woman described in job notes as having “severe mental health bipolar”, a woman "with mobility problems and is partially sighted” and a mother whose “daughter is disabled and has a hoist”
— Paul Morgan-Bentley (@pmorganbentley) February 1, 2023
British Gas’s parent company Centrica was clearly rattled by the story. It said on 2 February it was suspending “all warrant activity” as a result. Centrica will also launch an investigation. Politicians, meanwhile, were outraged:
Today’s news about British Gas breaking into the homes of vulnerable people to install prepayment meters is absolutely horrific.
Wider action to deal with the scandal of prepayment meters is long overdue.pic.twitter.com/nl2eLztyNI
— Lisa Nandy (@lisanandy) February 2, 2023
However, energy firms breaking into people’s homes to fit prepayment meters is hardly news if you’re poor. This is because the government has let energy firms do it since 1954.
As the website Dealing with Bailiffs wrote, energy firms like British Gas can force entry into people’s homes to either fit prepayment meters or cut them off. They can do this under:
Section 2 of the Rights of Entry (Gas and Electricity Boards) Act 1954.
The energy firm has to have a “Warrant of Entry” notice from a magistrate. Dealing with Bailiffs noted that this:
allows a utility company warrant officer access to gas and electricity services in a property on application to a magistrate to lawfully break entry.
It is normally used when contact with the occupants has been unsuccessful and a utility service remains unpaid. A warrant of entry is used to either disconnect services or fit a pre-payment meter to the supply.
iNews reported on this in December 2022. It found that magistrates had granted nearly 500,000 Warrants of Entry since July 2021. iNews noted then that magistrates often signed off on the warrants without even asking if the customers were vulnerable. One magistrate reportedly did a batch-signing of “496 utility warrants in just three minutes and 51 seconds”.
Of course, if the Times and iNews had asked poor people in the first place then they wouldn’t have needed to investigate. However, why would they? Previously, fuel poverty, which would often lead to energy firms installing prepayment meters, was mostly confined to the poorest people. As the Resolution Foundation previously predicted, the cost of living crisis would change all this – and more middle-class people would be hit by fuel poverty:
So now British Gas are raiding slightly richer people’s houses, and suddenly the corporate media are interested – and politicians like Rishi Sunak call it “deeply shocking and concerning”. What’s really concerning is that no-one was interested in how energy firms were treating poor people – until now.
Featured image via Annasmith1986 – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 3.0
By Steve Topple
Yah, I am training to be a school bus driver. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, and that’s First Student, a foreign outfit in 49 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and it’s an equity firm out of Belgium. Bidding on school district transportation contracts far and wide, and alas, this Belgium company is getting paid by guess who?
USA and Canadian taxpayers footing the bill and reaping the poor services. This is what they call the public-private arrangement, again, what is a low level form of socialized payola for private companies while the taxpayer is screwed. As if the public and our governments and our states and our national funding can’t take care of OUR own children’s food, education, and transportation needs: we have to go to a private equity fund to handle schools shuttling. How long will I last is a crap shoot, since this is it for Lincoln County — no luck getting past interviews for county, city and state jobs as a case manager or services coordinator, even though there is that great 10 million shortfall of men dropping out of the workforce.
Oh, shit, I’m almost 66, with too many college degrees and a resume way too long to get very far.
Ahh, I’m also a social worker, educator, writer, journalist and even someone in urban and regional planning, but I can’t get past the interview stage. Missing men, well, there are many reasons for this new phenomenon. In the uncritical thinking USA, we will not get much deep analyses, though, just plain black and white rationales.
*****
The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond: a loss of enrollment revenue, less viewpoint diversity on campus, and fewer men in jobs that require some college education. Some academics want to make clear that just because women outnumber men in college it doesn’t mean that gender-equity issues no longer remain.
This collection of Chronicle articles features news stories, analysis, advice, and opinion essays, including several articles that sounded a warning years ago. It also looks at how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there.
Section 1: Why Don’t Men Go to College?
Section 2: How Can Colleges Draw More Men?
Section 3: Deconstructing the Gender Gap
Don’t get me started on the nanny state, the reverse sexism, the anti-feminism bullshit female empowerment. Don’t get me started on the battle of the sexes, and don’t get me started on the sheeple aspect of education, social work, and nonprofit work. Don’t get me started, man.
I can go down a thousand rabbit holes or warrens, but the thing is I come back out, revitalized, smarter, and, sure more pissed off. This is the state of the world, under capitalism. A Belgium company in the USA and Canada is monopolizing on school transportation. No union shop, $19 an hour here in Lincoln county where home prices and gasoline and food are outrageous and where other districts might pay more per hour.
Again, it’s a bunch of older folk, mostly women, driving buses at age 67, 71, 78. What the hell is that about?
I have also been a substitute teacher in this district, and I’ve written about that too: “Take Down this Blog, or Else! No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans.” Of course, I was and still am mad as hell at my banishment teaching, and can’t accept it, or take it. Even writing this will get me scrutinized by those overlords of the HR subhuman species who spend countless millions of dollars a year on software applications that do snazzy background checks, credit checks, employment checks, reference checks, drug checks, and of course, in my case, Google Scans/Checks, looking for any anti-this or anti-that diatribes or even plain old inverted triangle journalism.
Let’s scoot over to the issue of the failing male, the males in the womb, those just out of the womb, and then the developing baby, child, kid, teen and we end up with 355 million Americanos and a shit load of chronic illnesses for EVERYONE, including the poor child, babes in the woods. The top ten:
What are the 7 main types of learning disabilities? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that developmental disabilities occur among all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Children from ages 3 through 17 frequently have one or more developmental disabilities, such as:
In particular, psychology professionals should study these seven learning disabilities:
Related Disorders
So here we are at, now, in a society with so many epigentic, developmental, gestational, chromosomal and neuro disabilities. So many youth are faced with a lifetime of struggle, even before crawling, and then in pre-K and then K12, and then as adults. If this were a socially just society, there would be trillions spent on finding out the causes and effects and then the effects as new causes for new effects on the individual gestating, and what it is that makes this such a prevalent issue in our Western Society. Schools are warehouses, for sure, and the school to prison pipeline is not some goof-ball concept. We’d be looking hard at the chemicals, the stressors, the mother and father and their own stressors. All the toxins in air, water, food, drugs, including EMFs, and just the lack of nutrition, the fatty liver disease in 1/3 of folk, and the failing sperm counts in men since 1950, and, well, the discussion of who is that village that takes to raise a child.
Everything in capitalism is ANTI-health, ANTI-human, ANTI-Learning, ANTI-community engagement. More and more children, and yes, mostly boys, are monitored in the classroom, those prisons, and the effect or affect is that there is little significant learning and developing going on inside the school and their brains. They are a nerved up/out or nervous wreck, and they are watched and graded and sent home with behavior reports.
Now is the time to pity the child. Our children, and of course, all those children hit with the wagers of war, the wagers of sanctions, the wagers of economic and health and food sanctions. Depleted uranium or lead in the pipes. All of those realities also tie into the flagging mental health, the growing pressures put upon mother, father, child, grandparents, the lot of them in education, et al.
This is the sickness of America:
In solidarity with Cuba, leaders and activists of all Left and democratic parties of India welcomed Aleida Guevara in Surjeet Bhavan.
To a packed hall, Aleida said that it is one thing to talk about an economic blockade and quite another to live under that blockade.
She narrated how no country was ready to even give easily available medicine for a five-year-old child only because of the fear of America. In spite of not being a milk producing country, Cuba supplies one litre milk daily for all children and the aged, by importing it from New Zealand which is expensive because of the high transportation costs.
They were forced to buy milk from far away New Zealand, as their northern neighbour, US is not ready to trade with Cuba. The sixty years of illegal and inhumane US blockade has taught Cuba to spread humanism through sending doctors to wherever they were in need. Cuba is just 90 kilometres away from the mighty imperialist super power US. Even then it can’t be defeated since it believes in the scientific principle of people’s unity and those who are united can never be defeated. “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (The people united, shall always be victorious). She said Cuba took arms for peace and defending their motherland. She asserted that Cuba believes in standing up for equality against any kind of barbarism in the world. Thanking the people of India for always standing with Cuba, she said that the people of Cuba will always treasure this solidarity and value it immensely. (source)
Milk, man, and the United Snakes of America is so so powerful, going after children far and wide. You know, Cuba never attacked the USA, never went to war, and alas, this is the power of the dirty capitalists, war mongers and some sick psychopaths. Medicines, medical equipment, air conditioners, food, and energy. This is the way of the rat, the USA RATON.
The entire psychiatry and psychology and sociology of oppression is what runs modern Western society. There are no right ways now to raise children, to support families, and to build community. It’s all about the private sector sucking up as much as the public sector can regurgitate to this thieves. While the children suffer, and while the entire shooting match is toast as we in a culture of pollution and gestational crimes and constant bombardment of children with poisons — from those in the plastics, chicken nuggets, lawn sprays, all the off gassing, all those artificial flavors — find it harder and harder to survive all the death traps that we know this society is unleashing at an earlier and earlier age.
We are in an age of behavior adjustment, brainwashing, mind control, sinister Stockholm Syndrome, general anxiety disorders created by social media and generalized hatefulness from the legislators and two-bit politicians. Checked out or challenged just looking at a book, we are in the new normal of trillion$ for the pigs of war, for SWAT teams, for the opposition to beat us down, to implode the family, to eradicate the human and humane family. These kiddos come onto the bus with behavior plans, with their little classroom check slips for the parents to mull over at home.
Oh, what is enlightenment? “Behavior charts and similar public shaming methods don’t teach self-regulation. They mainly harm vulnerable learners.” The following is pretty light weight compared to the scenes I have been enmeshed in as a substitute teacher in special education and blended classrooms. Believe me.
Mr. Hill stops reading aloud to his 4th grade students and turns to Anisa. “Anisa, you’re off task. Change your clip. I asked you once and you are still digging in your desk. Walk over and change it now.”
Anisa stands and walks across the classroom. Several of her peers make condescending comments under their breath. Anisa moves her clip from green to yellow and returns to her desk and puts her head down. Her nonverbal behaviors indicate that she’s angry, hurt, and frustrated.
A few minutes later, Josh raises his hand. Mr. Hill calls on him and Josh responds, “Anisa is off task again.”
Mr. Hill looks at Anisa and says, “Again? Please change your clip to red. One more problem and it will be another call home. You have to learn to pay attention.” (Source: Tear Down Your Behavior Chart! Lee Ann Jung Dominique Smith)
Read the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freire gives the term “freedom” a specific meaning: it is the freedom to critically question and change the world. In other words, a person is free when they are able to understand and change their own conditions.
For Freire, education and oppression are connected, since education can be used either as a tool for oppression or as a method of liberation from oppression. Freire distinguishes between a pedagogy (a way of practicing education) that serves oppressors, and one that helps oppressed people understand and change their society. According to Freire, “freedom” (the freedom to critically question and change the world) requires people to gain a new understanding of how reality works. Changing the dominant understanding of history is a key part of this process. Freire sees education as useful not just for individual growth, but also for achieving social change. To expand on this point, he discusses social change as a necessary tool to achieve freedom and overthrow oppression. Within Freire’s framework, systems of oppression try to prevent radical social change so that they do not lose power. Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics. A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. (some clipped notes)
*****
Feeling the burn yet, the absolute oppression instilled in the greatest country and system the world has ever seen?
Get a little primer on exactly what capitalism and inflation and the systems of Milton Friedman are all about here:
So when you say that inflation is only a monetary phenomenon, what Milton Friedman is saying is, “Don’t look at the power structure. Don’t look at how markets are structured. Don’t look at monopolies. Don’t look at how the wealthy corporations are inflating [prices]. Look at something that we can blame on labor.”
The inflation that Milton Friedman talks about — and you just mentioned my old boss’s boss Paul Volcker — is wages. So when the Federal Reserve talks about inflation, they say, “It’s really wages rising.” Well, we know that wages have not risen anywhere near as fast as the cost of living, so that can’t be the reason — that wages are rising.
But if you can claim that inflation is only caused by labor making too much money and hurting other workers as consumers, then you have the Federal Reserve able to come in and say, “We’ve got to have a depression. We’ve got to have unemployment. We’re going to raise interest rates because we want more unemployment to increase the reserve army of the unemployed so that wage earners will be so desperate for a job that they’ll work for less. And if only they worked for less, then prices will come down, if somehow the companies are going to lower their prices because they can pay their labor less.”
The pretense is that it’s all labor’s fault.
We are all on this behavior and consequence chart. We, that is, the 80 Percenters who have 8 percent of wealth in the USA, compared to the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the One Percent and 19 Percent holding 92 percent of the money-power-possession chart. We mustn’t act up, mustn’t question the boss, mustn’t wonder why the oppressors are our neighbors, the ones our taxpaying work funds, or why so many Americanos believe this is it for Nirvana — the USA, greatest invention in human kind since the wheel.
Oh, those progressives are capitalists to their bones:
Liz Warren shifted from supporting Medicare for All to advocating a two-phased approach intended to build support for a single-payer model (in which the federal government would provide health insurance for every person in the U.S.), by first creating a federally based plan to compete with private insurers and expanding access to Medicare. Elizabeth Warren Says She’s ‘a Capitalist To My Bones’ And Positions Herself as FDR’s Heir
And that is THAT capitalism —
“Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Rupa Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Raj Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.” (“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness)
Imagine that, all those children, and I am not talking about those with allergies, with multiple chronic illnesses, including diabetes and asthma, caught in this vice which is CAPITALISM.
Daily, we are oppressed, and as the digital oppressors get more powerful, everything about us will be transhumanist, and we will be abiding by retinal scans, saliva analyses, galvanic skin response tests, and then the body will be the internet of physiology, the absolute bot world of nano things controlling the entire human experience, and that’s not just heart rate and BP, but thoughts.
Below, I find these on the bus floors much of the time. The children leave them in their desks at school. They are on the playgrounds with orange peels wrapped inside. Oh, the behaviorists. The mind benders. The psyops, the dead-end Americans, paying for the tools of Nazi War, and now, how many teachers are talking about the Doomsday Clock to their high schoolers, just to broach the issue?
Hell, people do not talk about Ukraine and the pimping of weapons of child-killing in public or at the workplace. These bosses, like the Belgium First Student honchos, send memos out on what can and cannot be said during election A or election B at the workplace.
And we wonder why so many neuro-normal (sic) people are checked out. Trauma: The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank, baby, trauma!
This is Startup to Storefront, and on today’s episode, we are unpacking the science of how to get unstuck. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the title of the book written by our guest today: author, psychotherapist, and trauma specialist, Britt Frank. Britt knows a thing or two about getting unstuck, as she has battled everything from meth addiction to sexual abuse. She emerged from that trauma with a new outlook on life, a Master of Social Work degree, and a desire to help others overcome their own hurdles. These hurdles vary from individual to individual, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s not uncommon for someone to put up a mental blockade that prevents them from moving forward. Getting over this mental blockade that inhibits you from progressing forward is what we are dissecting today.
In today’s episode we discuss:
– Why you don’t need every friend to be a best friend
– How Covid didn’t create a mental health crisis, it just exposed the one we already had
– The power behind changing your why’s to whats. So roll up your sleeves and let’s start the process of getting unstuck.
The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank,
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
