Tag Archives: income inequality

Puerto Rico Files for Bankruptcy the Day After Trump Admin Brags About Blocking Funds

Mother Jones

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After a day of sometimes violent demonstrations in San Juan protesting austerity measures and government handling of the debt crisis, Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rosselló, announced Wednesday morning that he would move the island’s crushing debts into the bankruptcy-like process created under federal legislation to deal with the crisis. Unlike public entities and cities in the states, Puerto Rico, essentially a colony of the US, is prohibited from filing for bankruptcy under federal law. This legislation created a different option that allows a federal court to restructure more than $70 billion—the largest such restructuring in the history of the US municipal bond market.

The announcement comes after a flurry of lawsuits filed against the island’s government by creditors Tuesday morning, the first to land after local officials’ proposal for partial repayment of the debt was rejected by lenders last weekend. Under legislation passed last summer, known as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), the island had until May 1 to negotiate a plan to address the debts while also providing basic services for the island’s 3.5 million residents. The deal from the local government last Friday offered as much as 77 cents on the dollar to some lenders while offering 58 cents on the dollar to others, according to Bloomberg, but the lenders called the deal unworkable. Hedge funds such as Aurelius Capital Management and Monarch Alternative Captial, and Ambac Financial Group, Inc., an insurer that owned Puerto Rican bonds, had been prevented from filing suit until May 1 under PROMESA.

The suits came a day after thousands took the streets in a national strike throughout Puerto Rico protesting cuts proposed by the board that was created under PROMESA, which increased water rates, while cutting funds to schools, public-sector jobs and pensions, health care spending, and the island’s university system totaling roughly $450 million over three years. After a day of largely peaceful protests, police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse some protesters, according to local reports, and at least 17 people were arrested. Students and other protesters have demanded an independent audit of the debt, among other things, as the island grapples with the issue.

“As time goes by and austerity measures start to strike on more and more people, people are going to stand up and respond to what is the government violence against the people who are left in very difficult conditions,” Mariana Nogales Molinelli, an attorney in Puerto Rico and former candidate for the island’s non-voting representative to the US Congress, tells Mother Jones.

Nogales Molinelli says that the cuts by both the government and the control board to public sector workers and collective bargaining rights have made a lot of people angry—and not just university students. On April 18, the Puerto Rican Senate approved a bill that eliminated the publicly-funded audit commission responsible for insuring the debts were issued lawfully and were not in violation of island’s constitution. Some of the protesters at the capital were retired police, according to Joel Cintrón Arbasetti, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Puerto Rico. Nogales thinks more police will join the protests.

“My guess is that part of the police force will be joining the people because they are going to be affected also,” Nogales Molinelli says. “Their kids’ schools will be closed, and they will not have enough medical insurance. The situation could explode because of all the austerity measures and they are going to have to work under much more pressure and in conditions that are going to be very difficult for them.”

Nogales says there have also been reports of some violent responses by police towards protesters and those perceived to be organizing protests. During a protest at the capital, she saw a police officer take a protester’s sign and hit her over the head with it. The Puerto Rico Police Department is currently under a consent decree with the US Department of Justice in an effort to become more professional and accountable after years of documented corruption and violence against the population.

Back on the mainland, Puerto Rico has been a political football for Trump and Congress during negotiations for a federal spending bill, with the president implying that Puerto Ricans, who have been US citizens for 100 years, were not.

When the budget deal was announced Monday morning, Democrats managed to get “an emergency injection of $295 million” to help shore up the island’s Medicaid program through the end of the year, according to Reuters. On Tuesday, Office of Budget and Management Director Mick Mulvaney bragged during a White House Press briefing that Republicans and the president had actually prevented any money from going to Puerto Rico, and that the $295 million had come from funds not previously allocated.

“You had the Democrats crying out that they got $295 million for Puerto Rico,” Mulvaney told reporters, “Did not cost the taxpayer a penny. They wanted new money, they wanted a bailout. We wouldn’t give it to them.”

It’s unclear how the restructuring will proceed as the provision in PROMESA has never been used, but the New York Times reports that Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court will now appoint a bankruptcy judge to handle the case.

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Puerto Rico Files for Bankruptcy the Day After Trump Admin Brags About Blocking Funds

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The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the US women’s national soccer team notched a notable victory in its pursuit for equal pay. After a multi-year labor dispute, the team came to an agreement with the US Soccer Federation that will carry a big bump in compensation and expanded benefits.

The deal, which was part of an ongoing collective bargaining negotiation, will last five years and include the 2019 World Cup and 2020 Olympics. It is expected to significantly raise players’ base compensation and game bonuses, match per diem stipends with their counterparts on the men’s national team, bolster travel benefits, and improve financial aid for players who are pregnant or adopting, ESPNW reported on Wednesday. The US Women’s National Team Players Association, the union representing the players, would also gain some rights to licensing and sponsorship deals.

This week’s announcement ends a long and contentious fight over the team’s union agreement with US Soccer, the governing body for the sport. The fight came to a boil last February when US Soccer sued the union. At odds was whether a 2013 memorandum of understanding between the two sides could stand in for an earlier, expired collective bargaining agreement. The legal challenge came after the union’s former executive director, Richard Nichols, allegedly told US Soccer officials that the memorandum wasn’t valid and that, if the two sides failed to come to an agreement by the end of that February, the national team would be free to strike before the Olympics in Rio (Nichols denied saying this). A federal judge eventually ruled that, under the 2013 agreement set to expire that December, the team could not strike. But after talks stalled late last year and the players’ union changed leadership, the two sides spent the last four months hashing out an agreement.

And last March, five top players on the women’s national team filed a complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the national soccer federation of wage discrimination. Financial details from the filing alleged that despite bringing in a projected $18 million in revenue to US Soccer, players on the women’s team earned four times less than their male colleagues. Jeffrey Kessler, who represents the players in the EEOC complaint, told Mother Jones that the charges remained pending and would continue.

As the New York Times reported, the enhanced pay announced this week is not necessarily on par with that of players on the men’s squad, though it means that some players could see their incomes double and earn between $200,000 and $300,000 in a year.

US Soccer president Sunil Gulati said in a statement that the new CBA represents “an important step to continue our longstanding efforts to drive the growth of women’s soccer in the United States.”

Current and former players also lauded the agreement. Megan Rapinoe, a midfielder on the women’s national team, said in a tweet that the agreement reflected a “crucial step” in the national team’s future.

The members of the women’s national soccer team aren’t the only women athletes who’ve made progress toward equal recently. Last week, after threatening to boycott the world championships in Michigan and earning the backing of several players’ unions and 20 US Senators, the US women’s hockey team reached a last-minute agreement with USA Hockey to improve compensation, benefits, and opportunities for future players. It included the prospect of each player making at least $70,000 before performance bonuses in the Olympics and world championships. Previously, the players were paid just $1,000 per month during a six-month training period before the Olympics.

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The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

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Trump’s First Move as President: Screwing Over Homeowners

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive action requiring the Federal Housing Administration to decrease insurance premiums on FHA mortgages, a change that could have potentially saved low-income homeowners as much as $900 per year. In his first administrative order as president, President Donald Trump suspended this Obama order, which was slated to go into effect on January 27. In practice, this means that low-income homeowners will be stuck paying higher insurance premiums on their FHA-insured mortgages.

FHA loans enable homebuyers—often those with lower incomes and who have fewer assets or bad credit—to bypass conventional lenders who would likely deny them loans by taking out a mortgage that’s insured by the federal government. The borrowers have to pay FHA mortgage insurance, to protect the mortgage lender from a loss should the borrower default on their home loan. In his announcement of the change, Obama said the drop in premiums would help stabilize the housing market and spur growth in housing markets still recovering from the financial crisis.

At his confirmation hearing last week, Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, said he was concerned about the Obama administration’s last-minute implementation of this insurance premium drop and would reexamine it. “I, too, was surprised to see something of this nature done on the way out the door,” Carson told members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. “Certainly, if confirmed, I’m going to work with the FHA administrator and other financial experts to really examine that policy.”

Presidential executive orders require no congressional approval to pass or overturn. Trump has vowed to eliminate all of Obama’s executive actions during his first days in office. This may be his first step toward fulfilling that promise.

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Trump’s First Move as President: Screwing Over Homeowners

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, a federal judge approved a $4.7 million settlement with nearly 2,000 people who were thrown in jail illegally in a St. Louis suburb, a practice legal advocates had likened to a “modern debtors’ prison.”

The plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit alleged that the city of Jennings, Missouri, had jailed people who were unable to pay municipal fines and fees, keeping them in overcrowded, unsanitary cells where they were routinely taunted by jail guards and staff. The settlement, preliminarily approved in July, comes more than a year after the Jennings municipal court signed a separate agreement to eliminate cash bail for nonviolent offenses, dismiss “failure to appear” charges and forgive fees in cases before March 12, 2011, and establish a way to assess a person’s ability to pay. It also agreed to use civil debt collectors to obtain payments from fines instead of issuing warrants and immediately release people on first arrest on bond.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed that Jennings “built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish, and to profit.” According to the complaint, the city issued more than 2.1 arrest warrants per household in 2014 and nearly 1.4 for every adult, adding that if the rest of the St. Louis area generated revenue at the same rate as Jennings, cities would have made more than $670 million in five years.

In recent years, civil rights groups have taken cities to court to compel changes to their operation of so-called debtors’ prisons, where those who cannot afford to pay fines are jailed until their debts are paid off. The practice was first barred under federal law in 1833. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the act of imprisoning someone unable to settle their debt unconstitutional. Yet lawsuits and a federal investigation into policing and court practices in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown shed light on how municipal courts locked up poor residents who couldn’t pay off their debts as a way to generate revenue. Beyond Jennings, federal lawsuits are under way against Ferguson and 13 other cities in the St. Louis area over the alleged operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons.

“One thing that has been revealed over and over again in the Ferguson investigation and these lawsuits is that the worst practices tend to arise when courts and other officials perceive a financial necessity in funding their operation through fees and fines,” says Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “That creates conflicts of interest and distorts the justice system.” William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Mother Jones in July that small towns around urban areas “have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning.”

Here’s a look at some similar recent cases across the country:

Biloxi, Mississippi: In a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in last October, attorneys alleged that poor residents in Biloxi who couldn’t take care of their debt were “routinely” arrested and tossed in jail without receiving a court hearing to determine whether they would be able to pay such penalties. The lawsuit alleged that the city relied on the fines and fees for a substantial portion of its budget and enlisted the help of for-profit probation companies to collect the money. In March, the two sides agreed on a settlement and adjusted it in September. The city agreed to stop using private probation companies to collect payments, to adopt a “bench card” for judges as a reminder of how to not send people to jail who are unable to pay, and to provide alternatives to debt repayment, such as payment plans, job training programs, mental-health counseling, and community service. The city, its police chief, and a district judge named in the complaint also admitted no wrongdoing as part of the resolution.

Colorado Springs, Colorado: Hundreds of impoverished people in Colorado Springs who were fined for a minor infringement of the city’s ordinance had a choice: Pay the debt in full, or settle it for time in jail at $50 a day. Last October, the ACLU of Colorado sent a letter to the city’s attorney and a municipal court judge, alleging that the court had ordered the “pay or serve” sentence in more than 800 cases since January 2014. In May, the city agreed to pay $103,000 to 66 impoverished residents, or $125 for each day they were behind bars. Municipal judges and city-contracted attorneys also underwent training on the rights of indigent citizens.

Jackson, Mississippi: For impoverished Jackson residents, the Colorado Springs case sounds familiar. Those arrested for misdemeanor cases were forced to navigate Jackson’s “pay or stay” system, according to complaint filed last October. If someone failed to pay all or a large portion of their debt at the time of their hearing, they were sent to jail in Hinds County. Once behind bars, they “were told they could ‘work off’ their fines at the rate of $58 per day,” according to the complaint. Those who couldn’t work were left to “sit out” their fines at $25 a day. In June, the city of Jackson settled and created an alternative monthly payment of $25 or an hourly credit for community service. The city also eliminated a requirement for people to post a money bail when arrested for a misdemeanor and to instead be released on the condition they appear for a future court appearance.

Benton County, Washington: A woman named Jayne Fuentes was sent to county jail for more than three months to work off $3,229 in “legal financial obligations” from 2010 and 2011. A complaint filed last October by the ACLU alleged that people like Fuentes who couldn’t pay off their debt were either sent to jail or forced to work on the county’s work crew as part of “partial confinement.” In June, the county and ACLU reached a resolution. The county agreed to stop issuing warrants to arrest those who didn’t pay off their debts. Beyond that, district court judges were also required to ask about a person’s ability to pay at hearings, and county public defenders and prosecutors would receive training on the assessment and collection of court-imposed fines.

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

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What Is Bernie Sanders’ Role in the Democratic Party?

Mother Jones

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As Democrats point fingers in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprise win last week, Bernie Sanders is taking aim at one culprit: the Democratic Party. “One of the reasons that he won is, in my view, a failure of the Democratic Party that must be rectified,” Sanders told a cheering crowd at a Thursday rally on Capitol Hill convened by his political action committee and a coalition of progressive advocacy groups.

Sanders, though, is opting to try to change the party from without rather than within. Although the self-identified democratic socialist just secured a leadership post in the party, as its outreach director, he will continue to serve in the Senate as an independent. “The real action to transform America won’t take place on Capitol Hill,” Sanders said Thursday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, according to The Hill. “It will be in the grassroots America among millions struggling economically and young people.”

He added, “I initially understand my role to be to get those people into the political process to demand the US Congress and government and president represent all of the people and not just those on top. I’m excited about it, but how we go about it, I don’t know.”

Sanders’ party affiliation didn’t seem to matter much to supporters at the rally. “Is he an independent?” said Greg Hamilton, 23, who works for a group advocating criminal sentencing reform for youth offenders. “Is he a Democrat? Like, I could care less. I know that he represents what I want.” Hamilton voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary but for Clinton last week. “She would’ve been a whole heckuva lot better than Trump,” he said.

Sanders and Trump actually shared some populist messages on the campaign trail, including their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Clinton initially backed. But Lynette Raudner, a 31-year-old attendee of the rally, wasn’t impressed. “Do you really know where Donald Trump stands on trade?” asked Raudner, who volunteered for the Clinton campaign but could not vote because she was born in South Africa and is awaiting her citizenship. “If his message is to not have the TPP, then yeah, I’m glad that we have something in common, but I don’t know if that’s really the case.”

So where do Sanders and his movement go from here? His supporters who have responded to his message have no intention of giving up. Randle Edwards, 82, a retired law professor, said Sanders should focus his efforts on mobilizing his extensive donor network to regain a Democratic majority in the Senate in 2018. Edwards gives Sanders credit for his consistent message on wealth distribution, equal rights, and abortion. He added, “I’ve been waiting for Bernie Sanders for 50 years.”

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What Is Bernie Sanders’ Role in the Democratic Party?

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

Mother Jones

For the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, two exceptional new books take on the legacy and history of one of the most powerful and controversial community empowerment movements in America. One book offers a succinct but in-depth history of the party at its peak. The other scratches the itch that always surfaces around anniversaries like this, asking, “Where are they now?”

In 1968, as a student at the University of California-Berkeley, Stephen Shames befriended Bobby Seale, who became a mentor to Shames. Recognizing the importance of having someone document their revolution, Seale gave Shames unfettered access to himself and the Black Panther Party network to take pictures. It gave Shames an unparalleled, insider’s perspective on the party, from 1968 through Bobby Seale’s campaign for Oakland mayor in 1973. It’s a remarkable body of work, not just for its historical significance, but for the poignancy of the images.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther children in a classroom at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Black Panther school. Stephen Shames from the book Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams). Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, July 28, 1968. Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making Central Committee, talks with Los Angeles Panthers at the Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park (which the Panthers dubbed Bobby Hutton Park). Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, Shames’ new book with Seale, collects photos he shot through 1973 and pairs them with Black Panther Party ephemera and oral history. It’s an excellent introduction to a movement many people see only in a dramatically cinematic fashion. In popular culture, the Black Panthers are associated with tough dudes in cool leather jackets toting guns, fed up with racism and injustice. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced.

The book details how the Black Panthers took a proactive role in bettering poor communities that were ignored, if not outright shit on, by the powers that be. Their school breakfast program—famously reviled by J. Edgar Hoover—set a now-common standard for making sure school children don’t start the day hungry. The Black Panthers helped get old people to the grocery store and, in particularly tough neighborhoods, escorted them to cash their Social Security checks. They launched schools and newspapers, organized strikes, arranged health care for people. Such community “survival programs” were the backbone of the party. As Seale puts it, “The real heroes of the Black Panther Party were the thousands of sisters and brothers who made our survival programs work.”

Shame’s photos concentrate on the Black Panthers’ activities in Oakland and Berkeley, but he also got around, traveling across the United States in 1970 to document Panther activities in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Toledo, Ohio, among other cities. This was at the height of tension between the FBI and the Black Panthers, when the group’s headquarters around the country were being raided and bombed and fortified in anticipation of shootouts. A time when Panthers like Fred Hampton were being killed. It was a heavy time.

Shames says his photos are “aspirational,” but the tension and disquiet come through. The photos don’t capture the more controversial aspects of the Panthers, which are instead bluntly dealt with in the text by Seale and others.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther Gloria Abernethy sells papers at the Mayfair supermarket boycott, with Tamara Lacey in the rear. Abernethy now works for the state of California, and Tamara is a real estate agent. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, August 28, 1971. Party members carry George Jackson’s coffin into St. Augustine’s Church for funeral services. Jackson was killed in a San Quentin prison riot a week earlier, in which three corrections officers and two other inmates were also killed. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

August, 1970, Berkeley. Minister of Defense and Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton listens to a Bob Dylan album at home shortly after his release from prison. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, 1973. Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale campaigns for mayor on a city bus. Seale came in second out of nine candidates that year, only to lose the runoff. But the party’s 1972 voter registration drive helped Lionel Wilson became Oakland’s first black mayor in 1977. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People wraps up with Shames and Seale reflecting on the current mood in America and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, featuring photos of recent Black Lives Matter protests.

And that brings us to Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams‘ book, The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books).

While no doubt rooted in the past, Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution focuses squarely on the present, with portraits and interviews with former members today. While the authors did an excellent job of tracking down higher-ups in the party, the book smartly turns its focus to the “real heroes,” the group’s rank-and-file members, giving us a fuller picture of life as a Black Panther, and the impact those years had on people’s lives. Some of the former members are now academics. Some are solidly working class. Some are in prison. And many remain active as organizers and activists.

Shih’s simple, powerful, Richard Avedon-esque black-and-white portraits are paired with short pieces on each person: who they were then, where the Black Panther Party took them, and where they are now. Interspersed among the interviews are essays on different aspects of the Black Panthers.

Ericka Huggins was a leader of the Black Panthers Los Angeles chapter along with her husband, John Huggins, who was later killed in a shootout on the UCLA campus. She later founded the party’s New Haven chapter. A longtime director of the party’s Oakland Community School, she helped create educational and social justice programs with an emphasis on spirituality. She is also a professor of sociology and women’s studies at several California colleges and universities. (See our recent chat with Huggins here.) Bryan Shih

Phyllis Jackson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, before joining the party at its national headquarters. She served as a communications secretary and ran a voter registration campaign. She is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, teaching arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Bryan Shih

Abdullah Majid (formerly Anthony Laborde), born in Flushing, New York, was a founding member of the Queens Chapter of the party and a full-time party member from 1968 to 1971. At the time of his death this past April, he was incarcerated in Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for his role in the shooting death of one NYPD officer and the wounding of another. Bryan Shih*

Mike Tagawa was born in 1944 at the Minidoka Relocation Camp in southern Idaho, one of the locations where Japanese were interned during World War II. He and his family moved to Seattle. He joined the Air Force and later the Black Panther Party in Seattle, where he now works as a bus driver. Bryan Shih

B. Kwaku Duren coordinated the Black Panthers’ reorganized Southern California chapter (January 1977 to March 1982). After his sister was shot and killed by the police, he helped establish the Coalition Against Police Abuse, which became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the LAPD. The lawsuit was settled for $1.8 million and led to the disbanding of the LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division. Duren worked as a paralegal and lawyer in the South Central office of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles from 1977 to 1990. Bryan Shih

Ronald “Elder” Freeman grew up in Detroit and in the early 1960s moved to California, where he became a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the party, along with his brother, Roland. He was a priest in the African Orthodox Church, was affiliated with the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was a longtime prison reform advocate. Both brothers died of illness within a week of each other in October 2014, a few months after this interview was conducted. Bryan Shih

Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977, the only woman to serve in this top position. The author of two books, A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B, Brown is now executive director of the Michael Lewis (“Little B”) Legal Defense Committee and CEO of Oakland and the World Enterprises, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners create businesses—including an urban farm in West Oakland, where the party was headquartered. Bryan Shih

Taken together, the books offer a well-rounded primer on the Black Panther Party, then and now, top to bottom. You can find books out there with a more detailed history and books that go deep in the political thinking and revolutionary tactics employed by the Black Panthers. Dozens, if not hundreds of academic books parsing the party have been written. If you want to go deep on biographies, they’re out there, too. But for a solid introduction or a quick refresher, you can’t do better than this.

Shames’ photos are on exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City through October 29. Shames and Seales will be doing book signings in DC the last weekend of October, including one at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on October 30. Shih’s photos are part of the Oakland Museum of California’s impressive “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” exhibition, on display through February 12.

* Name corrected.

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

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Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common Take Aim at Inequality in This New Documentary Series

Mother Jones

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In “America Divided,” a new five-part documentary series premiering tonight on Epix, the nation’s growing inequality—in matters economic, racial, and otherwise—takes center stage.

Headed by executive producers Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common, the project looks into the ways inequality underlies so many modern crises, profoundly affecting our schools, our housing landscape, and our political discourse. The correspondents are all household names: Actress Rosario Dawson, for instance, takes us to Flint, Michigan, to meet families affected by lead poisoning. Actor Jesse Williams returns to the classroom to understand the school-to-prison pipeline. Comedian Amy Poehler grills well-to-do families about their relationships with struggling domestic workers.

The actors are invested, and in some cases confrontational. And while it’s a little strange to see them so out of context (especially comedians such as Poehler and Zach Galifianakis) there’s something refreshing about their earnestness. Take Dawson, who displays her humanity when she reaches out to hold the hand of a tearful woman who has been describing the toll Flint’s contaminated water has had on her family. The issues the series explores won’t be anything new to Mother Jones readers, but they are as timely as ever. So if A-list celebs and high production quality will convince you to think more about America’s more entrenched problems, and maybe even to step up and do something, then this series is for you.

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Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common Take Aim at Inequality in This New Documentary Series

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

Mother Jones

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In 2009, trains arrived in Uniontown, Alabama carrying four millions tons of coal ash, the toxic residue from burning coal. The ash was recovered from a spill in Kingston, Tennessee—a town that is more than 90 percent white—and brought to a new landfill less than a mile from the residential part of Uniontown, which is 90 percent black. Soon, Uniontown residents began reporting breathing problems, rashes, nausea, nosebleeds, and more.

“The smell, the pollution, and the fear affect all aspects of life—whether we can eat from our gardens, hang our clothes or spent time outside,” resident Esther Calhoun later said.

Uniontown residents filed a complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights in 2013, alleging that the waste was disproportionately affecting black property owners. By allowing the landfill to exist, they said, Alabama was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that federeal funds not be used in a discriminatory purpose. The EPA is supposed to respond to such complaints within 6 months. Three years after filing the complaint, Uniontown residents are still waiting for an answer.

The story is one of many detailed in a scathing report by the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, on the EPA’s “long history” of not effectively enforcing its anti-discrimination policies. “EPA does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so,” it reads. “When they do act, they make easy choices and outsource any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.”

For years, critics have accused the EPA of neglecting communities of color, pointing to cases from toxic air in Richmond, California to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

The report sheds light on why this might be the case: Despite receiving early 300 discrimination complaints since 1993, the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has “never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history,” the report found. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity found that it takes the EPA a year, on average, to decide to accept or dismiss a Title VI omplaint, and that the agency dismisses or rejects the discrimination complaints in more than 9 out of 10 cases.

Much of the US Commission on Civil Rights report focuses on coal ash, which typically contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that are “associated with cancer and various other serious health effects,” according to the EPA. The ash is America’s second largest industrial waste stream (after mining waste), with 130 million tons generated each year—more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Until recently, the coal ash was typically dumped in unlined pits and covered with water, sometimes contaminating local water sources.

In 2014, the EPA came out with the first ever a coal ash storage rule—after environmental groups sued the agency for evading its responsibility to revise its waste regulations. The regulations say that new coal ash pits must be lined, and unlined pits need to be cleaned up—but only if they’re connected to active power plants and found to be polluting groundwater. What’s more, the rule doesn’t allow federal enforcement, leaving lawsuits as the only mechanism of ensuring that the guidelines are followed.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report took issue with these weaknesses, saying the rule “requires low-income and communities of color to collect complex data, fund litigation and navigate the federal court system—the very communities that the environmental justice principles were designed to protect.”

It recommends that the EPA bring on additional staff to respond to discrimination complaints and handle the current backlog (some cases are decades old). It calls for the agency to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, test water near coal ash ponds in poor and minority communities, and study the health effects of the waste. It also points out that all this will be difficult without funding from Congress—currently, only eight EPA staff members are directly responsible for Title VI compliance.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said that the report had “serious and pervasive flaws” and included factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of EPA findings. Mustafa Ali, environmental justice advisor to EPA head Gina McCarthy, said, “EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution.”

In places like Uniontown, Alabama, it’s hard to see evidence of such a program. “EPA is more focused on process than on outcomes; more focused on rhetoric than results,” wrote commission chairman Martin Castro in in the report. “By any measure, its outcomes are pathetic when it comes to environmental justice.”

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

Mother Jones

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Last year, Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi made a decision that could disrupt the lives of nearly 84,000 of his state’s poorest residents. There was no public announcement or debate. It took a critical report by advocates and a swell in media coverage to alert policy circles to what was coming. “The overall feeling was a lot of panic and stress,” said Jessica Shappley, a senior policy analyst at the Jackson-based Hope Policy Institute.

The two-term Republican governor had reintroduced a three-month time limit on food stamp access for “able-bodied adults without dependents,” individuals between the ages of 18 and 49 who are known as “ABAWDs.” After three months of receiving food aid, they would now have to prove they were working at least 20 hours a week. If they couldn’t, their food stamps—averaging between $150 and $170 a month—would be cut off. The loss of that aid would disrupt the lives of many low-income Mississippians. “It’s the difference between having a meal every day until the end of the month and literally running on empty the last couple weeks,” said Matt Williams, research director at the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative.

The time limit is an often overlooked section of the sweeping welfare reform bill that former President Bill Clinton signed into law 20 years ago today. In a statement after signing the bill, Clinton heralded the legislation as a “historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.” The bill granted states a large degree of discretion over how, and even whether, the food stamp policy was implemented, so that states with high unemployment were able to request a waiver that nullifies the time limit.

In recent years, Republican governors and legislatures across the country have passed up the waivers not because of belt-tightening—SNAP benefits are fully funded by the federal government, and the administrative costs are split 50-50 with the state—but because of ideology. Mississippi, which has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, had received a statewide waiver every year since 2006. But in 2016, the story took an unexpected turn. Echoing like-minded politicians in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Gov. Bryant told the Mississippi Department of Human Services that he wanted to “steer people to jobs,” the Associated Press reported. The consequence? Across the country, tens of thousands of people in areas of high unemployment—including veterans, the homeless, and the mentally and physically handicapped—have lost access to federally funded food assistance. Many are likely to fall into what policymakers call “food insecurity,” the state of not reliably knowing where your next meal will come from.

The tension between conservative ideology and the harsh realities of poverty is nowhere more evident than Mississippi, which has the highest rate of food insecurity in the nation (22 percent) and the second-highest rate of poverty. African Americans are more than twice as likely to be poor than white Mississippians. Three historically impoverished regions converge here: the toe of Appalachia in the northeastern corner, the Delta region along the western edge, and the Black Belt that extends across the state. Since agricultural labor was mechanized, beginning in the 1940s, and jobs in rural regions disappeared, working-age people have moved, leaving a shrunken tax base. “We have some counties that are persistently losing people,” said John Green, director of the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi. “As the counties try to do things like improve education, diversify the economy, invest in small businesses, it’s harder and harder for them to do that.”

With unemployment rates in some counties more than twice as high as in the United States as a whole, few jobs exist for the people who now must work 20 hours a week to avoid losing their food stamps. Earlier this year, Bryant’s spokesman directed the Associated Press to the state’s jobs app, which he said “currently lists more than 40,000 job openings,” but there were twice as many ABAWDs as positions and no guarantees that the jobs were in communities where they lived.

The federal government even offers additional funding to states that pledge to provide job training or workfare slots for every person facing the time limit. But only five states have taken the pledge, and Mississippi is not among them. A memo sent by the Mississippi Department of Human Services to the US Department of Agriculture last year estimated that more than 71,000 of an estimated 84,000 ABAWDs were at risk of losing their food stamps and noted that only 1,391 workfare slots would be made available each month in 2016. The problem, according to Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that job training and workfare programs are “expensive,” and under the 1996 welfare reform bill, states are not obligated to offer them.

The time limit became law during a period of seismic shifts in the American welfare system. In July 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress were desperately seeking a compromise on the radical welfare overhaul that Clinton had promised in his presidential run. Clinton had already vetoed two proposals. On the day the House was to vote on a third version, John Kasich and Bob Ney from Ohio proposed a three-month lifetime limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults without dependents—unless they worked 20 hours a week.

Some Democrats were horrified; Bill Hefner (D-N.C.) declared it the “most mean-spirited amendment” that had come before the body in his 22 years in the House. Kasich assured the critics that anyone willing to work would be able to meet the requirement. “If you cannot find a job, you go to work for the state in a workfare program,” he said, adding that the rule would only apply in areas where “there are jobs available.” The amendment was debated for half an hour and added to the welfare reform bill. In negotiations, the time limit was softened to three months every three years. Despite signing the bill, Clinton expressed “strong objections” to the food stamp provision, saying that the policy failed to support able-bodied adults who “want to work, but cannot find a job or are not given the opportunity to participate in a work program.” Summing up the bill’s popular appeal, Ney—who a decade later was jailed for selling official favors to the clients of notorious Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff—told the Columbus Dispatch that there was “no escalator built by Washington to carry you up the ladder of opportunity.”

Suspicion toward the able-bodied poor runs deep in the history of US social assistance. In the words of historian Michael Katz, “Except for the Great Depression of the 1930s, even abundant evidence of job scarcity failed to shake the belief that men were unemployed because they were lazy or incompetent.” During the Reagan era, black mothers described as “welfare queens” became seen as undeserving of aid. By 1996, food stamps were the only form of aid widely available to the able-bodied poor. A few, about 136,000, also received general assistance, or cash benefits granted to the impoverished who do not qualify for other programs. But that support has waned as states slashed their general assistance programs in the intervening decades. Today, only 11 states offer such benefits to childless adults who are not disabled, leaving food stamps the one source of aid for the more than 1 million people in this group.

For all the political rancor directed at the able-bodied poor, remarkably little is known about them. A report commissioned by the USDA in 1998 referred to ABAWDs as a “little-known segment of the Food Stamp population,” and little has changed since then. States are not obligated to track the able-bodied once they leave SNAP; from a policy standpoint, that means they all but disappear. The group likely to be cut off from food stamps have an average monthly income of just 17 percent of the official poverty line, which in 2016 is $11,880 a year for an individual, and includes veterans, the homeless, and people with undiagnosed mental and physical disabilities.

Consider the 48-year-old African American woman in poor physical health who earlier this summer appeared at an office in Indianola, Mississippi, a city in the heart of the Delta known as the childhood home of B.B. King. She wanted a signature to prove that she had come looking for work and arrived at the Mississippi Center for Justice—a Jackson-based public-interest law firm. The staff soon realized that she was one of those nearly 84,000 in the state struck by the new time limit. She told Matt Williams, then a policy associate at the center, that after a lifetime of work her back could no longer handle physical labor. Under federal law, a physical handicap should have qualified her for an exemption from the time limit. But she had been led to understand that, because she was not receiving disability payments, she was legally “able-bodied.” After missing an employment and training session early in the year, the woman lost her food stamps for two months. Desperate, she had re-enrolled and was now paying someone to drive her around the city to perform mandatory job search activities, Williams told Mother Jones. He and a colleague advised the woman to seek a medical notice testifying to her condition, after which they lost contact.

There are provisions in the law to protect people in certain circumstances from the time limit, but to determine whether a person qualifies for an exemption the state has to gather a pile of new information. Many states don’t. Instead they send out form letters informing ABAWDs that they are now facing the time limit and telling them to speak to a caseworker if they qualify for an exemption. By doing that, states have shifted the burden of implementing a vital piece of the policy onto the poor and disadvantaged people affected by it. In Florida, according to Cindy Huddleston, an attorney at Florida Legal Services, people are “never given a complete list of everything that might exempt them.” When the time limit went into effect in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2014, people thought to be ABAWDs “were brought in in very large groups, anywhere from 200 to 400 people…and basically told to go get a job,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. “Having been in those,” she added, “I can tell you they’re worse than cattle calls. It’s hard to hear instructions.”

There are a whole host of reasons why a person might not be able to find or perform work, but little of this information is systematically captured by state agencies. From 2014 to 2015, Hamler-Fugitt’s organization conducted a rare comprehensive survey of 5,000 people subjected to the time limit in Franklin County. What they found contradicts the popular image of the food stamp recipient who could work but just doesn’t feel like it. One in three of their “able-bodied” clients self-reported a physical or mental limitation, with a quarter saying their conditions obstructed daily activities. Nearly 13 percent said they were caregivers to a parent, friend, or relative. And 36 percent said they had felony convictions, a known barrier to employment. Public support for the policy might just hinge on the public not truly knowing who is affected, Cindy Huddleston said. “If people realized that these are veterans, people with mental disabilities, people who have nowhere else to turn…they might feel differently.”

In Mississippi, many of those now facing the time limit likely qualify for an exemption. Ellen Collins runs the Prosperity Center of Greater Jackson, a one-stop shop serving low-income Mississippians in partnership with a Department of Human Services office. When five suspected ABAWDs came in for a meeting with a caseworker earlier this year, she said, it turned out that three of them qualified for an exemption. “What I’m hearing from other offices is that they think that same percentage probably applied,” Collins said. But without individual attention from caseworkers, thousands have likely slipped through the cracks. The Mississippi Center for Justice estimates that more than 42,000 ABAWDs disappeared from the SNAP program between January and June this year.

While advocates suggest that Mississippi could invest more in job training or use the many measures available in the bill to soften the time limit’s impact, there is a much simpler solution: Mississippi could seek a waiver. But, as Williams from the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative notes, “Pure politics and ideology has driven the decision not to seek that waiver.”

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

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Here’s What the World’s Top Chefs Are Making at the Olympics

Mother Jones

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Amid the never-ending scandal circuit at this year’s Olympics—the doping controversies, the coup and assorted government corruption, the mystifying pollution of seemingly every body of water bigger than a bathtub—it’s easy to forget that good things, too, are happening in Rio de Janeiro.

Tuesday marked the launch of RefettoRio, a zero-waste soup kitchen spearheaded by Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura in the Lapa neighborhood of the Brazilian city. RefettoRio, which gets its name from the Latin word reficere—”to make or to restore”—provides free meals to those in need throughout the course of the Olympic Games. The kicker: The kitchen does so using only surplus food from the Olympic Village.

Sinta um pouco do que foram os preparativos para o primeiro dia do @refettoriogastromotiva! Agora estamos com um sentimento que é misto de dever cumprido associado com os preparativos para o jantar de hoje! #ComidaCulturaDignidade #Gastromotiva #RuadaLapa108 #RefettorioGastromotiva

A photo posted by Gastromotiva (@gastromotiva) on Aug 10, 2016 at 7:10am PDT

Food waste became a prominent issue at the 2012 Olympics in London, when six whistleblowers working in catering posted photos and videos of huge quantities of food being thrown away immediately after preparation. One employee claimed to be tossing out 45 pounds of prawns, 30 pounds of fish fillets, 90 pounds of vegetables, and 45 pounds of meat on a daily basis.

RefettoRio, on the other hand, hopes to take that excess food and turn it into meals for the city’s low-income and refugee communities. It’s a collaboration between Bottura, the Italian head chef of Osteria Francescana, ranked as the top eatery in the world by San Pellegrino’s 2016 World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, and David Hertz, creator of Gastromotiva, a Brazilian public interest organization that aims to empower Brazil’s vulnerable populations through kitchen training. RefettoRio employs local cooks, many of them graduates of Gastromotiva’s training program, alongside international celebrity chefs, including Alain Ducasse, Francis Mallmann, and Rodolfo Guzman. Needless to say, the resulting meals are nothing like reheated soup and ramen noodles: All 5,000 planned meals have three full courses. The photo of chefs plating a course on the restaurant’s opening night above gives you an idea.

The soup kitchen is built on a swath of land granted by the city for the next 10 years. After the end of the Olympics, it will double as a restaurant-school, relying on donations of ugly and past-date produce from local markets and grocery stores.

This isn’t the first time Bottura has tried to elevate wasted food. During ExpoMilan 2015, Bottura created a soup kitchen in an abandoned theater in the Milan suburb of Greco, using only scraps discarded from the world exhibition. More than 60 international chefs came to cook free meals for Milan’s homeless and refugee populations. All told, the refectory served up more than 15 tons of salvaged food, enough for 10,000 meals.

After Rio de Janerio, Bottura plans to roll out soup kitchens in Montreal, Berlin, his hometown of Modena, and New York City, in an initiative called Food for Soul. The Bronx-based project, co-sponsored by Robert De Niro, is slated to begin in 2017. Despite the elite reputation of Bottura and his cohort of fine-dining masterminds, he stresses the inclusive nature of these projects. “Food for Soul is not a charity project: It is a cultural one,” he says.

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Here’s What the World’s Top Chefs Are Making at the Olympics

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