The Foxcomm deal with the Wisconsin government has been much ballyhooed; however, it contains within it significant problems. Foxcomm will get $1.35 billion for building a factory complex that will employ 3,000 workers. "Incentives" for Foxcomm could hit $3 billion -- with $2.85 billion in taxpayer cash and another $150 million in various tax breaks -- if Foxcomm ends up employing 13,000 workers. The deal could work out to cost taxpayers $500,000 per job or as much as $1 million per job. Foxcomm has promised an average salary of $53,000 but that would apply to only the first 3,000 workers and would mix in highly paid managerial positions with assembly-line workers.
Another perk for Foxcomm is an exemption from regulations to protect Wisconsin's wetlands.
Between 1990 and 2015, a new Upjohn Institute study shows average "incentive" packages for businesses tripled in value. Upjohn researchers found that those who subsidized would likely have received the same results without the incentives.
Staying with the theme of enriching big business, Robert Borosage has thrown a lot of water on the push to drastically reduce corporate taxes. He points out that since corporate profits are at a record percentage of the GDP and revenue from corporate taxes a record low, this isn't exactly a compelling cause for corporate tax cuts. Corporations that already pay at the lower 20 percent rate Republicans are peddling, have cut, not created, jobs over the last nine years.
Borosage says that in all versions of the Trump tax plans, the richest 1 percent get one-half or more of the tax cuts. In the most recent plan, the top one-tenth of one percent get a tax break of over $1 million a year. When Borosage says all versions, he is talking about a Trump tax plan released in September 2015, a written version published in December 2015, and a change in tax rates done in the summer of 2016.
Borosage says that an estimated $2.5 trillion in corporate money, with $700 billion in taxes saved, is parked overseas. Proposals to tax that money at 5 to 10 percent will not provide the trillions of dollars that President Trump promises. The last time the U.S. offered "repatriation" of overseas profits, U.S. companies used the tax giveaways to accelerate mergers, raise dividends, and buy back their own stock.
ADDENDUM:
*U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, claims that the American people view war as the last resort; however, it is the case that the U.S. is almost constantly at war with someone. In every decade since World War II, the U.S. has militarily attacked at least one nation that hasn't attacked it. Afghanistan is not an exception, because we attacked it for providing training facilities for Al Qaeda. The U.S. was in two major wars from the fall of 2001 to December 2011; also, there is no end date for military operations in Afghanistan. Anyone age 16 or under has never known a day when the United States was not at war.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Monday, September 4, 2017
Pricey Cost Estimates
Cost estimates for Hurricane Harvey and deporting Dreamers have started to come in. The very early estimates of fixing the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey were in the $10 to $35 billion range. Then Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that Harvey was "bigger than Katrina" and he estimated an overall cost to repair the damage as being $125 billion or more. Now costs of $180 to $190 billion are being voiced and these might be just the costs to the federal government. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) is estimating a relief and rebuild cost of $1 trillion, of which the federal government would pay $80 billion. If the $1 trillion cost is proven to be accurate, it is unlikely that the federal government would pay less than 10 percent. Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) is talking about three waves of spending. The $7.85 billion in Harvey spending by the Trump administration is seemingly wholly inadequate but it may be just a placeholder pending a better estimate of costs.
The "Arizona Republic" asked ICE what it would cost to deport someone who'd immigrated to the United States illegally, and learned that, on average, the agency spent $10,854 per deportee, or a total bill of over $8.5 billion. This is not the total cost of deporting the 700,000+ Dreamers, as there would be a reduction in GDP and in the financing of Social Security. When Fox News host Chris Wallace confronted Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin with the figures yesterday, he could only reply that the economic consequences of deporting such a large number of people are very complicated.
The issue that always comes up when it comes to paying for the damages resulting from a great natural disaster, or in this case, paying to deport a large number of people, is whether or not cuts in other spending must offset the costs. As of this time there don't seem to be any lawmakers who have specifically called for offsets, however, other voices important to Republican fundraising have spoken out. The Club for Growth wants the Harvey aid to be offset; also, Dan Heller, Heritage Action's vice president, wants anything that is out of the scope of being "truly emergency in nature" to be offset. President Trump wants a stand-alone bill.
In Other News
*Senate Democrats are making a major push to defeat the nomination of Sam Clovis as USDA's under secretary for research, education and economics. Clovis has said that Barack Obama was being "given a pass because he is Black," has called Eric Holder (former attorney general) a "racist black," declared homosexuality a choice, and called progressives "race traitors" and "race traders." Clovis is not a scientist, although the position calls for a scientist.
*North Korea is claiming that it has tested, with "perfect success," a powerful hydrogen bomb that could be fitted to an ICBM. President Trump has tweeted: "South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!" The one thing not mentioned is, of course, military force. Trump keeps repeating that all options are on the table; however, one option that he has taken off the table is diplomacy. He once declared the era of "strategic patience" to be over and now has declared any talks to be of no value.
*A judge has called out Trump's Election Integrity Commission for violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by not fully disclosing public documents prior to their first meeting. The only sanction to be imposed against the commission is that it must disclose documents to the public before its September meeting.
The "Arizona Republic" asked ICE what it would cost to deport someone who'd immigrated to the United States illegally, and learned that, on average, the agency spent $10,854 per deportee, or a total bill of over $8.5 billion. This is not the total cost of deporting the 700,000+ Dreamers, as there would be a reduction in GDP and in the financing of Social Security. When Fox News host Chris Wallace confronted Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin with the figures yesterday, he could only reply that the economic consequences of deporting such a large number of people are very complicated.
The issue that always comes up when it comes to paying for the damages resulting from a great natural disaster, or in this case, paying to deport a large number of people, is whether or not cuts in other spending must offset the costs. As of this time there don't seem to be any lawmakers who have specifically called for offsets, however, other voices important to Republican fundraising have spoken out. The Club for Growth wants the Harvey aid to be offset; also, Dan Heller, Heritage Action's vice president, wants anything that is out of the scope of being "truly emergency in nature" to be offset. President Trump wants a stand-alone bill.
In Other News
*Senate Democrats are making a major push to defeat the nomination of Sam Clovis as USDA's under secretary for research, education and economics. Clovis has said that Barack Obama was being "given a pass because he is Black," has called Eric Holder (former attorney general) a "racist black," declared homosexuality a choice, and called progressives "race traitors" and "race traders." Clovis is not a scientist, although the position calls for a scientist.
*North Korea is claiming that it has tested, with "perfect success," a powerful hydrogen bomb that could be fitted to an ICBM. President Trump has tweeted: "South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!" The one thing not mentioned is, of course, military force. Trump keeps repeating that all options are on the table; however, one option that he has taken off the table is diplomacy. He once declared the era of "strategic patience" to be over and now has declared any talks to be of no value.
*A judge has called out Trump's Election Integrity Commission for violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by not fully disclosing public documents prior to their first meeting. The only sanction to be imposed against the commission is that it must disclose documents to the public before its September meeting.
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Policing African Americans
Following are excerpts from: Angela J. Davis, Policing the Black Man (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017).
p. xiv - In 2011, black boys represented the greatest percent of children placed in juvenile detention -- 903 black boys per 100,000, compared to 125 black girls. Black boys were 9.3 times more likely to spend time in juvenile detention than white boys.
p. xv. - Over half the students arrested at schools in the U.S. and referred to the criminal justice system are black or Hispanic. Blacks represent 16 percent of student enrollment but represent 27 percent referred to law enforcement and 31 percent subjected to in-school arrest. African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than whites, and 49 percent of black men can be expected to be arrested at least once by age 33, compared to 44 percent for Hispanics and 38 percent of white men.
Under New York's stop-and-frisk practice, blacks and Hispanics were stopped almost 10 times their percentage of the population. Black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Between 2010 and 2012, black boys aged 15 through 19 were killed at the rate of 31.17 per million, vs. 1.47 per million for white boys of the same age group. African Americans killed were twice as likely to be unarmed as whites.
By the end of 2015, black men constituted 34 percent of the U.S. prison population. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime. Data collected by the U.S. Sentencing Commission between December 2007 and 2011 revealed that black men in federal prisons received sentences 19.5 percent longer than white men sentenced for the same crime.
p. xvi - As of 2014, the national death row population was approximately 42 percent black vs. a black population of only 13.6 percent.
p. 11 - "Convict leasing, the practice of 'selling' the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, utilized the criminal justice system for the economic exploitation and political disempowerment of black people. State legislators passed discriminatory laws, or 'Black Codes,' which created new criminal offenses such as 'vagrancy' and 'loitering.' "
p. 16 - The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in just 12 Southern states, This is at least 800 more than previously reported.
p. 20 - More than 8 in 10 U.S. lynchings between 1899 and 1918 occurred in the South and more than 8 in 10 of the more than 1,400 executions carried out in the U.S. have been in the South.
p. 41 - A 2003 study concluded that the "police cling to an institutional definition that stresses crime control and not prevention," and police organizations "have not been radically or even significantly altered in the era of community policing and problem-oriented policing."
p. 50 - When white respondents were asked to estimate the proportion of burglaries, drug sales and juvenile crimes committed by African Americans, they underestimated by 20 to 30 percent.
p. 67 - The presence of school resource officers (SROs) has increased arrests for low-level offenses, including non-serious assaults typical of an adolescent school fight or disorderly conduct. Discipline and rule enforcement is thus relinquished to police.
p. 75 - Neither resistance nor avoidance has been particularly effective in preventing abuses and rectifying injustice against black youth.
p. 140 - Slave patrols were the first uniquely American form of policing and the first publicly funded police agencies.
p. 155 - "Understanding implicit bias is essential to identifying and eliminating racial bias in policing."
p. 195 - According to a 2015 study by the Women Donor Network, of 2,437 elected prosecutors, 95 percent were white and 79 percent were white men. Only 4 percent of all elected prosecutors were men of color. Excluding Virginia and Mississippi, only 1 percent of all elected prosecutors are African Americans.
p. 266 - The centerpiece of the Supreme Court's approach to anti-discrimination protections has been to confine the definition of illegal discrimination to those acts that are motivated by intentional racial animus.
p. 268 - The Supreme Court has created an imaginary world where discrimination does not exist unless it was consciously intended.
p. 271 - Statistics, such as using the death penalty in a discriminatory manner, are not accepted as sufficient evidence to prove discrimination.
p. 272 - Justice William Brennan called dismissal of racial disparities as "a fear of too much justice."
p. 277 - "But what constitutes 'reasonableness' should exact even more scrutiny in the context of police killings of black people, given the phenomenon of implicit bias."
p. 301 - The total penal population in the United States stands at 2.2 million, although the U.S. has just 5 percent of world population -- the U.S. has 23 percent of the world's incarcerated population.
p. 308 - A survey of 18 jurisdictions revealed that African Americans represented 39 percent of the prison population, but 47 percent of those in administrative segregation units.
p. 310 - A researcher found that incarceration was associated with a 40 percent reduction in annual earnings after release from prison.
In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 3.6 percent of all minor children in the U.S. had a parent in prison of jail, up from 0.8 percent in 1980. The percentage is 11.4 for all black children.
p. 311 - In neighborhoods in Washington D.C., neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration had only 62 men for every 100 women, vs. 94 to 100 in low-incarceration neighborhoods.
p. 313 - "The causes, scope, and consequences of mass incarceration have contributed to a cycle of poverty and violence, producing a novel kind of embedded social inequality that prevents the full participation of blacks in American social and political life."
p. xiv - In 2011, black boys represented the greatest percent of children placed in juvenile detention -- 903 black boys per 100,000, compared to 125 black girls. Black boys were 9.3 times more likely to spend time in juvenile detention than white boys.
p. xv. - Over half the students arrested at schools in the U.S. and referred to the criminal justice system are black or Hispanic. Blacks represent 16 percent of student enrollment but represent 27 percent referred to law enforcement and 31 percent subjected to in-school arrest. African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than whites, and 49 percent of black men can be expected to be arrested at least once by age 33, compared to 44 percent for Hispanics and 38 percent of white men.
Under New York's stop-and-frisk practice, blacks and Hispanics were stopped almost 10 times their percentage of the population. Black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Between 2010 and 2012, black boys aged 15 through 19 were killed at the rate of 31.17 per million, vs. 1.47 per million for white boys of the same age group. African Americans killed were twice as likely to be unarmed as whites.
By the end of 2015, black men constituted 34 percent of the U.S. prison population. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime. Data collected by the U.S. Sentencing Commission between December 2007 and 2011 revealed that black men in federal prisons received sentences 19.5 percent longer than white men sentenced for the same crime.
p. xvi - As of 2014, the national death row population was approximately 42 percent black vs. a black population of only 13.6 percent.
p. 11 - "Convict leasing, the practice of 'selling' the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, utilized the criminal justice system for the economic exploitation and political disempowerment of black people. State legislators passed discriminatory laws, or 'Black Codes,' which created new criminal offenses such as 'vagrancy' and 'loitering.' "
p. 16 - The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in just 12 Southern states, This is at least 800 more than previously reported.
p. 20 - More than 8 in 10 U.S. lynchings between 1899 and 1918 occurred in the South and more than 8 in 10 of the more than 1,400 executions carried out in the U.S. have been in the South.
p. 41 - A 2003 study concluded that the "police cling to an institutional definition that stresses crime control and not prevention," and police organizations "have not been radically or even significantly altered in the era of community policing and problem-oriented policing."
p. 50 - When white respondents were asked to estimate the proportion of burglaries, drug sales and juvenile crimes committed by African Americans, they underestimated by 20 to 30 percent.
p. 67 - The presence of school resource officers (SROs) has increased arrests for low-level offenses, including non-serious assaults typical of an adolescent school fight or disorderly conduct. Discipline and rule enforcement is thus relinquished to police.
p. 75 - Neither resistance nor avoidance has been particularly effective in preventing abuses and rectifying injustice against black youth.
p. 140 - Slave patrols were the first uniquely American form of policing and the first publicly funded police agencies.
p. 155 - "Understanding implicit bias is essential to identifying and eliminating racial bias in policing."
p. 195 - According to a 2015 study by the Women Donor Network, of 2,437 elected prosecutors, 95 percent were white and 79 percent were white men. Only 4 percent of all elected prosecutors were men of color. Excluding Virginia and Mississippi, only 1 percent of all elected prosecutors are African Americans.
p. 266 - The centerpiece of the Supreme Court's approach to anti-discrimination protections has been to confine the definition of illegal discrimination to those acts that are motivated by intentional racial animus.
p. 268 - The Supreme Court has created an imaginary world where discrimination does not exist unless it was consciously intended.
p. 271 - Statistics, such as using the death penalty in a discriminatory manner, are not accepted as sufficient evidence to prove discrimination.
p. 272 - Justice William Brennan called dismissal of racial disparities as "a fear of too much justice."
p. 277 - "But what constitutes 'reasonableness' should exact even more scrutiny in the context of police killings of black people, given the phenomenon of implicit bias."
p. 301 - The total penal population in the United States stands at 2.2 million, although the U.S. has just 5 percent of world population -- the U.S. has 23 percent of the world's incarcerated population.
p. 308 - A survey of 18 jurisdictions revealed that African Americans represented 39 percent of the prison population, but 47 percent of those in administrative segregation units.
p. 310 - A researcher found that incarceration was associated with a 40 percent reduction in annual earnings after release from prison.
In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 3.6 percent of all minor children in the U.S. had a parent in prison of jail, up from 0.8 percent in 1980. The percentage is 11.4 for all black children.
p. 311 - In neighborhoods in Washington D.C., neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration had only 62 men for every 100 women, vs. 94 to 100 in low-incarceration neighborhoods.
p. 313 - "The causes, scope, and consequences of mass incarceration have contributed to a cycle of poverty and violence, producing a novel kind of embedded social inequality that prevents the full participation of blacks in American social and political life."
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
The Two Andrew Jacksons
President Donald Trump has described Andrew Jackson as the "People's President, a man who shocked the establishment like an earthquake." Trump has even ventured the opinion that if Jackson had been the president at the time of the Civil War, it never would have happened. The reporter, Machael Kazin, has written that Jackson, like Trump, "stirred a fury of populist discontent directed at the country's financial and political elites and sought to refashion America's political geography -- transforming a so-called 'era of good feelings' into a period of heightened partisan and regional conflict." [1]
Trump has suggested that maybe in connection with taking down Confederate statues and monuments, we might consider doing the same to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, because they were both slave owners. Jackson owned more than 100 slaves and favored expanding the "peculiar institution" into Texas and beyond.
Kazin writes that "In the service of pursuing Jefferson's vision of the United States as an 'empire of liberty,' Jackson conquered lands occupied by people of another race and built the world's first mass political party as a coalition that preserved chattel slavery. Yet as a self-made man who railed against the well-born, he also persuaded white farmers and wage earners --both immigrant and native-born that a lack of privilege should not prevent them from thriving." "One cannot appreciate Jackson, the tough-talking populist and partisan, without understanding that his popular appeal was as much due to his defense of slavery, his years of killing Native Americans, and his simplistic grasp of economics as it was to his rhetorical defense of white workers and small farmers."
Thus, by adopting Andrew Jackson as his presidential role model, President Trump embraces both the bad and the good.
Contrasting Education Reforms
Gary Anderson, professor of educational policy and leadership at New York University, penned an article in the June 17, 2017 Albuquerque Journal, in which he chastised the Journal editorial for applauding Hannah Skandera's "accomplishments" as New Mexico's secretary of education. Skandera was no friend of unionized teachers and was an ardent proponent of high-takes testing of students and teachers. After years of being only the "acting" secretary of education, a reluctant state legislature finally removed "acting" from her title in the past year. Skandera recently resigned, with no stated reason why.
Below are Anderson's "research-based 21st-century reforms:"
#Community schools with wrap-around services, not quasi-markets and charter schools;
#Controlled choice programs that seek desegregated schools, not market-based choice that results in schools stratified by class and race;
#Restorative justice approaches to discipline that reduce suspensions, not overly punitive, zero tolerance, suspension-oriented discipline;
#Dual language programs, not English-only approaches to English language learners;
#Authentic performance-based assessments, not high-stakes paper and pencil tests; and
#Social movement unionism, allied with communities, that fight for research-based social and educational reforms, not industrial union models that focus only on bread-and-butter issues, important as those are given teachers' salaries in New Mexico.
Footnote
[1] Machael Kazin, "The Two Andrew Jacksons," The Nation, August 28/September 4, 2017.
Trump has suggested that maybe in connection with taking down Confederate statues and monuments, we might consider doing the same to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, because they were both slave owners. Jackson owned more than 100 slaves and favored expanding the "peculiar institution" into Texas and beyond.
Kazin writes that "In the service of pursuing Jefferson's vision of the United States as an 'empire of liberty,' Jackson conquered lands occupied by people of another race and built the world's first mass political party as a coalition that preserved chattel slavery. Yet as a self-made man who railed against the well-born, he also persuaded white farmers and wage earners --both immigrant and native-born that a lack of privilege should not prevent them from thriving." "One cannot appreciate Jackson, the tough-talking populist and partisan, without understanding that his popular appeal was as much due to his defense of slavery, his years of killing Native Americans, and his simplistic grasp of economics as it was to his rhetorical defense of white workers and small farmers."
Thus, by adopting Andrew Jackson as his presidential role model, President Trump embraces both the bad and the good.
Contrasting Education Reforms
Gary Anderson, professor of educational policy and leadership at New York University, penned an article in the June 17, 2017 Albuquerque Journal, in which he chastised the Journal editorial for applauding Hannah Skandera's "accomplishments" as New Mexico's secretary of education. Skandera was no friend of unionized teachers and was an ardent proponent of high-takes testing of students and teachers. After years of being only the "acting" secretary of education, a reluctant state legislature finally removed "acting" from her title in the past year. Skandera recently resigned, with no stated reason why.
Below are Anderson's "research-based 21st-century reforms:"
#Community schools with wrap-around services, not quasi-markets and charter schools;
#Controlled choice programs that seek desegregated schools, not market-based choice that results in schools stratified by class and race;
#Restorative justice approaches to discipline that reduce suspensions, not overly punitive, zero tolerance, suspension-oriented discipline;
#Dual language programs, not English-only approaches to English language learners;
#Authentic performance-based assessments, not high-stakes paper and pencil tests; and
#Social movement unionism, allied with communities, that fight for research-based social and educational reforms, not industrial union models that focus only on bread-and-butter issues, important as those are given teachers' salaries in New Mexico.
Footnote
[1] Machael Kazin, "The Two Andrew Jacksons," The Nation, August 28/September 4, 2017.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
TRUMP WATCH: So Long, Science
#Calling it "very unfair," President Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris climate accords. Among those urging him to stay in the agreement are BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell.
#Trump's appointee to the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is a prominent critic of renewable energy. His nominee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's top scientist position is not a scientist.
#Trump signs a executive order seeking to expand oil drilling along the U.S. continental shelf. It would overturn President Barack Obama's ban on drilling in Arctic waters and on the Atlantic coast. The Sierra Club sues to block the order.
#The Trump administration's proposed budget for 2018 cuts funding for the EPA by nearly a third overall and for its enforcement arm by 40 percent; shuts down programs to clean up the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound; and ends the Energy Star program, which informs consumers about the energy efficiency of appliances. It slashes research and science programs across the government, particularly those related to climate science. The budget also presumes the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
EPA administer Scott Pruitt claims that 50,000 coal jobs have been created under the Trump administration. The actual figure is 1,000 jobs.
#Trump proposes that his border wall be 50 feet high and outfitted with solar panels. Source: Paul Rauber, Sierra, September/October 2017).
#Sierra Club Climate-Related Impacts
#In March, wind and solar account for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation for the first time.
#2016 had the second-biggest jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on record -- to nearly double the pace since 1979.
#Asked about climate change, Representative Tim Walberg (R- Mich.) replies: "If there's a real problem, He (God) can take care of it."
#Because of a decline in sea ice, polar bears's diets are shifting from seals to bird eggs.
#Tropical diseases normally associated with warm waters -- like infections of Vilrio vuinficus -- are turning up not far from the Arctic Circle.
#On June 7, 2017, renewables supply more than 50 percent of the U.K.'s electrical-power needs.
#The rate of sea level rise is nearly three times what it was prior to 1990.
#In retaliation for new U.S. duties on Canadian wood imports, Canada threatens to bar shipments of U.S. coal from British Columbia ports. (Source: Same as above).
ADDENDUMS:
*The Congressional Budget Office says that $7 billion withheld in subsidies by President Trump would expand the national debt by $194 billion in a decade; also, it could raise premiums by 20-25 percent in two years.
*According to Census Bureau data, 28.1 million Americans were uninsured in the January to March, 2017 period.
*A Monmouth poll found that 46 percent of hardcore Trump supporters are 55 or older.
#Trump's appointee to the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is a prominent critic of renewable energy. His nominee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's top scientist position is not a scientist.
#Trump signs a executive order seeking to expand oil drilling along the U.S. continental shelf. It would overturn President Barack Obama's ban on drilling in Arctic waters and on the Atlantic coast. The Sierra Club sues to block the order.
#The Trump administration's proposed budget for 2018 cuts funding for the EPA by nearly a third overall and for its enforcement arm by 40 percent; shuts down programs to clean up the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound; and ends the Energy Star program, which informs consumers about the energy efficiency of appliances. It slashes research and science programs across the government, particularly those related to climate science. The budget also presumes the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
EPA administer Scott Pruitt claims that 50,000 coal jobs have been created under the Trump administration. The actual figure is 1,000 jobs.
#Trump proposes that his border wall be 50 feet high and outfitted with solar panels. Source: Paul Rauber, Sierra, September/October 2017).
#Sierra Club Climate-Related Impacts
#In March, wind and solar account for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation for the first time.
#2016 had the second-biggest jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on record -- to nearly double the pace since 1979.
#Asked about climate change, Representative Tim Walberg (R- Mich.) replies: "If there's a real problem, He (God) can take care of it."
#Because of a decline in sea ice, polar bears's diets are shifting from seals to bird eggs.
#Tropical diseases normally associated with warm waters -- like infections of Vilrio vuinficus -- are turning up not far from the Arctic Circle.
#On June 7, 2017, renewables supply more than 50 percent of the U.K.'s electrical-power needs.
#The rate of sea level rise is nearly three times what it was prior to 1990.
#In retaliation for new U.S. duties on Canadian wood imports, Canada threatens to bar shipments of U.S. coal from British Columbia ports. (Source: Same as above).
ADDENDUMS:
*The Congressional Budget Office says that $7 billion withheld in subsidies by President Trump would expand the national debt by $194 billion in a decade; also, it could raise premiums by 20-25 percent in two years.
*According to Census Bureau data, 28.1 million Americans were uninsured in the January to March, 2017 period.
*A Monmouth poll found that 46 percent of hardcore Trump supporters are 55 or older.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Border Wall Hostile to Wildlife
Border Wall Blocks Jaguar Migration
The jaguar, among the big cats, considered to be by zookeepers, the most "unreliable" and "untamable," will be blocked from migrating from Mexico if the Trump border wall is built. 'Transborder connectivity' is an important component of jaguar recovery, and a future border wall would slice across five of the six critical habitat areas of the jaguar. "There is no recovery without connectitivity. By cleaving the landscape in two, the border wall would violate a core axiom of wildlife conservation and foreclose any future for the American jaguar. Separation is how an animal goes extinct -- first its population gets fragmented, then it winks out." "Today, most of the 60,000 or so wild jaguars in the world live in the tropics but the animal's range once included what today is the United States. Biologists say that the jaguar likely roamed a territory that stretched from Los Angeles to New Orleans." (See Jason Mark, "Migrants," Sierra, September/October 2017).
The jaguar would not be the only animal whose migration patterns would be threatened by a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The Coronado National Forest, which encompasses most of Arizona's Sky Islands, is a bioclimversity hot spot and contains more threatened or endangered species than any other national forest.
Republicans Slipping in Polls
Pollster Tony Fabrizio has found that President Trump's favorable rating among Republicans has slipped from 78 percent to 71 percent now. Speaker Ryan's favorable rating has dripped from 56 percent to 52 percent and Majority Leader McConnell's rating is at 27 percent favorable to 44 percent unfavorable.
Among Republicans, 18 percent blamed Trump for the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, and 82 percent blamed the GOP lawmakers.
Republicans Are a Polling Outlier
The most recent Public Policy Polling firm poll has found that 45 percent of those who voted for Trump said they would prefer Jefferson Davis over Barack Obama as president. To the question of what racial group suffers the most discrimination in America, 45 percent of Trump voters said white people; 17 percent said Native Americans; 16 percent said African Americans; and 5 percent said Latinos. And what religious groups suffer the most discrimination? Trump voters said: 54 percent Christians; 22 percent Muslims; and 12 percent Jews.
ADDENDUMS:
*Department of Justice attorneys have filed a legal brief in federal court arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not protect workers from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.
*The Department of Labor is trying to reverse the Obama rule to extend overtime pay to nearly 5 million people.
*President Trump's proposed cuts of 6 percent to the National Weather Service budget and 16 percent to the budget of its parent agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), could bring strong criticism in the wake of the damage being done by Hurricane Harvey.
*A Pew Research Center poll shows 35 percent support building the border wall and 62 percent oppose.
The jaguar, among the big cats, considered to be by zookeepers, the most "unreliable" and "untamable," will be blocked from migrating from Mexico if the Trump border wall is built. 'Transborder connectivity' is an important component of jaguar recovery, and a future border wall would slice across five of the six critical habitat areas of the jaguar. "There is no recovery without connectitivity. By cleaving the landscape in two, the border wall would violate a core axiom of wildlife conservation and foreclose any future for the American jaguar. Separation is how an animal goes extinct -- first its population gets fragmented, then it winks out." "Today, most of the 60,000 or so wild jaguars in the world live in the tropics but the animal's range once included what today is the United States. Biologists say that the jaguar likely roamed a territory that stretched from Los Angeles to New Orleans." (See Jason Mark, "Migrants," Sierra, September/October 2017).
The jaguar would not be the only animal whose migration patterns would be threatened by a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The Coronado National Forest, which encompasses most of Arizona's Sky Islands, is a bioclimversity hot spot and contains more threatened or endangered species than any other national forest.
Republicans Slipping in Polls
Pollster Tony Fabrizio has found that President Trump's favorable rating among Republicans has slipped from 78 percent to 71 percent now. Speaker Ryan's favorable rating has dripped from 56 percent to 52 percent and Majority Leader McConnell's rating is at 27 percent favorable to 44 percent unfavorable.
Among Republicans, 18 percent blamed Trump for the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, and 82 percent blamed the GOP lawmakers.
Republicans Are a Polling Outlier
The most recent Public Policy Polling firm poll has found that 45 percent of those who voted for Trump said they would prefer Jefferson Davis over Barack Obama as president. To the question of what racial group suffers the most discrimination in America, 45 percent of Trump voters said white people; 17 percent said Native Americans; 16 percent said African Americans; and 5 percent said Latinos. And what religious groups suffer the most discrimination? Trump voters said: 54 percent Christians; 22 percent Muslims; and 12 percent Jews.
ADDENDUMS:
*Department of Justice attorneys have filed a legal brief in federal court arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not protect workers from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.
*The Department of Labor is trying to reverse the Obama rule to extend overtime pay to nearly 5 million people.
*President Trump's proposed cuts of 6 percent to the National Weather Service budget and 16 percent to the budget of its parent agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), could bring strong criticism in the wake of the damage being done by Hurricane Harvey.
*A Pew Research Center poll shows 35 percent support building the border wall and 62 percent oppose.
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
ACA : Improving or Screwing It Up
Fixing or Hobbling the ACA
Outside the White House, a collapse of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act may make some Republicans more willing to consider improving the law. To that end, Congress could permanently fund cost-sharing reductions to insurers, boost reimbursements to insurers for high-cost patients, and fix other small glitches in the law. Congress could also create a public option to boost competition in the ACA market.
A strategy to make the ACA fail would include ending the subsidies to insurers to cover premium shortfalls for low-income persons; choose not to enforce the tax penalties for people who forego insurance; and to refuse to advertise enrollment periods.
Leaving Students Behind
In the Jefferson County [Oregon] 509J School District, more than a third of all American Indian students in sixth through twelfth grades were suspended at least once during the 2015-16 school year, making them more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as their white peers. Native Americans make up one-third of the district's student population but receive nearly two-thirds of the expulsions. Last year, less than two-thirds of the tribal members who were enrolled as seniors in the 509J School District graduated. [1]
In public schools across the country, American Indian and Alaska Native students are more likely to be suspended than any other racial group, with the exception of African Americans. The suicide rate among Native teens is one and a half times higher than the national average, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than one percent of educators nation-wide are American Indians or Alaska Natives. [2]
Confederate Monument Building Periods
One thing that should have been learned during all the emphasis on Confederate statues and monuments is that they were not constructed and put in place as a direct result of the Civil War. There were periods in which other events and motivations drove an accelerated pace of building.
Most of the Confederate statues and monuments were built between 1890 and 1920 -- a time of lynchings, the "Lost Cause"myth, and a resurgent KKK. Another peak was achieved in the 1950-70 period -- a time of the Brown Supreme Court decision and Civil Rights activism. The peak in the building came in 1905-10 and that was primarily due to the growth of the KKK.
Defunding Planned Parenthood
In the state of Iowa, more than 4,000 patients, most of them women, will have to find new options for family planning care -- a change that will be especially hard for rural and low-income patients in the four locations where Planned Parenthood clinics closed. "The replacement plan is a fiscal double whammy: Iowa is giving up millions in federal money and plugging the hole with state taxpayer dollars -- even though it faced a major budget shortfall last year. And the costs will likely rise. in the decade it existed, the largely federally funded Iowa Planning Network helped save $265 million in Medicaid spending because of fewer births, even as the abortion rate dropped by 32 percent." [3]
Footnotes
[1] Rebecca Clarren, "Left Behind," The Nation, August 14/21, 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hannah Levintova, "If You Defend It, They Won't Come," Mother Jones, September/October 2017.
Outside the White House, a collapse of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act may make some Republicans more willing to consider improving the law. To that end, Congress could permanently fund cost-sharing reductions to insurers, boost reimbursements to insurers for high-cost patients, and fix other small glitches in the law. Congress could also create a public option to boost competition in the ACA market.
A strategy to make the ACA fail would include ending the subsidies to insurers to cover premium shortfalls for low-income persons; choose not to enforce the tax penalties for people who forego insurance; and to refuse to advertise enrollment periods.
Leaving Students Behind
In the Jefferson County [Oregon] 509J School District, more than a third of all American Indian students in sixth through twelfth grades were suspended at least once during the 2015-16 school year, making them more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as their white peers. Native Americans make up one-third of the district's student population but receive nearly two-thirds of the expulsions. Last year, less than two-thirds of the tribal members who were enrolled as seniors in the 509J School District graduated. [1]
In public schools across the country, American Indian and Alaska Native students are more likely to be suspended than any other racial group, with the exception of African Americans. The suicide rate among Native teens is one and a half times higher than the national average, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than one percent of educators nation-wide are American Indians or Alaska Natives. [2]
Confederate Monument Building Periods
One thing that should have been learned during all the emphasis on Confederate statues and monuments is that they were not constructed and put in place as a direct result of the Civil War. There were periods in which other events and motivations drove an accelerated pace of building.
Most of the Confederate statues and monuments were built between 1890 and 1920 -- a time of lynchings, the "Lost Cause"myth, and a resurgent KKK. Another peak was achieved in the 1950-70 period -- a time of the Brown Supreme Court decision and Civil Rights activism. The peak in the building came in 1905-10 and that was primarily due to the growth of the KKK.
Defunding Planned Parenthood
In the state of Iowa, more than 4,000 patients, most of them women, will have to find new options for family planning care -- a change that will be especially hard for rural and low-income patients in the four locations where Planned Parenthood clinics closed. "The replacement plan is a fiscal double whammy: Iowa is giving up millions in federal money and plugging the hole with state taxpayer dollars -- even though it faced a major budget shortfall last year. And the costs will likely rise. in the decade it existed, the largely federally funded Iowa Planning Network helped save $265 million in Medicaid spending because of fewer births, even as the abortion rate dropped by 32 percent." [3]
Footnotes
[1] Rebecca Clarren, "Left Behind," The Nation, August 14/21, 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hannah Levintova, "If You Defend It, They Won't Come," Mother Jones, September/October 2017.
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