Women's Voices Media Newsletter

HONORING FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER DURING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 18:01:07 +0200

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

The list of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s accomplishments is lengthy. She was a suffragist, an abolitionist, a poet, a teacher, a prohibitionist, a public speaker, and a writer.

Mary Ellen Watkins was born free in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the only child of free parents whose names are unknown. They both died in 1828, making Watkins an orphan at age three. She was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle, Henrietta and Rev. William J. Watkins Sr. who gave her their last name.

Rev. Watkins was the minister at the Sharp Street African Methodist Episcopal Church and in 1820 had established the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. It was there that Frances received her education. A civil rights activist and abolitionist himself, Rev. Watkins was a major influence on his niece’s life and work.

At age thirteen, Watkins began working as a seamstress. She had been trained in the “trades” of sewing and domestic work in addition to academics at Watkins Academy. She also worked as a nursemaid for a white family who owned a bookstore. In her spare time she was able to read books from the shop and began doing her own writing. She published her first book, a collection of her poetry entitled “Forest Leaves”, when she was 21.

At age 26 Watkins moved from Baltimore to take a position as the first female teacher at Union Seminary, an AME-affiliated school for Black students near Columbus, Ohio. She taught domestic science there until it closed in 1853. The following year she took a position at a school in York, Pennsylvania. During this period of her life, she lived with the family of William Still, a clerk at The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and who helped refugee slaves on their passage along the Underground Railroad. Watkins began writing anti-slavery literature and, after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Watkins began her career as a public speaker and political activist. Her literary career by then was becoming quite successful. Her collection “Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects” (1864) became a commercial success, making her the most popular African American poet before Laurence Dunbar.

On November 22, 1860, Watkins married Fenton Harper and moved to a farm in Ohio. She remained there for the next four years, raising their daughter and Fenton’s three children from a previous marriage, until his death four years later. Fenton’s death left Watkins-Harper with a large debt requiring her to resume lecturing, teaching and writing in order to support herself and the children.

Because of her alliances with prominent women’s rights activists, she was a speaker at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York in 1866. There she gave her famous speech entitled “We Are All Bound Up Together”, urging attendees to include African American women in their fight for the right to vote. She emphasized that Black women faced a double battle against racism and sexism and therefore the fight for women’s suffrage must include suffrage for African Americans. The next day the Convention held a meeting to organize the American Equal Rights Association to work for suffrage for both African Americans and women. A dispute over support of the fifteenth amendment caused the organization to split. The amendment was to grant African American men the right to vote. Watkins-Harper supported the amendment. She, along with Frederick Douglass and other supporters, formed the African Woman Suffrage Association.

Watkins-Harper spent the rest of her career working for equal rights and education for African American Women. With Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and several others she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women. Prior to forming the association, she published her most famous novel “Iola Leroy”. She served as the director of the National Association of Colored Youth and as superintendent of the Colored Sections of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women’s Christian Temperance Unions.

Watkins-Harper died on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

Behold, the New GOP Culture Wars

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 17:41:29 +0200

The Republican Party’s latest wave of attacks against anyone who threatens the white supremacist patriarchy is couched in false concern for health and well-being.
By Sonali Kolhatkar This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of Independent Media Institute
Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.

As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.

Republicans claim that in addition to protecting the life of a collection of fetal cells that they are determined to personify, they are working in the interests of women’s health. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey explained his opposition to the abortion pill in a written statement, saying he was merely “protecting the health of women and their unborn children.”

However, not only are abortion pills safer than penicillin or Viagra, but going through pregnancy and childbirth is far more dangerous to women’s health than aborting a fetus. According to a New York Times report on one study of the effects of abortion restrictions on women, “Women who were denied an abortion and gave birth reported more chronic headaches or migraines, joint pain and gestational hypertension compared with those who had an abortion.” Furthermore, “They also reported more life-threatening complications like eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, and burdens that included higher exposure to domestic violence and increased poverty.” (It is a wonder that some of us choose to have children at all.)

The GOP’s war on transgender people has also gained steam. Just as Republicans are determined to control the bodies of people who want to terminate pregnancies, they are battling the right of transgender people to transition via surgeries, hormone supplements, or other gender-affirming medical treatments. It’s a shocking attack on people’s right to be who they want and need to be—one that targets young people in particular.

Again, the right wing uses concerns over health as cover for its attacks on human rights. For example, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced 35 anti-LGBTQ bills, three of which would view medical care as child abuse. But, even though the vast majority of the anti-LGBTQ bills that are introduced fail to become law, according to the Trevor Project, the debate itself is deeply traumatizing for young people. The organization found that “86% of transgender and nonbinary youth say recent debates around anti-trans bills have negatively impacted their mental health.” It has further encouraged bullying, and the risk of suicide.

Writing in the Nation, Amy Littlefield and Heron Greenesmith point out how “The right is deploying tactics against trans rights that are eerily similar to those mounted against abortion rights over the past five decades.” It’s the same Republican playbook over and over: claim that attacks on vulnerable people are in their own best interests to distract from the fact that the party has no actual plan to make people’s lives truly better.

Like the attacks on abortion and transgender rights, Republicans are also so worried about the supposed harm to students of American history that their third major battlefront is educational courses that question white supremacy and its impact. Claiming they are fighting a college-level academic approach to history called critical race theory, GOP leaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are busy banning books and classes at all levels of education. DeSantis’s latest assault is a ban on a new AP-level high school African American studies course that the College Board spent years devising and is set to pilot in 60 schools across the country.

The pushback by DeSantis and his allies has already yielded results. The College Board seemingly capitulated and sanitized the AP course, paring back mentions of Black feminism, queer theory, and the Black Lives Matter movement and replacing it with a new section on Black conservatism.

The move came at the same time that congressional Republicans took aim at Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), unceremoniously stripping her of membership in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy justified his ousting of Omar from the committee over her alleged antisemitism because she has criticized the state of Israel. Never mind that criticism of Israel is not equivalent to racist attacks on Jews; two of the GOP’s own representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whose antisemitism is well documented, are now poised to regain their committee seats.

In a speech on the House floor, Omar rightly pointed out that the Republican attack was about “who gets to be an American.” She called out the GOP for its earlier culture war aimed at the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and for spreading rumors that he was a secret Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen.

The message that emerges from the conservative party is that those who are not either straight, white, cisgender men, or in service of white supremacist patriarchy, had better fall in line or face prohibition and the threats of violence.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are busy readying their pitchforks over the federal government’s debt, hoping to extract austerity measures in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling. According to the Washington Post, “the party has focused its attention on slimming down federal health care, education, science and labor programs, perhaps by billions of dollars.” And, some have “pitched a deeper examination of entitlements,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Aggressively bombarding women, transgender people, Black people, immigrants, and people of color over their bodily autonomy and their gender and racial identity is a tactic that Republicans hope will keep conservative voters loyal to the GOP and lets them off the hook on regressive economic policies. It’s a classic bait and switch—one that we ought not to fall for.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

An Ancient Recipe for Social Success By Linda M. Nicholas and Gary M. Feinman

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 01:22:58 +0200

New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism.

Archaeology has a more valuable story to tell: Collective action and localized economic production are a recipe for sustainability and broader well-being. The Mesoamerican city of Monte Albán, which was a major regional urban center for 1,300 years, is a shining example. It is a powerful case study that early investments in public infrastructure and goods foster longer-term sustainability.

There is a rich vein of insight here for some of the most pressing challenges faced by humanity: billions of people living in poverty, and collapsing social structures in the developing world. And in the wealthy industrialized world, many are increasingly disillusioned by the flaws in our political and economic models.

But if we’re going to use the models from the ancient past, can we be confident about how early societies really operated?

Researchers have begun to identify archaeological evidence that works as indicators for political and social behaviors and institutions:

Is there evidence of extreme wealth disparity or equality in lifestyle or burial?
Does monumental architecture foster exclusivity (elite tombs, aggrandizing monuments, evidence of dynastic legitimation) or access (e.g., open plazas, wide access ways, community temples)?
Are palaces prominent or is it not clear where the leader resided?
Does art emphasize lineal descent, divine kingship, and royal patron deities or does it feature more abstract themes such as fertility or integrative cosmological principles?

There is a lot we can determine from a society’s tendency toward the first or second option in each of these questions about whether it was more autocratic or associated with collective/good governance.

In a study of 26 early urban centers in Mesoamerica, Monte Albán was one of 12 that was characterized as a collectively organized city based on a series of indicators. Prior to the city’s abandonment, Monte Albán was not highly unequal: there were few, if any, lavish tombs, no great caches of household riches or other evidence of extreme wealth differences, and no large, ornate palace that was unequivocally the ruler’s residence.

From early in the site’s history, the city’s core was centered on a large plaza that could have accommodated a signiﬁcant proportion of the site’s population. Flattening the hill’s rocky top and then deﬁning and creating this large open space entailed planning, coordination, and cooperation. Until very late in the city’s history, material representations of rulers were relatively rare, and there is an overall lack of ruler aggrandizement. During the city’s ﬁrst four centuries (500–100 BCE), there were few depictions of seemingly important individuals or leaders. Rule was largely faceless.

How did it happen?

In this light, let’s travel to the early sedentary villages (c. 1500–500 BCE) in the Valley of Oaxaca—the largest expanse of ﬂat land in Mexico’s Southern Highlands. They were situated on or near well-watered land.

Around 500 BCE, however, a new hilltop center, Monte Albán, was established at the nexus of the valley’s three arms, where agriculture was far riskier due to unreliable rainfall and a dearth of permanent water sources. During the era of its establishment, not only was Monte Albán larger than any earlier community in the region, but many other settlers moved into the rural area around Monte Albán.

This marked shift in settlement patterns and the underlying processes associated with the foundation of Monte Albán have long been debated. How can we account for the immigration of people, some likely from beyond the region itself, to an area where they faced greater risks of crop failure?

One perspective, reliant on uniform models of premodern states as despotic, viewed the process from a basically top-down lens; leaders coerced their subjects to move near the capital to provide sustenance for the new center.

Yet more recent research has found that governance at Monte Albán was generally more collective than autocratic, and in its growth period, productive activities were collective, centered in domestic units and not managed from above.

By the time Monte Albán was established in the Valley of Oaxaca, more than a thousand years had passed since foragers transitioned from mobile lifeways to sedentary communities. Maize, beans, and squash, which had been domesticated prior to village formation, were key elements of an agricultural economy, with maize providing the bulk of calories. Early villagers also exploited a mosaic of other natural resources including clay for making ceramic vessels and ﬁgurines, stone for making tools and ornaments, and plant materials for processing into a range of woven products.

The shift to sedentary life was a long social process through which formerly dispersed populations not only adjusted but committed to living in larger communities and interacting with more people on a daily basis.

The Valley of Oaxaca has a climate that is semiarid, rainfall is unpredictable and spatially patchy across the region, and not all sectors of the valley ﬂoor receive the minimum annual precipitation necessary for reliable rainfall farming of maize, the region’s staple and culturally most important crop.

The prime factor that determines the productivity of maize is the availability of water, and a diversity of water management practices have been used since prehispanic times. These manipulations, which increase agricultural yields, include wells and pot irrigation, check dams, and small-scale canals, all of which were easily managed or implemented at the household level.

The Valley of Oaxaca was a core politico-economic region. Prior to Monte Albán’s founding, most of the populace resided in one of three clusters of settlements that were separated from the others by largely unoccupied areas, including the center of the valley where Monte Albán was later situated. In each arm, a cluster of smaller communities surrounded one larger settlement that had special functions and served as the “head towns” of small competing polities.

This millennial pattern was broken when Monte Albán was built on a steep hilltop in the center of the valley. The settlement’s establishment and rapid growth in size and monumentality set off a dynamic episode of innovation and change that included demographic, dietary, and other economic shifts. Populations grew rapidly not only at the new center, which became the largest and most monumental city in the valley’s early history, but also in the surrounding countryside. The center and rural communities were integrated through an emergent market network that provisioned the city.

This dramatic episode of change required the coordination of labor to build the new city. The rocky hilltop was ﬂattened into a large main plaza with monumental buildings constructed along its edges. The scale and orientation of this central plaza represent a key transition from prior community plans in the region. Residences for the city’s burgeoning population were constructed on the steep slopes of the hill by creating ﬂattened spaces, or terraces, shored up by stone and earthen retaining walls, each of which sustained a domestic unit.

The allocation of the hill’s apex for civic-ceremonial space and the lower slopes for commoner residences was a blueprint for a broad social accord. Built environments are not neutral, but political, and Monte Albán’s footprint with a large, relatively open central space and little display of hierarchical leaders points to a collective arrangement.

The city’s concentrated residential precincts comprised strings of artiﬁcially ﬂattened terraces that shared long retaining walls. Construction of the terraces required allotments of domestic labor to clear trees, ﬂatten steep inclinations, erect stone walls to retain ﬂat spaces where houses would be built, and construct drainage channels to divert rainwater from living spaces. The construction, sharing, and maintenance of front retaining walls involved high degrees of interhousehold cooperation between neighbors.

Additionally, commoners adopted construction techniques and basic ceramic wares that previously were the domain of high-status families. In the early city, most houses included contiguous rooms with plaster ﬂoors, often constructed around a patio; they were built with adobe bricks on stone foundations instead of the mud and thatch typical of earlier commoner houses. The pottery wares that previously were largely used by higher-status families or as ceremonial vessels became more broadly distributed in the centuries after Monte Albán was established. This level of cooperation and coordination is evidence of a social charter or norms, in which a wider array of residents had access to what previously had been higher-status materials and goods.

No large-scale production has been uncovered, and there is no indication of central-governmental food storage at Monte Albán, as one might expect with top-down economic control or redistribution.

Economic production at Monte Albán was situated in domestic contexts. Instead of being coerced to move to Monte Albán, people were attracted to the city. Monte Albán was settled by a sizable group, possibly as large as 1,000 people, and rapidly grew to about 5,000 people within a few hundred years. Populations also increased in the rural areas around Monte Albán, and the annual rate of population growth in the valley exceeded what could have been maintained by natural increase alone. Populations expanded again in and around Monte Albán after c. 300 BCE. The threefold growth was too large to be accounted for by local, “natural growth,” so that people must have been drawn to Monte Albán and the valley from more distant, extra-regional locations.

Evidence indicates that the agricultural catchment for feeding Monte Albán likely extended 20 kilometers from the city. The market and exchange networks that moved food to the city created a high degree of interconnection among small settlements and Monte Albán. This interdependence required cooperation, infrastructure, and institutions that together provided the means of moving food and distributing seasonal surpluses.

Prior to Monte Albán, early “head towns” were generally positioned adjacent to good farmland. But the new city was located in an area of the valley where agriculture was riskier and largely dependent on unpredictable rainfall. Why would people move to a place where they faced a high risk of crop failure, where they could have been taxed more highly, and where, if governance were coercive, they had little voice? Such a scenario seems improbable, and it is far more likely that people moved to Monte Albán to take advantage of economic opportunities, a parallel to most migrants in the world today.

This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:

Linda M. Nicholas is an adjunct curator of anthropology at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, also at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

A REFLECTION OF REPUBLICAN CONCERN FOR.....YOU

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 22:06:14 +0200

Republicans tout moral values and then spit on those values by their actions.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

NEW VISION for REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE in 2023

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 23:23:08 +0200

Reproductive Justice leaders met January 20-22, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia, convened by SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. This summit took place on what would have been the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion—a decision that was overturned in 2022 leading to the loss of legal abortion in half the country. The group envisioned a new future for Reproductive Justice, which follows here.

Visioning New Futures for Reproductive Justice Declaration 2023

We Declare:

We choose us. We invoke the spirit of our ancestors who cleared the path for us, the comrades who fight alongside us today, and those who will fight beyond us, who will become our greatest dreams.

How do you know if this movement is for you?f you've ever felt shamed during conversations about sex, sexuality, or pregnancy instead of receiving the support and information you desired — this movement is for you.

If you have ever had abortions, thought about having an abortion, supported someone having an abortion, loved someone who has had abortions – this movement is for you.

If you've ever felt targeted or criminalized for your labor, including doing sex work for pay — this movement is for you.

If you’re a parent, a mama, an auntie, an abuela, a transgender dad – this movement is for you.

If you love to have sex and pleasure with consent - this movement is for you.

If you are a man, cisgender, straight, queer or transgender, who is ready to move with us and trust Black Women — this movement is for you.

If you’ve survived state, sexual, interpersonal, or other violence, and exploitation – this movement is for you.

If you are a person of faith – this movement is for you.

If you are undocumented - this movement is for you.

If you are queer, transgender, nonbinary, or gender-expansive – this movement is for you.

If you are a young person, if you are an elder, or anywhere in between - this movement is for you.

If you are a healthcare provider who supports all the tenets of reproductive justice – this movement is for you.

If you are disabled or have not had your accessibility needs met in your community or in a medical space - this movement is for you.

If you know, from experience, how important it is to be able to vote, feed our families, be paid a livable wage, drink safe water, and live in safe and affordable housing – this movement is for you.

The right to have kids (or not), to survive, and thrive is universal, and one of the basic building blocks of liberation. When we fight for reproductive justice – we show up for people who are harmed the most. Reproductive justice builds economic, social, and political power for our communities, even as we struggle in systems that were never meant for us to survive. This movement saves lives.

Many fundamental rights have been snatched away from us. This isn’t new–but it is getting worse. With the rise of white nationalism, people who want more white babies born and to control and end the lives of Black and Brown ones are using every tool in their arsenal to advance their hate.

The truth is, ending white supremacy and racism is going to be hard and messy. That’s exactly why we can’t run from the fight, especially since our opposition won’t stop. They will keep trying to break up our families, lock up our loved ones, and take us out in the streets. Too many of our beloved community, including Indigenous children and transgender women and femmes have been harmed, kidnapped, or killed by patriarchal or state violence.

We are fighting for an end to anti-Blackness, misogynoir, machismo, white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia, transphobia, harmful religious fundamentalism, and all other systems of oppression that are the foundational harms of this country and much of the world.

We need to keep our communities safe against the rising tide of hate and violence. We need to join in a global uprising for global liberation.

Our Vision and What We Are Fighting For

We are dreaming ourselves into the future, fighting like revolutionaries.

Our vision is a future rooted in human dignity and worth, bodily autonomy, joy, love, and rest.

Reproductive justice is our framework, intersectionality is our lens, and liberation is the goal.

Reproductive justice leads to futures we do not yet know but dare to imagine:

Liberation is giving the land back to Indigenous people who stewarded and protected it for generations before colonization, and who live on it today.

Liberation is having what you need to keep your kids, care for your kids, and keep your family safe and together.
Liberation is being able to have healthy and supported pregnancy options, and prenatal, birth, and postpartum care. This is birth justice.
Liberation is choosing your family, and being able to care for yourself and your community.
- Liberation is an end to police, prisons, family surveillance, and detention centers which are designed to harm Black and Brown bodies and break up our families.
- Liberation is building communities where we all feel safe, able to experience joy, and live together with our loved ones.
- Liberation is ending the war on drugs and providing physical and mental health care, help and support for everyone who needs it.
- Liberation is reparations.
- Liberation is abortion care for any person who needs it.
- Liberation is sexual consent, pleasure, and joy.
We will not be silenced. We will take up all the space we need. We will lead with love. We will reclaim our power for ourselves, our beautiful families, our children, and the generations to come.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We invite you to join us.

Sign HERE!

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

POLICE VIOLENCE REACHED an ALL-TIME HIGH LAST YEAR—ARE WE READY to SHRINK POLICE BUDGETS?

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 03:14:46 +0200

The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. In comparison, there were 1,048 shooting fatalities at the hands of police the year before, 1,019 the year before that, 997 the year before that, and so on.

These numbers are most likely underestimated. According to Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Campaign Zero, which runs Mapping Police Violence, the Post “only captures incidents where a police officer discharges their firearm and the victim is killed.” This means that it doesn’t count events like the 2014 killing of Eric Garner in New York and the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, as both deaths resulted from asphyxiation.

In contrast, Mapping Police Violence includes any action that a law enforcement officer takes that results inpolice killed 1,158 people in 2021 compared to the Post’s figure of 1,048 (final results for 2022 are not yet available). a fatal encounter. For example, Rad’s project concluded that

There are other databases of police violence like Fatal Encounters, run by the University of Southern California, that have their own criteria for counting police-related killings. Such projects track police violence because the federal government refuses to, in spite of a 1994 law requiring the Justice Department to keep records. Moreover, there is evidence that biased reporting by medical examiners and coroners in individual cases is helping significantly to cover up the extent of police violence.

The upshot is that in spite of the huge public attention on police violence since 2020, every year cops kill more and more people. We can expect 2023 to be even deadlier if the years-long trend continues.

Another clear conclusion is that police violence is dramatically focused on communities of color. According to the Washington Post, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans,” while Mapping Police Violence finds that “Black people are 2.9x more likely to be killed by police than white people in the U.S.” Police killings of Latinos and Indigenous people are similarly disproportionate.

Recall that in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder in 2020 at the hands of officer Derek Chauvin, activists demanded a defunding of the police. The well-documented assumption underlying that demand was that generously funded police departments were using their resources to kill people, especially poor people of color whose needs in turn were not being funded.

Rad explains that the disproportionate police killings of people of color are “due to historical disinvestment and how the U.S. state has used punitive and carceral responses to social problems, specifically to Black and Brown communities.” Therefore, the only just conclusion is to divert tax revenues from fueling death to fueling life.

Instead of city governments embracing the life-affirming idea of diverting money away from murderous police, media pundits and politicians led a reactionary backlash. President Joe Biden, in a clear clapback at the defund movement, promised to fund the police, and even begged local governments to use federal stimulus funds to bolster their police departments in 2022.

In Minneapolis, which became the focus of international attention in the wake of Floyd’s murder, lawyers Doug Seaton and James Dickey opined in a piece titled “Minneapolis Needs a Fully-Funded Police Department,” that “the city’s most vulnerable… have suffered from” the demand to defund police. One might conclude that Minneapolis’ police are struggling for funding, but in fact more than a third of the city’s entire general fund is poured into police coffers. Mother Jones’ Eamon Whalen rightly concluded that “The Police Are Defunding Minneapolis.”

According to Rad, “In 2022, funding actually continued to increase across U.S. cities into law enforcement agencies.” He adds, “what might be the media narrative actually doesn’t match up to what is actually going on.”

Does giving police more money result in greater public safety, as Seaton and Dickey claim, and as Biden assumes? One recent study analyzing funding of hundreds of police departments over nearly three decades concluded that “new police budget growth is likely to do one thing: increase misdemeanor arrests.”

One of the study’s authors, Brenden Beck, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver, writing in Slate about his team’s results, said, “The trend was clear: When cities decreased the size of their police departments, they saw fewer misdemeanor arrests and when they increased them, they saw more.”

According to Beck, “misdemeanor enforcement is concentrated in poor neighborhoods and in communities of color.” He is confident that, “One thing… [increased police funding] is likely to do, even if paired with community policing, is generate more misdemeanor arrests. Arrests that will disproportionately hurt poor and Black people.”

It is during such arrests that police tend to kill Black and Brown people. Those cities that specifically took steps to reduce arrests for petty crimes saw a decrease in police killings, according to data scientist and cofounder of Campaign Zero Samuel Sinyangwe. He also concluded that crime rates in those cities did not increase.

There is so much data bolstering the fact that more police funding means more violence and death at the hands of police. And yet, police departments remain flush with cash.

How can we simply accept that police will continue to kill more and more people each year?

Not everyone accepts this deadly status quo. In spite of the backlash, police abolitionists are continuing to organize. They have created a powerful internet tool, DefundPolice.org, to help communities put police spending into perspective and reimagine their city budgets. The site includes a detailed video tutorial on how to use tools like a “people’s budget calculator.”

In Los Angeles, whose police budget receives massive infusions of private foundation cash on top of generous public funding, activists have been using the idea of a “people’s budget” to “reimagine public safety.” Vocal critics of police funding like Eunisses Hernandez and Kenneth Mejia have won elections to powerful local offices.

It’s not enough to call out police when they kill people. It’s not enough to march in the streets or write op-eds. Police will continue to murder more people every year with impunity, their violence nurtured by powerful allies. If we want to see a significant reversal to the ruthless march of police savagery, we’re going to need to put our money where our mouths are: toward people’s needs, not police’s deadly deeds.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Released for Syndication: 01/17/2023

Have a question about this article? Contact us at info@ind.media.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

NO RIGHT TO CALL YOURSELF PRO-LIFE

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 16:56:31 +0200

Your so-called family values are repugnant and without real regard for your fellow human beings.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

INTERNATIONAL DAY of COMMEMORATION IN MEMORY OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 02:57:46 +0200

Every year around 27 January, UNESCO pays tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and reaffirms its unwavering commitment to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of intolerance that may lead to group-targeted violence. The date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. It was officially proclaimed, in November 2005, International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust by the United Nations General Assembly

The Holocaust profoundly affected countries in which Nazi crimes were perpetrated, with universal implications and consequences in many other parts of the world. The Holocaust was the attempt by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to murder the Jews of Europe.

Member States of the United Nations share a collective responsibility for addressing the residual trauma, maintaining effective remembrance policies, caring for historic sites, and promoting education, documentation and research, more than seven decades after the genocide.

This responsibility entails educating about the causes, consequences and dynamics of such crimes so as to strengthen the resilience of young people against ideologies of hatred. As genocide and atrocity crimes keep occurring across several regions, and as we are witnessing a global rise of antisemitism and hate speech, this has never been so relevant.

Now may be a good time to expand your knowledge of the Holocaust and/or persuade others to do the same. Go to Holocaust This is a site established by the World Jewish Congress together with UNESCO “to provide the world with the basic facts about the Holocaust”. “Understanding the past is critical to building a better and safer future for all.”

SOURCE: UNESCO

For more information: Hollocaust Remembrance

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

JANUARY 22……..THE DAY

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 17:54:00 +0200

This is the day we rise up and stand up to say, “We will not be silenced; this is BIGGER THAN ROE.”

Will you be with us? Will you make your voice heard?

If you have not already done so, go to

https://action.biggerthanroe.com/local?akid=19484.2928324.MoKbWU&rd=1&t=12

Find a march or rally near you and make your plans to attend.

Even if you have never participated in an action before, this is your chance to be a part of something bigger than you. It will make you feel empowered. It will be time well-spent.

BE THERE!

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

OUR PLANET VERSUS PLASTIC BAGS—A TALE of TWO CITIES

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:26:13 +0200

Americans discard 100 billion plastic bags annually, the equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil.

By Erika Schelby

With oceans, countries, populations, and governments inundated by a plague of plastic worldwide, it may be useful to focus on the single-use plastic bag choices made by two cities, in the same U.S. state, located at a distance of only 64 miles (104 km) from each other. Both Santa Fe and Albuquerque share many qualities and conditions, foremost among them a distinctive cultural mix of American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American citizens. But the two communities are also dissimilar, and this is reflected in the way they have dealt with the plastic bag dilemma.

Santa Fe is the oldest capital city in the United States. It is the seat of the New Mexico government and is home to the country’s third-largest art market. It calls itself “the City Different” and has more than 250 art galleries and dealers, a dozen state and private museums, and a world-class opera, for its more than 88,000 residents.

The “costly negative implications for tourism, wildlife and aesthetics” led Santa Fe to ban single-use plastic carryout bags with Ordinance No. 2015-12 in April of 2015. The decision was also made “to protect the environment while reducing waste, litter, and pollution in order to help improve the public’s health and welfare.” In April 2016, an open letter was sent from the mayor and addressed to the local businesses explaining the project and the new rules in detail.

Nearby Albuquerque is also attractive but less rarefied and more of a workhorse city. It is much larger with a population of 562,599 as of 2021, a growth rate of 24.8 percent since 2000, and a metropolitan area population of 942,000 until 2022. It has a total of 49.8 percent Hispanic inhabitants. Most have lived here for generations. Located in the high desert along the Rio Grande, Albuquerque has several museums, an Old Town dating back to 1706, and various cultural and recreational attractions.

After long debates, Albuquerque’s Clean and Green Retail Ordinance became effective on January 1, 2020. Single-use plastic bags were banned from the point of sale. But then came the pandemic, and enforcement was deferred. Doing business at the retail level had already grown difficult and stressful for management, employees, and shoppers. Supply chains were disrupted. With the new challenges thrown up during the pandemic, these changes seemed all too much at once. The city council listened to the plight of constituents and decided to oppose Mayor Tim Keller’s progressive plastic bag ban. It voted 6-3 to revoke it. The mayor bravely vetoed the reversal. Yet on April 4, 2022, the councilors’ motion to override the veto passed with a vote of 6-3 once again. The ban on single-use plastic bags was lifted. Convenience won over environmental concerns but did not win the war.

That struggle is undeniably bigger than one city council’s decision to put off what needs to be done. In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to pass a law against the use of single-use plastic bags. California followed by implementing a statewide ban in 2014. Puerto Rico and ten other states have enacted legislation to ban single-use plastic bags: Connecticut, Delaware, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. And in contrast to Albuquerque’s reversal of the ban, a growing number of American cities have introduced plastic bag bans or bans and fees—among them are Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boulder, New York, Portland, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Internationally, a growing number of countries have launched nationwide bans on producing, using, and distributing plastic bags.

Experiencing devastating floods in the summer of 1998, Bangladesh noted that thin plastic bags were clogging hundreds of storm drains and drainage systems during flooding, worsening the situation. This caused an estimated 80 percent of the flooding blockages in cities. So in 2002, Bangladesh implemented a ban on all plastic shopping bags in the nation, becoming the first country in the world to do so. Others followed. “According to a United Nations paper and several media reports, 77 countries in the world have passed some sort of full or partial ban on plastic bags,” reported Statista.

Unfortunately, such prohibitions are not enough. Despite the fact that Bangladesh became the world’s first country to ban plastic bags, their use continued to cause environmental harm. Its Department of Environment confiscated 592,223 metric tons of polythene from 2019 to 2021. The number of illegal polybag manufacturers increased from 300 in 1999 to an estimated 700 to 1,000 by 2021. In addition, until 2019, about 1.2 million metric tons of plastic waste was shipped in from the U.S. and the UK, making a bad situation worse.

Instead of finding solutions to the issues related to plastic pollution, reports by Western nonprofits and companies have, meanwhile, helped push the blame for polluting the world’s oceans onto “a small geographical area in East and Southeast Asia.” In July of 2022, the well-known nonprofit advocacy organization Ocean Conservancy delivered an official apology for the damage done by a report it coauthored along with McKinsey Center for Business and the Environment in 2015: Stemming the Tide: Land-Based Strategies for a Plastic-Free Ocean.

Impeccably written, professional in tone, and convincing in language, the report claimed research had shown that more than half of the plastic pollution entering the ocean originated from five Asian countries: China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The report claimed that “increasing economic power” and “exploding demand for consumer products” had led these countries to produce and use plastic heavily, and they lacked the infrastructure to deal with the resulting plastic waste tsunami. Consequently, the waste ended up in the ocean. The study argued that the most effective way to deal with this was through recycling. What was meant by this euphemistic term was the deployment of waste-to-energy technology: gasification, and incineration.

Yet burning plastic discharge s a potent and dangerous mix of toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and into the communities unfortunate enough to be near the incinerating sites. Moreover, for a number of rich countries with environmental restrictions, the cynical hype for recycling has fostered the export of plastic trash to less developed countries like Bangladesh, resulting in the charge of “waste colonialism.” Additionally, the report created an injurious and false narrative. Although it was removed from the Ocean Conservancy website, it lingers on as a sophisticated and warning masterpiece of greenwashing. It is surprising that it took so long to acknowledge this truth, given the list of the project’s supporters: the Coca-Cola Company, the Dow Chemical Company, the American Chemistry Council, and the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa, among others.

Meanwhile, with a March 2022 UN resolution adopted during the United Nations Environment Assembly 5.2 in Nairobi to end plastic pollution, governments have started to strive for a global, legally binding agreement by 2024. It could not be like another timid 2015 Paris Agreement. It needed teeth. So from November 28 to December 2, 2022, delegates from 150 countries met for the UN’s First Session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC1) in Punta del Este, Uruguay, to begin negotiations that will eventually lead to an international plastics treaty. Or so one hopes. “Turn off the tap on plastic,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “Plastics are fossil fuels in another form.”

Indeed, that’s what they are: products made from oil and gas. Americans discard 100 billion bags annually, which are manufactured from 12 million barrels of oil. And what makes these flimsy thin, light, cheap, containers especially dreadful is perhaps the fact that globally 500 billion of them are used annually, for an average of only 15 minutes. After that brief moment in time, they are thrown away. Yet they go on polluting the environment and causing health hazards for years.

What is more, most of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that have been manufactured since the 1950s remain in landfills or within the natural environment. By 2050, it is estimated that around 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste will reside in landfills or the natural environment. Plastic is a synthetic substance. It does not biodegrade. Eventually and very slowly the sun, wind, water, waves, and abrasion break it down into tiny particles. Single-use polyethylene plastic bags will take up to 1,000 years to photo-degrade. Effective recycling, specifically in the U.S., may be a pipe dream. The practical infrastructures, facilities, workers, and readiness to handle this daily flash flood of indestructible waste do not exist and would be expensive to achieve. Incineration is not a solution: it does more harm than good. Therefore it is no big surprise that globally, more than 90 percent of plastics are not recycled. The pile ends up in landfills, rivers, and oceans.

Much of the plastic waste is dumped in landfills. As it breaks down, it leaches hazardous chemicals, contaminates the surroundings, and infiltrates the food chain. According to a fact sheet from EarthDay.org, “Researchers in Germany indicate that terrestrial microplastic pollution is much higher than marine microplastic pollution—estimated at four to 23 times higher, depending on the environment.”

Nevertheless, tossing plastic garbage into the oceans proceeds at a furious pace. A lot of it is swept in from rivers. At least 10 million tons of plastic waste ends up in our oceans each year. If this continues, we may have more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.

Globally, people generate so much filth and debris that these waste products are now beginning to accumulate and occupy significant space, sometimes larger than the size of whole cities and countries. One such example is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), which “is a collection of marine debris” spanning “waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan.” It is already enormous—estimated to be some 1.6 million square kilometers, about twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France—and may spawn a whole family of floating trash concentrations that drift and travel with ocean currents and thereby can reach additional bodies of water. The relentless energy of the sea grinds portions of these garbage vortexes into microplastics. This produces a thick, cloudy gumbo in which larger items are suspended. A share of this mess sinks down to the seafloor. As a result of this, algae and plankton are deprived of sunlight and wiped out, which leads to fish and turtles growing hungry and weak. Many perish. This causes less food for tuna, sharks, and whales, leading to the marine food web being destabilized.

Humans already eat—literally—five grams of microplastics and nanoplastics, or a credit card’s worth of plastic, every week. That amounts to between 39,000 and 52,000 particles of plastic added to our diet every year. Microplastics can be found in animals, fish, and birds, and also in human blood and organs. They even invade the placentas of unborn babies. They are everywhere.

Plastic is affecting human health and reproduction and might have irreparable consequences for the human species, even leading to “human extinction” if uncontrolled use of plastics is not prevented. In mice, research has already shown a decrease in the quantity and quality of sperm and a reduction of total follicles in the ovaries of females. So far, investigations into the effects of microplastics absorbed into the human body have barely begun. Science needs another 10 to 15 years to come up with answers.

The wish for a clean, safe personal space—a home—is hardwired into humans. Indeed, many individuals want to make their homes as beautiful as possible according to their means and their taste. But each person also generates waste and is responsible for it—that’s the flip side of our way of life. In contemporary households, the waste is flushed away or picked up in a trash bin by the waste management services of a city. Residents pay fees for this convenience. But the waste is still theirs. It has simply been relocated—it’s out of sight, out of mind.

That is where the problem lies. Municipalities and landfills are overwhelmed with plastic waste. In 1960, the U.S. generated 88.1 million tons of solid waste; by 2018, this had increased to a whopping 292.4 million tons. America had become a wasteful society that throws stuff away. In 2022, it became the second largest per capita generator of solid municipal waste in the world—surprisingly after Denmark, which is often cited as a model global citizen. Other highly developed countries produce far less waste than the U.S. A special case is Australia’s city of Adelaide, which may have the most effective waste program anywhere. A recent article in the Guardian tells the story of Alice Clanachan, a woman who applied the city’s “reduce, reuse, recycle” plan so resolutely, that for a total of 26 months, she didn’t need to put her rubbish bin out for collection.

Here in the United States, in the state of New Mexico, the city of Santa Fe succeeded in banning single-use plastic bags years ago. Its residents understood that you cannot maintain a beautiful home for long without caring for the surroundings. If individuals loathe the idea of befouling their own interior spaces, they can also leap to the wider view of detesting the squalor inflicted on the entire planet—our common home. Perhaps this was easier to do in Santa Fe. It’s a small place that knows its own mind.

For Albuquerque, the American can-do attitude may reassert itself sometime soon. Civic pride and civic duty will remind the residents that the ban on single-use bags is a rare thing they can control and do right here and now, at the local level. People have done just that before the plastic plague began. And we can even do our shopping by adopting the uncomplicated routine of bringing our own durable and reusable bags. This simple step could help decrease plastic waste and help promote a cleaner way of living and supporting all life on Earth.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:

Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONTINUE TO THRIVE DESPITE DEFUNDING and PRIVATIZATION ATTACKS

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:27:00 +0200

Efforts by governments and cities across the nation to defund the public library indicate a misunderstanding of the essential role that libraries play.

By April M. Short

The public sector in the U.S. has been shrinking rapidly since the 1990s as a deluge of privatization has, to various degrees, overtaken many so-called public services and institutions. Public education, for example, has been increasingly privatized by way of racist school voucher programs, and the expansion of for-profit charter schools and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). Private organizations own and operate the nation’s homeless shelters and food banks, and oversee many welfare programs including Head Start programs and child welfare assistance. Medicare and Medicaid systems include government payouts to private managed care organizations (MCOs), process reimbursement claims through private intermediaries, and commonly delegate medical care to private care facilities, private doctors, and private hospitals. Not to mention the nightmare that is America’s private, for-profit prison system.

Public libraries may be the last truly public institution. Linda Stack-Nelson’s essay “The Last Free Space,” published in 2018 by World Literature Today, is a “love letter to public libraries” that details the reasons these uniquely public entities are essential. In it, she salutes the fact that public libraries offer much more than free books, noting the classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, community gathering events, and so forth that libraries provide. However, she argues, this “plethora of resources and opportunities for community” that libraries provide is not the sole reason they are important.

“Libraries are the last place in every town and city that people can simply exist,” Stack-Nelson writes. “Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money.”

She continues:

“In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the 21st century, how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world, whose presence has never been questioned. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.”

The very existence of public libraries, from this perspective, can be seen as an emblem for the people. American Library Association (ALA) President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said in November 2022, in an interview with Independent Media Institute, that the public library has been an “enduring symbol of democracy.”

“Democracy is listed as one of ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship,” she said. “Regarding this core value, the ALA Council notes that ‘The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.’ The ALA Council also previously stated that libraries are an ‘American Value’; they are at the heart of the community—a resource for people of any age to find what they need to help improve their quality of life.”

As American generations go, millennials love the public library most of all. A Pew Research Center analysis released in 2017 showed millennials use public libraries more than other age groups.

Pelayo-Lozada said this love affair is likely due to the fact that millennials as a generation were entering adulthood “during a recession and through multiple life-changing world events.”

“Millennials understand the importance of free and equitable access to information as well as the need to support those institutions that provide it,” she said. “From a practical standpoint, as pay increases do not match living expense increases, access to the public library allows millennials to enjoy culture and participate in education and learning at no cost, helping to alleviate some of the financial pressures they may be experiencing.”

While the public library system has remained steadfast in what many Americans would agree is its traditional function—the ALA’s first-listed core value is to be a space that offers access to information—Pelayo-Lozada pointed out that it has evolved significantly over time. In recent years, for instance, many libraries across the U.S. have been doing away with late fees. Studies by various library systems showed late fees primarily impacted people living in poor neighborhoods where the residents are more likely communities of people of color.

“The mission of the library has always been about access to information, literacy, learning, and culture,” Pelayo-Lozada said. “Public libraries have evolved from spaces that included membership fees and practiced exclusion based on class and race to spaces that are open for all. The ability of the public library to reimagine itself to the needs of society has been an ongoing significant achievement.”

The ALA released a Resolution on Monetary Library Fines as a Form of Social Inequity in 2019 that details its decision to support eliminating late fees charged by public libraries.

She notes that because libraries are “hyperlocal institutions,” they have been able to translate the overarching mission of the public library in a range of ways over time, as needs and challenges have arisen.

“As the world navigated the [COVID-19] pandemic, many libraries expanded the range of support they offer for workforce and small business development—including formal coworking spaces, networking events, and programs to assist with the development of business plans or market research,” she said. “As the needs of our communities change, so do the services and resources available through our libraries, from a Library of Things, to mobile technology labs, to vibrant maker spaces.”

She said in recent years the library system added sustainability as a core value of librarianship, and ALA works to support libraries in the development of sustainable models.

“Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change, and a sustainable future,” she said.

Historically, the development of the public library system in the U.S. has in many ways pushed the edges of the concept of public institutions. The small Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, was the first documented free, public library in the world. In the period between 1870 and 1930, local public libraries emerged as a widespread institution of community life.

Pelayo-Lozada said in comparison to public libraries from around the world, “American libraries often set the standard for the type of experiences and materials offered to patrons.”

“International counterparts have said that the advocacy work we do for all communities such as emerging ethnic communities and services to the incarcerated support their mission to bring these types of demographic-focused services to their own libraries when administrators may interpret more homogenous communities,” she said.

“Because libraries have the ability to serve as innovative and creative spaces, there are opportunities to pilot, test, and launch various types of programming, which can be case-studied, replicated, and adapted to fit the needs of libraries in their respective communities.”

One example of this, she said, is ALA’s Libraries Build Business initiative. For the initiative, 13 libraries received grants to start or grow small business programming, in an effort to provide support, advice, and networking opportunities around small businesses and entrepreneurship. The cohort collaborated to answer questions, pilot projects, develop resources, and share what they learned with the wider library community.

While the international community may look to America’s libraries as exemplary, support for public libraries in the U.S. has been a mixed bag. In the sociopolitical climate in the U.S., especially following four years of divisive Trump administration rhetoric, there has been an increased politicization of information and data. Some states and cities have been in the process of defunding public libraries. There has been a movement by the far right to censor books in schools and efforts to ban some books entirely.

“Public libraries serve everyone in the community, and library collections, by necessity, must reflect the diversity of thought and values that exist in every community,” said Pelayo-Lozada. “Public libraries are the bastions of democracy, access, and critical thinking and are at the forefront of protecting our freedom to read and our freedom to information.”

She said efforts by governments and cities across the nation to defund the public library indicate “a threat and a misunderstanding of the essential role that libraries play in our society and our democracy.”

“By breaking down institutions that support the public good, those who are threatening to decrease funding are breaking down the very fabric of our society and our right to information,” she said.

She said in an increasingly divided world, many people use information and access to information to disenfranchised communities from being full participants in society.

“Libraries and library workers are attacked as a tool of a minority of voices seeking to silence diverse ideas and abolish free and equitable access to information, eroding this country’s commitment to freedom of expression,” she said. “Operating in this world, public libraries are essential public goods that allow individuals to bring these ideas together and learn from each other, at no cost to the individual. As a true public benefit, public libraries are essential to creating an inclusive society where everyone is able to fully participate.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:

April M. Short is an editor, journalist, documentary editor, and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon, and many others.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

Stop MAGA Shutdown!

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:56:50 +0200

Call or write your representatives TODAY! Better yet...contact your representatives and one or more of the legislators listed below. For contact information go to

Common Cause

Background

MAGA Republicans in the U.S. House are planning a US government shutdown to force President Biden to destroy essential programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, public schools, college loans, and climate jobs.

President Biden will not give in to these MAGA terrorist demands, so the United States will default on its bonds, triggering an economic meltdown.

Stock markets will collapse, wiping out pension funds, 501ks, and IRAs.
Interest rates will soar, canceling investments in construction and manufacturing.
The U.S. government will be unable to pay the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
State and local governments will be unable to pay police, teachers, firefighters, hospitals, etc.

Before long, the U.S. will be in a Depression. But we can stop a MAGA Shutdown if only 5 out of 223 House Republicans vote with Democrats to lift the debt ceiling. 19 of them represent Democratic districts won by Joe Biden, so they are vulnerable to organized pressure from their own constituents. So we will organize voters in every Republican district to change their minds – or defeat as many as we can in 2024.

Republicans Against Default

Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)
- “I will tell you that we will not allow our country to default on our debt. The full faith and credit of the United States is what gives us the position we hold in the world. So that’s off the table. We’re not going to default. We cannot allow ourselves to default.”

Republicans who represent Democratic districts

David Schweikert (AZ-01)
Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)
Mike Garcia (CA-27)
Young Kim (CA-40)
Ken Calvert (CA-41)
Michelle Steel (CA-45)
Zach Nunn (IA-03)
John James (MI-10)
Don Bacon (NE-02)
Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)
Nick LaLota (NY-01)
George Santos (NY-03)
Anthony D’Esposito (NY-04)
Mike Lawler (NY-17)
Marc Molinaro (NY-19)
Brandon Williams (NY-22)
Lori Chavez-DeRemer (OR-05)
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01): opposes default

At a time when we are seeing one crises after another, this may be one of the most important for all of us to deal with. Use your VOICE and apply the pressure. Our very well-being hangs in the balance. ACT TODAY!!!

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

NATIONAL POVERTY IN AMERICA AWARENESS MONTH

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 19:49:38 +0200

The U.S. may be a developed nation and one of the greatest countries in the world. But there are still thousands of people who are deprived of three meals a day, quality education, healthcare, and even clean and healthy drinking water. In fact, many can’t even afford warm clothes during winter. The current rise in the cost of housing coupled with housing shortages has added to the severity of poverty.

Many Americans are not aware of the large number of individuals who are suffering from poverty and can’t even afford the basic necessities. Knowledge of the severity of the problem can create greater determination and effort to devise ways to eliminate poverty.

WHY NATIONAL POVERTY IN AMERICA AWARENESS MONTH IS IMPORTANT

A. Increases empathy: The month is important because it brings to light the number of people who are suffering, in effect creating empathy in the hearts of those who were previously unaware. Once individuals become aware of the effects of poverty, they are more likely to engage in donations and improvement plans to help eradicate poverty

B. Encourages donations: Giving the exact figures of poverty and highlighting the number of children who are deprived of food and shelter, encourages people to donate. Whether it is money, food, or clothes, people need to be encouraged to give whatever little they can.

C. Calls for action: The month calls for action in terms of donations, and the introduction of measures and public policies that may eliminate poverty in the country. If we work together as a nation, we can achieve a poverty-free society.

TO UNDERSCORE THE NEED, HERE ARE A FEW FACTS ABOUT POVERTY

People living in poverty In 2020, over 37 million people lived in poverty
Poverty in Chicago In 2007, an estimated 21% of the population in Chicago was living in poverty.
People of color Societies made up of non-whites face a higher rate of hunger, poverty, and unemployment compared to white areas
Savings Nearly 70% of adults have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts.
National Center on Family Homelessness In a 2015 analysis, it was found that approximately 2.5 million children experience homelessness in a year.

Want to lend a hand to those suffering from poverty?

Make a gracious donation to anyone in need. You can donate food, clothes, blankets, money, or anything that a person living in poverty may need. Give as much or as little as you can afford. What may seem like a little donation to you may be big in the eyes of a person who has little or nothing.

Spread knowledge regarding the poverty rate in the country so people start helping those in need. You can share the knowledge with friends and family and on social media.

In addition apply pressure on your members of Congress to pas The Right to Vote Law. When we can all vote, we can - and will - make change happen.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY - A NATIONAL DAY OF SERVICE

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 01:18:20 +0200

Monday, January 16 is the the day we honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. But it is also designated a National Day of Service as a way of celebrating the work that he did for this country. While there are other days throughout the year designated as days of service,, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only federal holiday designated as a National Day of Service. Even during this time of divisiveness, fomenting racism and hate, and rising cases of viruses, there are ways you can safely provide service to others. Many organizations list opportunities for volunteering on their sites and/or their Facebook pages. You might start by looking at organizations listed in our Resource Library for opportunities in your community. Additionally, you could participate in a Martin Luther King, Jr. parade or other public commemoration of this special holiday. With all the ugliness happening in our lives, wouldn't it be uplifting to provide a little beauty in someone else' life as well as your own? Let's make this the dawning of a new day for America! Show what good Americans are made of.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

‘PUBLIC TRUST’—A KEY LEGAL TOOL TO PRESERVE OUR NATURAL RESOURCES

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 23:19:30 +0200

Law professor Mary Wood breaks down how people can protect their right to clean air, water, and land as well as fortify their climate change resiliency.

By Aric Sleeper

With the reality of climate change becoming more apparent in the form of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods, it is clear that the future of all life on the planet is in peril. To stress the immediacy and seriousness of human-caused climate change and its effects, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the leaders and representatives of nearly 200 countries at COP27 in November 2022.

“Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” said Guterres at the conference. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

As the climate rapidly changes largely due to the environmentally damaging practices of large corporations, unchecked by government officials that receive campaign contributions from the polluting industries, it may seem like there isn’t much that can be done to combat this problematic pattern.

However, there are underutilized legal weapons already on the books that can help fight big corporations and preserve the planet’s natural resources, such as watersheds and large forests, like those in Oregon—which can either serve as a sponge for carbon dioxide or an emitter when the forest cover is cut down. That legal weapon, a component of property law, is a concept known as the public trust.

“The public trust lies in the realm of fundamental rights law,” says University of Oregon Philip H. Knight Professor Mary Christina Wood. “Its roots actually go back to Roman law and the institutes of Justinian, which does seem like a long time ago, but every court case today that deals with the public trust mentions those Roman roots, literally.”

The institutes of Justinian or Justinian the Great, a Roman emperor ruling in the sixth century, declared that certain natural resources are always considered under public ownership, and those resources are air, water, and coastlines, according to Wood.

“The public trust has its origins in public property rights,” says Wood. “The Roman law became the basis of civil and common law systems around the world.”

The Roman concept that the public has ownership of natural resources subsequently became embedded in English law. After the Magna Carta was established in 1215, the king of England could not assert full dominion over fisheries, forests, or water, according to Wood.

In the law of the United States, the public trust principle is also present but is expressed in a slightly different way than the English monarchy.

“In this country [the U.S.], it was announced as the most simple and logical principle,” says Wood. “The government is a sovereign with the people giving it power, and the government does not have the power to fully privatize resources that are crucial. Those stay in trust for the people—and the government works as a trustee or fiduciary steward of those resources, and the beneficiaries are present and future generations of citizens.”

Wood points out that the public trust has always been a part of United States law, but isn’t always utilized in the context of protecting natural resources, with statutory laws such as the Clean Air Act of 1963 and others being more commonly used in court cases.

“I’m just sort of taking it off the shelf,” says Wood.

When Wood was a student at Stanford Law School, one of her professors was Joseph Sax, who was a pioneer of public trust scholarship. Wood was inspired by Sax’s work and took the concept of the law further by devising a litigation strategy based on the public trust, which continues to evolve.

She has also written a book called Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, which critiques statutory environmental law, in the sense that the laws don’t go far enough to protect natural resources. She also discusses established public trust principles in her book and identifies the responsibilities the government has to protect natural resources in the context of the public trust.

To put the concept in different terms, Wood explains the public trust through a financial example.

“Say you have a college-age daughter and you have $500,000 to pay for her college, but you don’t want to deal with the money management because you’re too busy,” says Wood. “So you appoint me as a trustee for the college account. As the trustee, I am the legal owner of that account. I manage it, safely invest it and pay [your daughter] the dividends, and she is the beneficial owner. If I screw up in some way or buy a condo with the money, which is what our political representatives are kind of doing by using our resources as a payback for political contributions, I have violated a fiduciary obligation to your daughter.”

In all, there are about 10 fiduciary obligations or legal responsibilities that the government has to its citizens with regard to vital natural resources that are a part of the public trust, which are outlined in Wood’s book and recent talk.

“The most basic fiduciary obligation is the duty of protection,” says Wood. “You protect the wealth of the trust.”

Wood notes that clear-cutting of forests is a violation of the public trust, as it releases large amounts of carbon. Although she points out that it is debatable whether a forest is considered part of the public trust, there is no debate about water and air’s inclusion. When a forest is clear-cut, it affects the watershed and releases carbon into the atmosphere, which violates another fiduciary obligation.

“That violates the duty to maximize benefit to the public,” says Wood. “The public has many interests in that ecology. It serves as a watershed and a habitat, and typically speaking, the agencies are taking actions for the primary benefit of a private party and not for the public.”

Because of the Citizens United court case, Wood can’t legally do anything about timber companies that give contributions to political campaigns, but with the public trust law she found a loophole with the fiduciary duty of loyalty.

“The government has many functions, and one of those is dealing with natural wealth,” says Wood. “The agencies in those dealings are public trustees, and courts say this across the board.”

In this context, when a legislator accepts a campaign contribution and makes a decision about the wealth of the public trust—say, a watershed—that benefits the contributor, then that is a violation of the public trust. This allows lawyers like Wood to challenge and legally invalidate the actions of legislators who try to give favors to their financial backers, but only in the sphere of natural resources protected in the public trust.

“It’s a full frame change of the law,” says Wood.

One group fighting to protect natural resources in the public trust in Oregon is called North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection (NCCWP), a grassroots organization of Oregon residents. The group is concerned with the protection of drinking water that comes from forested watersheds, and air quality, which are both negatively impacted by common timber industry practices like clear-cutting, slash burning, and pesticide spraying in forests that surround communities in Oregon. The group’s awareness-raising petition, launched in summer 2022, calls for the cessation of logging operations and pesticide use in drinking watersheds across the northern Oregon coast. Because the petition is not a legal petition but instead aims at increasing public awareness, anyone from anywhere can sign it. The group plans to present the petition to city, county, and state-level lawmakers in Oregon, as well as a number of relevant stakeholders, in an effort to increase consciousness about the ways communities are impacted by industrial timber practices.

Wood points out that the work of groups like NCCWP is vital to combating environmental degradation and fighting climate change, but changing the status quo will take even more audacious actions.

“We are going over Niagara Falls, all of us,” says Wood. “We really need some bold thinking, and I think that the public trust is that because it reorients government back to the basic principles of substantial impairment. So I try to create legislative approaches that hit hard and hit big.

Aric Sleeper is an independent journalist whose work, which covers topics including labor, drug reform, food, and more, has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications local to California’s Central Coast. In addition to his role as a community reporter, he has served as a government analyst and bookseller.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

NEPO BABIES and the MYTH of the MERITOCRACY

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 18:54:53 +0200

Society’s top tiers are rife with nepotism. It’s past time to expose just how much unearned wealth and power has been accrued by elites.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.

The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.

The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated defensive responses from nepo babies. Jamie Lee Curtis, actor and daughter of famed Hollywood stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wrote a lengthy post on Instagram defending her status. Although she admitted that she benefitted from her parents’ fame—“I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any”—she also clapped back at critics, saying she was tired of assumptions that a nepo baby like her “would somehow have no talent whatsoever.” Curtis went further in claiming that the current focus on people like her was “designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.”

Curtis is clearly a talented actor, of that there is no doubt. But, in defending her privilege from critique, she reveals just how deserving she considers herself. It is the converse of imposter syndrome—the insider syndrome.

The act of calling out nepotism doesn’t necessarily imply that nepo babies are not talented. (Nepo babies are sometimes talented—and sometimes not.) It means pointing out that some talented people are able to benefit from family connections and fame that other equally talented people are not able to.

The critique is intended to call out elitism, not “diminish,” “denigrate” or “hurt,” as Curtis accuses journalists of doing. Journalism that exposes power and its corruptive influence among elites punches up, not down. Curtis is hardly a disadvantaged person whose well-being will suffer from such coverage. Rather, stories pointing out her parental advantages could potentially help to even the playing field so that it is unacceptable in the future to consider family connections in film and TV auditions.

Recall the college admissions scandal of 2019 when it was revealed—again through good journalism—that wealthy parents like TV star Lori Loughlin used all the power and money at their disposal to bend the rules of elite school admissions for their children. Many of those children may well have deserved to get into those schools they attended. But, in the face of stiff competition, untold numbers of equally deserving youth who did not have powerful and wealthy parents willing to break rules were not admitted. Now, many of those same nepo babies' parents are using their money and connections to win shortened prison sentences.

But Hollywood celebrities, however much they enjoy prestige and privilege, are an easy target. Nepotism is rife in all the halls of power - in the world of art, sports, and even journalism, and especially in corporate and political circles.

Billionaires (especially those in tech) may propagate the myth of the merit-based American dream, but some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand. Take Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who became one of the world’s wealthiest people in his 30s. Gates’s early success was largely due to the well-documented connections that his parents flexed on his behalf to get his fledgling company off the ground. Other tech nepo babies include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose father loaned him $100,000 to start his company, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose parents were early investors in his online retail business to the tune of nearly $250,000.

Nepotism is part of the fabric of capitalism. For centuries, unfair advantages were available to those who have historically faced fewer hurdles, through the sheer luck of being born into a family with wealth, connections, or respect within their field. Indeed, in order to beat back the imposter syndrome, many advise channeling the unearned confidence of a mediocre straight white man.

Our economy is rigged to encourage nepotism by ensuring that the already wealthy pass their wealth—and by extension the power that their money buys—to their children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out how the tax code is written in order to benefit the moneyed classes. According to a CBPP report, “High-income, and especially high-wealth, filers enjoy a number of generous tax benefits that can dramatically lower their tax bills.”

Nepo babies who defend their status reinforce the notion that wealth, fame, and privilege equal brilliance, talent, and genius. The reality is that the privileged among us simply have the means to cheat. The rest of us are sold the lie that working hard will bring rewards—rather than unearned wealth.

This, in turn, encourages cheating among those who cannot rely on nepotism to gain power. One well-known example of the “fake-it-till-you-make-it” approach is Anna Sorokin, a woman whose fabricated lies about wealth and power landed her in prison and made her the focus of a Netflix show. Sorokin faked being a nepo baby—a German heiress—in order to live a lavish lifestyle. Sorokin learned that to gain the edge that moneyed elites have, one must internalize the insider syndrome.

Republican Congressman George Santos, who was recently exposed as a fraud for lying about his work experience, wealth, and even ethnicity, is another prime example. His political party has made a habit of encouraging (real or fake) nepo babies like Donald Trump, who openly admitted to tax avoidance in a debate and whose company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.

The GOP has for years led the charge to protect the interests of the wealthy while insisting on means testing and drug testing for the rest of us to receive benefits.

In truth, the emperor has no clothes. The meritocracy of American capitalism is a myth built on smoke and mirrors, on lies and false confidence. The current long-overdue conversation around nepo babies may help to further class consciousness among Americans who may see a bit more clearly now just how scantily clad the emperor really is.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

JANUARY 22 NATIONAL DAY of ACTION.....BE THERE!

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:41:13 +0200

Bigger than Roe.

On January 22nd we march!!!

On January 22nd, the anniversary of Roe V. Wade, we are teaming up with Women's March and people across the nation to march for Reproductive Freedom.

We are putting all politicians on notice. If you come for our families, our freedoms, or our future, we are coming for your seat!

Our movement is strong. Our movement is growing. Our movement is bigger than Roe.

March: https://act.womensmarch.com/si

Host a march: https://act.womensmarch.com

Message from Debbie DeLand, President of Florida National Organization for Women

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

"VIGILANTE" - the documentary movie - from GREG PALAST

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:08:42 +0200

Darkness and Thanks

by Greg Palast

I want to let you in on something personal. Kind of rare for me.
Today felt really dark.

Our documentary Vigilante will be available online through New Years Day.

Go to VigilanteMovie.com

After that, for contractual reasons, we have to take it down—it won’t be available online nor broadcast. It’s free for these next couple of days – then gone.
So, take an hour to see the film that Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown says, “Everybody, I mean everybody, must see.”

Watch it and pass on the link.

The press has been celebrating the “record voter turnout” in Georgia. But I know the terrible truth: Voter turnout plummeted by a million votes.
Why does it matter, and why do I care?

Having one more story, one more fact, buried by propaganda—hey, that’s just another Tuesday in American journalism.
That’s not why the darkness seizes me.

It’s because I was there when the elegant, elderly African-American woman in a walker was told, “Your registration has been cancelled” while her granddaughter broke down in tears. I was with the soldier who was refused his ballot at his military base. Fighting his emotions, he told me, “I couldn’t believe it. Not my country. Not now. Not this day and time.”

It’s when I think of the victims of these attacks, whose citizenship, whose humanity is denied; that sends me spinning into a frustrated rage.

Frankly, after 22 years of this, I just wanted to quit.

But, then, I get a text from Major Gamaliel Turner of Georgia, the soldier, thanking me for telling his story.

You don’t have to ask: The Major is Black, his challenger is white.

The Major did shed some angry tears—but then took action—hiring lawyers, traveling to Georgia with my crew to confront his accuser on camera. He’s a warrior, and his courage pushes me on even when I don’t see the point.

Because he sees the point.

Then George Rhynes sent a note. Rhynes is the Black journalist who reports from rural Georgia where the county lines are marked with Confederate flags; from the “sundown towns” where signs once read, “No Negroes After Sundown.” The signs are gone but the threat remains.

Journalist George Boston Rhynes, Valdosta, GA featured in Vigilante

In this brutal atmosphere, Rhynes insists on reporting on the state’s terrorizing of Black polling officials, handcuffed in raids ordered by the “moderate” Gov. Brian Kemp, and of lynchings long forgotten.

Rhynes, Major Turner, and so many others you’ve met in my films and books, had been silenced. So they brought their stories to us. Because they know their stories remain unseen and never told by the reporters safely distant in Atlanta office towers, in five-star hotel suites, or in staged press conferences; reporters who will not venture to Coffee County or Forsythe or Valdosta.

I find myself going where CNN fears to tread, and now, I can’t walk away from what I’ve seen and heard and discovered.

And this: I found a note someone slipped into my pocket. I don’t know who wrote it. It reads,

“Thank you.
For giving a voice to
those without one.”

So, I’m kind of stuck. I’m obligated. I can't turn my back on their stories.

I don’t want to give the impression that my work is all grim frustration. If you’ve seen me chase down some vote-thieving scoundrel of a Governor; or when I hold up cold evidence in the lying face of some vote rustler as Zach’s camera closes in; when they run away like cockroaches from a flashlight…you know I really enjoy my job.

This is certainly an odd year-end note.

But I want to tell you that all your kind comments, your donations, your passing my stories around—it just makes me humble and grateful.
And keeps me going.

And that’s not a bad way to end the year.
And so I thank you.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS BROKEN—FIXING IT IS NOT HARD

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:38:16 +0200

If only the health care system received the same treatment that military spending gets from politicians and the public.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Americans are being slammed by a “tripledemic” this holiday season as three major respiratory illnesses—COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—are spreading at indoor gatherings. Hospitals are once more in danger of running out of beds, and the Biden administration has revived a program to mail out free at-home COVID-19 testing kits. It seems that the United States has learned nothing from the early months of the pandemic when our healthcare system broke along the fissures created by corporate models of profit-based medicine.

Take the current shortage of antibiotics and other medications. Axios reported that “Parents have been calling [pharmacies and other health care providers], distraught over the trouble they’ve had securing everything from Children’s Tylenol to amoxicillin to Tamiflu.” Hospitals are also running out of drugs. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry, which operates adjacent to the healthcare industry, functions on thin margins, producing just enough inventory based on projections in order to maximize profits and not overproduce items that may remain unsold. But when a crisis hits, the projected supply is outstripped by demand.

Another example is that of Ascension, a company most of us have never heard of but one that the New York Times described as “one of the country’s largest health systems.” Although it is technically a nonprofit company, Ascension operates like a for-profit corporation, cutting costs by cutting staff. This has left existing staff overstretched and exhausted, leading to mass resignations of nurses and other medical staff. According to the Times, “When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.”

Meanwhile, for those people lucky enough to have private or public health care coverage, out-of-pocket health costs have risen sharply. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released figures for 2021 showing that Americans spent an average of $12,914 per person for healthcare costs that were not covered by their plans. This is equivalent to 18.3 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP).

Almost everyone agrees that our healthcare system is in dire need of an overhaul. But rather than seeing it as a problem that needs solving simply and efficiently, the system has become a target for capitalist opportunism. The technology industry, which has sold society the lie that it can innovate a solution to any problem, has tried and failed to solve health care. For example, in 2018 Google decided to get in on the game, launching “Google Health” as a way of “helping billions of people be healthier.” Three years later, the company gave up.

Oliver Kharraz, a former physician and the founder of Zocdoc, another tech attempt at solving the health care crisis, wrote in an op-ed on Fast Company that health care “is the problem of our generation, and if we don’t fix it then it will break the bank, our health or both.” Admitting that so far, technological approaches have not worked, Kharraz said, “It is tempting to fix the symptoms, but ultimately, we must address the underlying cause.” Unfortunately, being invested in a private, for-profit mindset prevents Kharraz and others like him from seeing the situation in anything other than capitalist terms.

But there is a simple mathematical formula that appears to elude the world’s most brilliant minds: Taxpayer funding minus health care costs equals a net positive remainder. Recast as a word problem, this means that people pool their money together so that their representatives spend it on their health and well-being.

After all, this same formula is applied to other issues that political leaders consider important, such as war fighting—known more commonly by the term “national defense.” Each year Congress appropriates more and more taxpayer money toward military spending, and this year was no exception. Lawmakers in mid-December approved a whopping $858 billion military spending bill—an 8 percent increase over the previous year. It is a mind-bogglingly large figure—close to a trillion dollars.

Conservative politicians (whether Democrat or Republican) roll out endless objections to government funding of health care and squabble over the Affordable Care Act, single-payer health care, Medicare spending, and more. But they manage to set aside their differences when it comes to applying the same idea of taxpayer funding to military spending.

This is not surprising. Conservatism is aligned with national and personal self-interest. Government spending on the Pentagon ensures American military supremacy. But government spending on health care means spreading the wealth among people based on collective concern for public health.

It turns out that conservative politics—based on individualism and selfishness—is bad for everyone’s health. A Harvard study examining the correlation between lawmakers’ voting records and the COVID-19-related mortality rates of their constituencies came to a stark conclusion. The Washington Post summarized the results: the rates of death from COVID-19 “were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative.”

What this means is that state-level policies that strip funding from welfare and social programs, in combination with behavior influenced by conservative politicians such as forgoing masks and vaccines, can result in poor health outcomes.

Offering a contrast is the United Kingdom’s national health care system. A federal system like the UK National Health Service (NHS), flawed as it is, was able to enact broad, protective measures during the COVID-19 pandemic that saved lives. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a sprawling and fractured profit-driven system in combination with myriad local public agencies was unable to agree on which measures to adopt. One American infectious disease expert, William A. Haseltine, explained in the Hill in 2021 that given the U.S. healthcare system’s lack of “federal authority to enact nationwide policy, it is unsurprising that a period of immense political polarization, as we are witnessing today, leaves public health matters divided across party lines rather than scientific consensus.”

The good news is that there is a public appetite for adopting the simple equation of using taxpayer funds to cover health care—as long as the idea is not labeled as progressive. The Intercept reported that voters enthusiastically passed a slew of progressive-leaning healthcare initiatives across the country during the November 2022 midterm elections.

As the Intercept noted, the example of Dunn County, Wisconsin, is particularly instructive because a voter-passed initiative excluded language commonly associated with progressive Democrats such as “single payer” or “Medicare for all.” Instead, the ballot measure asked voters a very simple question: “Shall Congress and the President of the United States enact into law the creation of a publicly financed, non-profit, national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

A majority agreed with this idea. Although the measure was a symbolic one, the fact that voters from a rural Midwestern county support their taxes being used to fund their health care is a positive sign.

The existing corporate model of treating our healthcare needs purely through the lens of supply and demand, profit and loss, is utterly broken. We don’t need any more examples of crisis-related breaking points. And we certainly don’t need tech bros agonizing over complex ways to exploitatively extract profits from our need to see a doctor. There is a simpler, easier way to fix this mess.

Independent Media Institute This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.

GREETINGS TO ALL!

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 17:39:44 +0200

SEASON'S GREETINGS!, HAPPY HANUKKAH!, MERRY CHRISTMAS!, HAPPY KWANZA! To each of you from each of us at Women's Voices Media.

May the true spirit of the season touch the hearts of everyone. Let love replace hate. Let compassion replace anger. Let empathy replace indifference. Let generosity replace greed. Then, with the dawn of the new year, the world will be a better place for all of us.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.