This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Here is the Sept. 16 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents. |
At Capital and Main of Los Angeles, Danny Feingold conducts an interview with—Former White House Economist Jared Bernstein: Incomes Are Up, But It’s Still Inequality, Stupid:
Capital & Main spoke to Bernstein, now a senior fellow at Washington DC’s Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, to get his take on how rising income, persistent inequality and populist politics all fit together. (See the second part of the interview here.) [...]
Capital & Main: Inequality and economic insecurity played a huge role in the 2016 election, yet the new census report shows big gains in income for the middle class, drops in poverty and higher rates of health insurance last year. How do we make sense of this?
Jared Bernstein: One of the most important things to realize is that with these gains, middle-income families are back to where they were in about 2007, which is about where they were in 2000. So, if you abstract from a few good years — and we celebrate them and we want to make sure that they keep going — and you ask how are you doing relative to seven years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago, there you don’t see nearly enough progress. [...]
Given the income gains for 2015 and 2016, is it fair to conclude that Trump’s victory had less to do with the economic woes of the white working class and more to do with his race-based attacks on immigrants and other minorities?
Bernstein: You cannot conclude that from these or from other data that I’ve looked at. I don’t discount for a second the role of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, gender politics in Trump’s victory — that was all there, in levels that were extremely disturbing [and] bad for our country. That said, if you look at median family income growth by race, the growth of incomes for African Americans and Hispanics actually outpaced that of whites, and by a few percentage points. One of the reasons for that is that as the economy strengthens, and you start moving closer to full employment, the folks who disproportionately get a bump from that tend to be those in more economically vulnerable circumstances. So it’s not surprising that in year seven or eight of an economic expansion you’d start to see income growth of blacks, for example, outpace that of whites, and this is actually of course a positive development in the sense that you’re closing some racial gaps.
Prior to this census I’ve looked at the earnings of non-college educated white guys, 25-54 — economists call them “prime age workers” — and sure enough, their earnings have looked pretty terrible for a pretty long time. So there really is something there.
While the census report shows the biggest earnings increase is among blacks, Latinos and Asians, at the same time we know that the wealth gap between blacks and Latinos on the one hand, and whites on the other, remains enormous in this country. Which of these should we pay more attention to?
Bernstein: We have to keep all the variables in our head but it’s important to raise that question because there you really have a legacy effect. Even if you believed — and you’d be crazy to believe this — that somehow we’ve banished discrimination, you’d have to accept that the legacy effects of discrimination have meant that African-American communities simply haven’t been able to accumulate the wealth of other communities, particularly [of] whites. So yes, that gap remains as wide as ever.
At RI Future.org, Pete Nightingale writes—Worker co-op bill being heard in Senate, could this model work for Benny’s?
The Rhode Island Senate calendar for Tuesday features legislation that makes it easier to create and run worker-owned cooperatives. The bill is “a statutory vehicle for the creation and functioning of workers’ cooperatives which are corporations that are owned and democratically governed by their members.”
In June, the House passed an amended version of the bill, H6155. The legislation reached an impasse when Speaker Nick Mattiello sent the House packing at the end of that month. The need is growing for distributed, post-carbon food and energy production systems. At the same time, Amazon just took over Wholefoods. The Internet is abuzz with Amazon’s role in the “retail apocalypse” of which Benny’s demise is an example.
The resurrection of the legislation could not be more timely
But there is more. Amazon is close to killing its host, Seattle, and the company is looking for secondary headquarters. And yet, some want more concentration of wealth and less democracy, as witnessed by an on-line petition asking Amazon to take over Benny’s.
As WPRI reports, RI leaders hope to lure new $5B Amazon HQ. The report makes clear that the thought of not participating in this bidding war never even entered the Raimondo administration’s thinking. Clearly, this administration takes Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” as its economic article of faith.
Contrast this with Aaron Regunberg’s rhetorical question on Facebook:
Instead of bribing companies like Amazon to come here, should we instead invest in our community businesses and workers and stronger schools and reliable transportation so companies (local, Amazon, and otherwise) want to create jobs here?
At Blue Virginia, lowkell writes—Which Ad Is More Disgusting, Dishonest, etc.: Ed Gillespie’s “Sanctuary Cities” or Jerry Kilgore’s “Hitler Ads?”
The following ads, both by Republican candidates for governor of Virginia (Jerry Kilgore in 2005; Ed Gillespie in 2017) share a number characteristics: 1) dishonest (Tim Kaine actually said that his personal religious views were anti-death penalty, but that as governor, he would carry out the laws of Virginia, including the death penalty; the charge against Ralph Northam about “sanctuary cities” is extremely shaky/tenuous, at best); 2) disgusting/vicious in various ways (the Gillespie ad plays upon fears and prejudices by the GOP “base” of “dangerous illegal immigrants” – translation, Latinos, people of color more broadly; the “loathsome” “Hitler ads” employed demagoguery about crime and the death penalty – a classic Lee Atwater/Karl Rove move, and also used “Mr. Kaine’s courtroom work as an appointee of the state Supreme Court” to smear him); 3) signs of a candidate who fears he’s going to lose (after leading Tim Kaine for weeks, the race was basically a dead heat by mid-October, when Kilgore released the “Hitler ads”; Ed Gillespie hasn’t led in a poll since June 6-8). I’d also note that, following the debut of the “Hitler ads” in 2005, despite many supposed experts claiming Kaine was doooooomed, instead the ads appeared to backfire, with Kaine pulling ahead and proceeding to defeat Kilgore by 5.7 points on election day. Let’s hope the same thing happens this year, in response to Gillespie going to the gutter with his disgusting, race-baiting new ad.
[Links to the ads are here and here.]
At Louisiana Voice, tomaswell writes—It has now been 17 months and AG’s investigation of Union Parish jail rape still not completed: How long, Jeff Landry?
Yesterday, Sept. 19, was the 17-month anniversary of the rape of that 17-year-old female meth addict in the Union Parish Jail by a man already convicted of aggravated rape who was awaiting sentencing. (See LouisianaVoice’s initial story HERE.)
Seventeen months and still no resolution to Attorney General Jeff Landry’s “investigation.”
Because the Union Parish Detention Center is run by a consortium comprised of the mayors of Union Parish municipalities, the Union Parish Sheriff, the Union Parish Police Jury and the local district attorney, District Attorney John Belton correctly recused his office from the investigation and requested the assistance of Landry’s office.
Apparently, that’s where the “investigation” ended.
Landry, who harbors an apparent obsession with issuing news releases that promote Jeff Landry almost on a daily basis, is never shy in boasting about his intolerance for wrongdoing and how his office will not stand for (fill in the blank for whichever hot button topic a particular days’ news release is about). [...]
So, what more does he need? Why has his office’s “investigation” still not been completed after 17 months?
The answer is simple and it’s a sad indictment of the political culture and the political agenda of not only the state of Louisiana in particular but the entire nation in general. [...]
In the words of one state official: It’s low priority because there’s no political capital to be gained.
At Blog for Arizona, AZ BlueMeanie writes—Kochbot Governor Ducey supports harming health care for Arizonans:
Governor Doug Ducey, the ice cream man hired by Koch Industries to run their Southwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Arizona, supports the zombie ‘Trumpcare” bill despite not knowing — nor caring — about what This Republican health-care bill that is the most monstrous yet.
Let’s be clear: Tea-Publicans do not care about health care — they have been trying to repeal Medicare/Medicaid since it was first enacted — this zombie bill is not about health care at all. It is about freeing up revenue to give “the biggest tax cut in history” (per our Dear Leader) to corporations and the Plutocrats whom Tea-Publicans serve. Senate Republicans Embrace Plan for $1.5 Trillion Tax Cut: Senate Republicans, abandoning a key fiscal discipline doctrine, agreed on Tuesday to move forward on a budget that would add to the already $20 trillion federal deficit in order to pave the way for a $1.5 trillion tax cut over the next 10 years.
The Koch brothers’ private political operation largely supplanted the Republican National Committee last year. It’s right-wing millionaire and billionaire donors do not give a damn about the health care of their fellow American citizens, they only care about one thing: they want the tax cuts they paid for through campaign donations to the GOP, so they can redistribute wealth from the undeserving poor to the elite Plutocrat class. They want to accumulate all of the money. And Governor Doug Ducey is the loyal lickspittle servant of the Koch brothers. After all, it was unlimited Koch dark money that got him elected governor.
At The Left Hook of San Jose, California, a staff blogger writes—Council Votes to Expand Access to Hours for Part-Time Workers:
Today, the San Jose City Council voted to move forward with a plan to cover City employees under the landmark Opportunity to Work measure. The first-of-its-kind initiative, which passed with overwhelming support from San Jose voters in November of 2016, provides part-time workers the opportunity to work additional hours before their employers can hire more part-time staff.
By a vote of 9 to 2, with Council Member Don Rocha leading the way, the Council agreed to study the most effective way to apply the Opportunity to Work rules to its own workforce. With today’s decision, the Council has taken an important step towards ensuring that the jobs the City creates using public money meet basic standards of fairness. [...]
The Opportunity to Work legislation, which went into effect in early March of this year, currently requires medium to large employers in San Jose to offer available work hours to current, part-time, qualified employees before hiring any new staff. Until today, the City of San Jose had not moved to give its own employees the same protection.
At Better Georgia, Shelby Steuart writes—Georgia’s rural schools struggle:
Georgia’s rural schools are struggling and being left behind as metropolitan Georgia expands. Rural Georgia schools deal with high rates of poverty, small budgets and rising transportation costs. About 65 percent of Georgia students receive free or reduced lunch, a rate that is third-highest in the country. Georgia also has one of the highest numbers of students receiving special services.
While Atlanta and Savannah are seeing populations soar, rural Georgia’s population continues to shrink. Too many rural Georgians have to leave their homes to find work, an issue State Chamber CEO Chris Clark sees as a major problem for rural communities. Rural areas, which are already struggling with high rates of unemployment, are seeing a “talent vacuum” created, virtually assuring that no new businesses will move in and create jobs.
Some say rural communities suffer because of the promise of industry that failed to materialize and the loss of existing factories and plants, due to the increasingly automatized and technological nature of modern factories. Others say, the lack of jobs is not the problem. It’s the lack of trained and educated workers in some cases, Bluestone said, and the state passing tax laws that devastate city and county budgets.
Adding to rural woes, state and federal Medicaid and Medicare cuts drain rural hospitals of the money they need to survive, shutting down eight hospitals in the past few years. For rural Georgians, hospital closures mean so much more than decreased access to medical care. In many rural communities, the hospital is the main economic engine. When a hospital closes, good-paying jobs disappear, people have less money to pay for goods and services and businesses in all industries feel the pain.
At The Montana Post, Pete Talbot writes—You’re the fraud, Stapleton:
It’s time Secretary of State Corey Stapleton learned the difference between a ballot that has an irregular signature and voter fraud.
Most irregular signatures, according to county election administrators, are due to a husband and wife getting their ballots mixed up and signing the wrong one. Same thing happens with roommates. Or a spouse signs a ballot because the significant other forgot to before going out of town.
This hardly meets the definition of fraud in the Oxford Dictionary: “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain,” also defined as the “intentional perversion of truth… ” (an apt description of Stapleton’s proclamations).
He’s been preaching voter fraud since before May’s special election, costing Montana taxpayers around $750,000. The fraud charges have been debunked at every turn but he keeps hammering away.
Hundreds (if not thousands) of mail ballots in recent Montana elections have been cast and signed by someone other than the voter whose name is on the ballot.
That quote comes from Stapleton in a recent email to me. So what is it, Corey, hundreds or thousands? Any documentation? Transparency doesn’t seem to be the secretary’s strong suit.
At NH Labor News of New Hampshire, Matt Murray writes—Right-Wing Front Group Attacks Teachers With Biased Report On Absenteeism:
Yesterday, the Concord Monitor, along with a number of other media outlets across the country, ran a story about a new report on “teacher absenteeism,” produced by the conservative think tank, The Fordham Institute.
The crux of their entire report is that based on their research that public school teachers – specifically the unionized public school teachers – take more sick days than charter school teachers.
According to the report, “Twenty-eight percent of traditional public school teachers are chronically absent, compared with 10 percent in charter schools.”
Fordham defines chronically absent as being absent for 10 or more days a year.
Educators were quick to disagree with Fordham’s research.
“Fordham is a biased organization that is driven by an anti-student agenda with anti-public education funders,” wrote the National Education Association. “The authors of this study themselves note that their own research ‘cannot establish a causal relationship between any specific policy or factor and absenteeism.’ Fordham is using corrupted assertions to draw misguided conclusions that denigrate the service of hardworking educators who put the best interest of students at the center of their daily lives.” [...]
“A poorly-designed report that, for example, counts maternity leave as chronic absenteeism,” said Doug Ley, President of AFT-NH. “Using the logic of the report, ill teachers should report to work regardless of the risk of spreading illness to students and colleagues.”
At Raging Chicken Press of Pennsylvania, Kevin Mahoney writes—Precarious Life: Kutztown University Adjunct Kicked to the Curb Right Before Critical Surgery:
On Wednesday morning, faculty members at Kutztown University opened their morning email to find a heart-wrenching message from Dr. Amanda Morris, president of the Kutztown chapter of the faculty union, APSCUF. “Good morning, everyone, although there is not much good about it today,” the email began. An adjunct faculty member is in need of “major life-saving surgery,” Morris explained. The surgery itself was not the problem. The problem was that the adjunct faculty member no longer had health insurance. Kutztown University had just fired that faculty member. The faculty member did not “have enough sick time to cover the estimated time they will be out, which could possibly be the entire semester,” Morris explained. So, with critical surgery right around the corner, one of the universities most vulnerable faculty members is now out of work and without health insurance.
Morris was alerted to the dire situation by the department chair last Thursday. The adjunct faculty member’s colleagues had already agreed to overloads to cover courses, and that department’s faculty “volunteered to donate their own sick time to alleviate this person’s lack of sick time,” wrote Morris. There was one hitch: Morris would need to secure a local agreement with management that would allow faculty members to donate their sick leave to their colleague.
Morris never got the chance. In her email, she explained that late Monday afternoon she got the bad news:
On Monday, the chair of this adjunct’s department wrote me a simple email alerting me that HR had fired this person. Simultaneously, I discovered from another meeting that this person’s benefits were cut off, leaving one of our most vulnerable colleagues without an income and without health insurance a couple of weeks before major life-saving surgery. [...]
APSCUF president Ken Mash told Raging Chicken Press that while PASSHE’s decision to fire this faculty member may not violate any existing policy, it’s “heartless.” “I think from their perspective, it costs them money, it’s not in the contract, and it’s opening up a can of worms for other people in the future,” he said. But the fact is, he continued, “you don’t know how do deal with certain circumstances until they come up. If they really wanted to try to find solutions, they would have contacted us to see if we could find a solution. That didn’t happen and they’re really not going to budge on that.”
Heartless indeed. And despite expressions of concern from Kutztown University’s administration or PASSHE, the cold hard facts are that their decision not to “open a can of worms” is putting a real human being in peril.
At Progress Texas, a staff blogger writes—Amid Harvey Recovery, Houston Fights to Defend Marriage Equality in Texas:
In June — two years after the US Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality ruling — the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court — at the urging of Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton — issued a decision denying marriage benefits to same sex spouses of city of Houston employees. Last week, Houston fought back, appealing to the US Supreme Court and arguing the Texas court was disregarding the high court’s ruling guaranteeing marriage equality.
Making this ongoing, discriminatory assault on the rights and lives of LGBTQ Houstonians even more egregious: the city was devastated by Hurricane Harvey last month and is consumed by a massive recovery effort.
Targeting Houston as the testing ground for the GOP’s extreme anti-LGBTQ isn’t new. As the Texas Observer explains: “Jonathan Saenz and Jared Woodfill, the anti-LGBT architects of the religious-right campaign that repealed Houston’s non-discrimination ordinance in 2015, have for years been trying to overturn same-sex spousal benefits for Houston city employees.”
The City Houston is currently providing health coverage and other benefits for same-sex spouses of city employees. On August 10, three married couples from Houston filed a suit in federal court to block this extremist effort to strip them of those benefits. One of the plaintiffs in that suit is a Houston police officer, and her lawyer spoke to the Observer at the time:
“She puts her life on the line for the city and the people who live there every day,” he said. Were she to die in the line of duty, [her attorney] said, “her surviving spouse would be treated differently than that of a straight officer, and that’s just offensive.”
Houston police officers acted as Hurricane Harvey’s first responders, and the state’s Republican leadership is still campaigning to strip LGBTQ Houstonians in uniform and their families of their rights.
At Appalachian Voices, Cat McCue writes—Va. foes of Atlantic Coast Pipeline applaud N.C. delay, urge Gov. McAuliffe to likewise seek more information:
VIRGINIA – Late yesterday, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration delayed until mid-December its decision on whether to permit the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline project, requesting additional information on its potential impact on more than 300 nearby waterways. This action follows on the heels of a move by West Virginia state regulators on Wednesday to rescind their approved permit for a similar pipeline, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Statement from Allegheny Blue-Ridge Alliance (ABRA), Lew Freeman, chair and executive director:
“We applaud North Carolina Governor Cooper’s move to delay a decision on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to ensure his state is properly analyzing the tremendous harm this pipeline would have on his citizens’ water quality. Because this pipeline is scheduled to run through Virginia as well, we call on Governor Terry McAuliffe to take note and insist on this level of scrutiny in Virginia’s consideration of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
“These proposed pipelines would cross many of our state’s pristine watersheds, rivers, streams, springs, and wetlands – bringing significant risks to the quality and safety of our water supply. It’s essential to the safety and health of Virginians, as well as to the farming and other local industries, that these risks are thoroughly assessed, including the high potential for blasting, erosion, and soil erosion during the pipeline’s construction. We hope Gov. Cooper’s decision inspires Gov. McAuliffe to make sure Virginia fulfills its responsibility under the federal Clean Water Act to avoid risks to the waters of the Commonwealth.”
Statement from Appalachian Voices, Cat McCue, communications director, regarding the Mountain Valley Pipeline:
“While Gov. Cooper’s decision relates to a different energy company than the developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the pending state permit in question in Virginia is equally bad and possibly worse than what’s being considering in North Carolina. Two days ago, regulators in West Virginia rescinded their approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline under the federal Clean Water Act. They saw that they did not have adequate information and a full understanding of the impact this pipeline would have on water quality. We are just as in the dark in Virginia. We cannot jeopardize the health and safety of the people of Virginia, and we urge Gov. McAuliffe to re-assess his stance on this and demand the time to fully consider what’s at stake.”