Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

(I saw that Jeff Bezos wants the Washington Post’s editorial page to run pieces touting the merits of free markets. Here’s my submission.)

There are not many issues on which there is largely bipartisan agreement, so the story we tell about the origin of economic inequality stands out. Both sides agree that the increase in inequality of income and wealth is driven by an unfettered market. The difference is that conservatives say it is wise to accept the outcomes of the ‘free market,’ while people on the left believe the government should ameliorate the effects of the market.

But both sides accept that inequality is caused by the market. This is nothing but a Big Lie that bolsters elite interests.

The reality is that there is no “the market” out there generating inequality. The government structures the market, which is infinitely malleable and can produce almost any outcome we want. Over the last half-century, we have increasingly structured markets in ways that generate more inequality — a reality that our economic policy debates largely refuse to acknowledge.

Let’s start with the clearest example: government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. These are government policies to promote innovation and creative work. Since we have seen lots of innovation over the last half-century, one could argue these are good policies. However, the economy actually had faster productivity growth (the economic measure of innovation) in the quarter century following World War II — a time when there was less inequality, and these monopolies were less important. Recent policies have made these monopolies longer and stronger.

In the case of prescription drugs, while patents monopolies provide incentives for innovation, they also provide incentives for drug companies to lie about the safety and effectiveness of their products. The opioid crisis is the most prominent example, where drug manufacturers deliberately misled the public about the addictiveness of a new generation of drugs so that doctors would more freely prescribe them. Instances where drug companies are less than honest about their products occur all the time.

But the merits or disadvantages of monopolies in specific circumstances obscures our understanding of the broader pattern: These are government policies with enormous implications for the distribution of income. We will spend over $650 billion this year (or $5,000 per household) for drugs and other pharmaceutical products that would likely sell for less than $100 billion in a free market without patent monopolies.

As far as the impact on inequality, we can take the example of Bill Gates. He would likely still be working for a living if the government did not threaten to arrest people who copied Microsoft software without paying him a licensing fee.

The shaping role of government goes far beyond enforcing these costly monopolies. While we have supposedly embarked on a quest for what is often labeled ‘free trade,’ little effort has been put into removing the obstacles that protect physicians and other highly paid professionals from international and domestic competition. As a result, our 1 million doctors earn an average of morethan $360,000 a year, twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

Or consider the lesson of the 2008-9 financial crisis. If we really believed in the “neoliberal” free market ideals, why didn’t we let most of our major financial institutions go bankrupt? That would have given us a much smaller financial sector (which is already subject to other backstops from the government, like deposit insurance).

If having a smaller financial sector was a goal prioritized by a government promoting efficiency, we could institute a modest financial transaction tax. After all, we apply sales taxes to most items people buy. Given that sales taxes are the norm, we could argue the special exemption for financial transactions is a government intervention, and that taxing sales of stock in the same way as we tax sales of shoes and furniture would be a more “free market” policy. There would certainly be fewer great fortunes in the financial sector if its sales subject to a transactions tax.

It is impossible to overstate the extent to which policy choices by government structure the market. Corporations as legal entities (as opposed to partnerships, where the partners are personally liable for a company’s actions) are the creation of the government. Our corporate governance rules make it far easier for CEOs and other top executives to pull down incredibly high paychecks than is the case in Europe or East Asia. Again, this is simply how the government structures the market – we are not choosing between government intervention and a supposedly free market.

It is understandable that people who approve of the rise in inequality claim that it is just the natural workings of the market. After all, blaming the market sounds much better than saying we rigged the market to redistribute income upward. But those who are bothered by inequality – and want to do something about it – should resist this obviously false narrative.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post The Elites Big Lie on Equality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Today is the federal holiday that honors civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was born January 15, 1929, and was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at just 39 years old. We play an excerpt from King’s last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” in which he spoke of the ongoing struggle for equal rights that he said would continue even without him. “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land,” King said. He was killed one day later.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Oh, yeah, that Messiah, Mister Rapist, Grifter, Dirtier than Dirt Kushner-Guided, Roy Cohen-Trained TRUMP: “My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’”

Read the Time Magazine article written  by his nephew.

Here, reality check for democrats and republicans:

Some legit writing here from me to be published in “legit” media around my area:

When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful

“I’d like to have enough resources, money, to take a trip somewhere. I don’t want to be homeless if housing finds out I have extra money in my bank account.”

Seems like a wish for anyone supposedly in the land of the free – not to be homeless. Variations on this goal were broached at the Oct. 23-24 self-advocacy meeting at the Best Western at Agate Beach.

More than forty people attended the planning and visioning session to carve out some future collective goal to make change a community of people living in the developmental disability and neurodiverse world. One of the main organizers of this self-advocacy event is Julie Chick, Sammy’s Place Director, a nonprofit out of Nehalem.

I attended the event wearing several hats – an educator, an activist, journalist and assisting working with clients in the neurodiverse “world” with Essential Services. Right out of the blocks I asked Chick to synthesize what she got out of the two-day meeting.

What did you find valuable in the event?

“The person-to-person connections and relationships again can be taken for granted by those that easily access their community, and can be difficult if you have no wheels or knowledge of public transportation. Relationships of all types are the bedrock of humanity, yet some of the people in our DD system had not had much opportunity to get out and make friends. These folks have been meeting though this self-advocacy work, Arc of Lincoln’s Day Services Activities, and Beach Buddies, and their circle is growing with some coming in from other counties.”

The critical mass around self-advocacy is fighting for basic rights, like lifting up the maximum allowable savings and checking account balance above the draconian $2000 law.

With such a limit on money given to or earned by people living in subsidized housing, and those receiving disability payments from the government, and other services, like personal assistants, the fear losing those hard-fought safety nets is palatable.

Connecting with others along the coast, in the seven counties situated along the Pacific, the participants were passionate and determined to come away with tools to advocate for themselves not only politically, but through better transportation services, more opportunities to make money on the side with arts and crafts creations, and better ways to make personal connections, even romantic ones.

“I want to meet people who respect me for who I am and so I can follow my dreams,” stated advocate Frank Perdue. “I don’t understand why ‘normal’ people don’t want to go out on dates with people like us. We need better opportunities to meet people who think like us.”

For anyone interested in the complexities of life as a man or woman living in the neurodiverse world, a recent Hulu documentary might be their entry point. “Patrice” follows New Jersey school crossing guard Patrice Jetter. The kids love her, and she loves them.

She is also an amazing artist, entertainer and performer. She is romantically involved with Garry, who lives with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. The story is about a commitment ceremony – between Patrice and Garry – since they were told their marriage quest would jeopardize their individual monthly social security stipends and their subsidized housing.

The documentary utilizes vérité footage of Patrice and Garry’s daily life, both together and apart. Their lives are at a rather challenging level just accomplishing daily routines like preparing a meal. Patrice walks with a cane and leg braces, whereas Garry uses a wheelchair and needs help into bed.

They both have their separate apartments, 20 minutes apart via bus. Also part of the movie is the handicapped-equipped van Patrice owns which breaks down for good in the documentary. Much of Patrice’s story focuses on raising funds (and awareness) around a vehicle they need – for Patrice to get to work as a school crossing guard and for Garry to live a more mobile life with his significant other. Collecting aluminum cans just won’t cut the $55,000 price tag, and alas, a Go Fund Me drive gets Patrice to that goal and the new vehicle.

Many of my current and past clients will relate well with this documentary, from the Special Olympics participation, to the end-of-the-month dilemma of $28 left for food or incidentals. The shared values and the care each of the main protagonists display should melt any cold heart, but the reality is that both democrats and republicans have stalled on a marriage equity bill allowing a legal union AND continuation of both spouses’ Social Security/Medicaid support.

Garry and Patrice had terrible upbringings and experiences  during their formative years, and Patrice’s reads read like a horror story of abuse, bullying, assaults and rape. The oppression from the government agencies is just another knife in the heart. We learn that Patrice’s mother was from a family of abusers, and that Patrice’s stepfather abused her mother.

Patrice is on her own as her siblings are dead, as well as her mother. But by the end of the movie, with the Go Fund Me videos, it is clear that she has a plethora of friends and tribal family.

Compelling is Patrice’s real life friend, Elizabeth Dicker, who happens to be the Accessibility Specialist at Rutgers Center for Adult Autism Services. Elizabeth summarizes how Garry and Patrice’s situation is not just cruel, but also illogical:

“If two people are having Medicaid benefits, and then those two people get married and then they just don’t lose their benefits, how is the government making or losing any money?”

Situating the real policy issues now, after billions ($15.5 billion) were spent on the 2024 elections, we learn from advocates like Julie Chick and Frank Perdue that the limitations on Supplemental Security Income are badly out of date.

Organizations like Oregon Self Advocacy Coalition (OSAC) work hard to engage communities in advocating for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

I spoke at length with Gabrielle Guedon, director of OSAC. She was really interested in the power of the press to bring OSAC members’ struggles to the general public. She is also inviting people to read the GO! Bulletin on how to get involved in advocacy about policies.

She lives by this credo by Malala Youseif: —

And, on the OSAC webpage we see she’s just like anyone you might know:

“I build miniature doll houses and make pillow cases. I love camping. I’m a carb-o-holic! I like rock-n-roll and I would love to visit Australia.”

Fred C. Trump III is the author of

All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.

In January 2020, just before COVID hit, Lisa, myself, and a team of advocates met with Chris Neeley, who headed the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, a much-needed federal advisory committee that promotes policies and initiatives that support independent and lifelong inclusion. We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders. This was not about more government spending. It was about smarter investing and greater efficiency.

We spent the next few months making calls and talking with officials and gathering our own recommendations, giving special attention to the critical need for housing support for people with disabilities. We were back in Washington in May.

By this time, COVID was raging. We were all masked up and COVID tested on the way into the White House Cabinet Room. Once we got inside, we sat down with Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of health and human services, and Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health, both of whom served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The promising agency motto stated: HHS: Enhancing the Health and Well-Being of All Americans.

Sharp, direct, and to the point, Azar exhibited my kind of efficiency with no time to waste. His first question was, “OK, why are you here?”

I made a brief introduction. Our group included a leading doctor and several highly qualified advocates. What followed was a great discussion. Something clicked with Giroir—an idea for a program everyone could agree on that would cut through the bureaucracy and control costs and also yield better and more efficient medical outcomes.

Excellent. We were making progress.

“Really appreciate your coming in,” Azar finally said, more warmly than he had sounded at the start. “I know we’re going to see the President.”

The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office with all of us—Azar, Giroir, the advocates, and me. I never expected to be there so long. Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.

Donald was still Donald, of course. He bounced from subject to subject—disability to the stock market and back to disability. But promisingly, Donald seemed genuinely curious regarding the depth of medical needs across the U.S. and the individual challenges these families faced. He told the secretary and the assistant secretary to stay in touch with our group and to be supportive.

After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.

Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”

“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”

“Sure, happy to do it.”

He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.

“Those people … ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.

I turned and walked away.

And, yes, this is an equal deformity essay, so, drum roll, Harris did what?

And, yes, bullying at school is a effing big thing, leading to depression, and, yep, suicide. But another clown just didn’t/doesn’t get it.

The Human Costs Of Kamala Harris’ War On Truancy

[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla Rucker, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization.]

On the morning of April 18, 2013, in the Los Angeles suburb of Buena Park, a throng of photographers positioned themselves on a street curb and watched as two police officers entered a squat townhouse. Minutes later, their cameras began clicking. The officers had re-emerged with a weary-looking woman in pajamas and handcuffs, and the photographers were jostling to capture her every step.

“You would swear I had killed somebody,” the woman, Cheree Peoples, said in a recent interview.

In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.

[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization. (Credit: Tara Pixley for HuffPost) ABOVE: Buena Park police officers Luis Garcia (left) and James Woo escort Peoples, 33, to their patrol car on April 18, 2013. She was handcuffed and under arrest.]

Yet the penalties she once championed for truancy and the way she originally thought about the issue are foundational to how California handles truancy today. Peoples’ arrest wasn’t a freak occurrence ― it was the inevitable outcome of Harris’ campaign to fuse the problem of truancy with the apparatus of law enforcement. And Peoples is far from an outlier. There are still hundreds of families across California entering the criminal justice system under the aegis of Harris’ law.

“I think it was a good thing that she shined a light on [truancy],” Jeff Adachi, who served as San Francisco’s chief public defender from January 2003 until his death on Feb. 22, told HuffPost in February. “There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school — it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”

“What it ended up being, practically, is families and kids having to come to court to be told to utilize certain services in order to come to school. Which, from where I sit, is very much the job of the school district and not the job of the criminal court.” – a public defender

And then this criminal, Trump?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Climate justice and gender equality cannot be achieved separately, a Pacific women’s conference heard this week.

Marshall Islands President Dr Hilda Heine said the climate crisis faced in the region and the world would make gender equality more difficult to attain.

“For example, we know that we cannot have gender equality without climate justice, and vice versa,” Dr Heine told delegates at the the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women gathered in the Northern Pacific for the first time in 40 years.

• READ MORE: Other articles in the Pacific Women series

“Our aspirations are shared,” Dr Heine said.

“We have convened on Majuro because of one of those aspirations is the empowerment of Pacific women and girls in all their diversities and ultimately to reach gender parity in our region.”

President Heine said that for gender parity to be achieved, every Pacific woman’s ability, talent dreams would need to be harnessed.

“We must draw on the resourcefulness of Pacific women, rich in our diverse cultures and traditions, to map a way forward for us, tapping into our region’s diversity and creativity to find solutions that are embedded in our Pacific philosophies and world views,” she said.

“We know that the climate crisis will make achieving gender equality even harder — and that we cannot solve the climate crisis without gender equality.”

Women hit fastest, hardest
Heine said women were often hit fastest and hardest by climate impacts.

“They are the first responders of the family, responsible for ensuring that the family is taken care of and healthy,” she said.

“As climate change brings droughts, they are charged with securing water; when children or the elderly are affected by extreme heat, it is women who are the primary caregivers.

“In the Marshalls, where women often participate in the informal economy through the production of handicrafts, for example, we know that the material used for those handicrafts are at risk as sea levels rise and salt water inundates our arable land.

“Women are also central to the solutions to the climate crisis.”

Dr Heine said Pacific women had been some of the strongest voices for climate ambition at the international level while at home they were caretakers for solar panels, providing communities with clean energy.

She described them as being at the heart of securing climate justice.

‘Gains are far from consistent’
Two regional meetings took place on Majuro Atoll this week — the 8th Ministers for Women meeting and the 3rd PIF Women Leaders Meeting.

Political commentators said this showed that regional leaders recognised the importance of gender equality and the meetings provided opportunities to collectively discuss how to advance their commitments to the issue at national, regional and international levels.

President Heine acknowledged that the Pacific had made what she described as remarkable progress on women’s rights on many fronts in recent decades.

“But these gains are far from consistent and much more remains to be done,” she warned.

Women’s health, gender-based violence, and climate justice were the themes for discussion during the conferences and highlight some of the key challenges Pacific women continue to face.

Dr Heine said all these issues aggravated the impacts of inequalities faced by women and girls as a result of existing social norms and structures.

She said the triennial conference and the Pacific Ministers for Women meeting were important platforms at which to unpack these and other barriers to gender equality.

Netani Rika is an award-winning Fiji journalist with 30 years of experience in Pacific regional writing. The joint owner of Islands Business magazine he is communications manager of the Pacific Conference of Churches and is in Majuro, Marshall Islands, covering the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

After Sunday’s local elections, Turkey’s highest election authority, the Supreme Election Council (YSK), rescinded the victory of a pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) mayoral candidate on Tuesday, in the eastern metropolitan city of Van, on grounds that he was not eligible to run. YSK then certified election results in favor of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which received the second-most votes.

The decision, as well as claims of voter fraud at polling stations in the mostly Kurdish-populated regions of eastern and southeastern Turkey, led to days of social unrest in multiple cities with Van being the foremost epicenter. Another major site of protests and clashes occurred in the southeastern city of Hakkari, where the results of 60 ballots were contested by AKP and six contested by DEM.

Police intervened in the protests with arrests, tear gas,  rubber bullets and water cannons, targeting several field reporters, some of whom were taken into custody. Multiple journalists also reported receiving threats and insults online and offline. 

“Field reporters are among the most vulnerable journalists in Turkey. Security forces, and even civilians, exploit the country’s institutionalized impunity to pressure journalists into not doing their jobs. Their hostility extends to not taking threats against journalists – whether online or face to face — seriously,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should, protect all journalists who believe their security is compromised, remove the issued foreign travel bans, investigate the claims of excessive force, and end the constant violent actions against field reporters.”

All of the field reporters in Van who spoke to CPJ said they were tear-gassed on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Protests ended and turned into celebrations by Wednesday evening in Van after the DEM candidate’s win was recognized by authorities. 

CPJ documented these actions against journalists in post-election unrest:

• Police in the Esenyurt District of Istanbul took four journalists into custody Wednesday while they were following a protest march in solidarity with the DEM Party’s troubles in Van: Ferhat Sezgin with the pro-Kurdish news outlet Mezopotamya Agency, Sema Korkmaz with the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam, Müzeyyen Yüce with the critical news website Artı Gerçek, and Dilan Şimşek from the pro-Alevi PİRHA news agency. Police beat the journalists and broke Sezgin’s nose, and smashed his camera, according to reports. The journalists were brought to an Istanbul courthouse for processing on Friday, according to reports. Prosecutors transferred Sezgin and Korkmaz to a court on duty, asking for their arrests pending investigation while Yüce and Şimşek were released. All four were later released, Sezgin and Korkmaz, under a foreign travel ban.
• Freelance journalist Medine Mamedoğlu, from the southeastern Province of Hakkari, posted on X that she received death threats in connection with her reporting on the protests in Van. Separately, Mamedoğlu was briefly taken into police custody in Hakkari on Wednesday while she was following a protest march. CPJ spoke to the journalist by phone Thursday, and she said her lawyer will file criminal complaints regarding the death threats alongside complaints against the police officers who took her into custody in Hakkari. Mamedoğlu told CPJ that the officers tried to take her two cameras and beat her when she resisted. “They punched me in the mouth, hit me in the back, pulled my hair and throttled me,” she said. One of her two cameras was broken and another suffered a damaged lens, according to the journalist. 
• Freelance journalist Oktay Candemir said in a post on Wednesday that police officers in Van forcibly deleted images on his phone, threatened to get him off the street and insulted him. Candemir told CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday that the officers also punched him in the face. The journalist said he will file a criminal complaint about the incident. 
• Freelance journalist Ruşen Takva was subjected to water cannons from a police tank as he was livestreaming from the streets of Van on Tuesday. The journalist also said, in a post on X on Tuesday, that he was receiving threats and insults on social media over his reporting. Takva talked to CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday and said he will file complaints about the insults and the threats via his lawyer.
• Kadir Cesur, Van reporter for critical news site Gazete Duvar, told CPJ via messaging app on Thursday that he was deliberately shot at with rubber bullets by the police on two separate occasions on Tuesday and Wednesday. “Police were shooting at the protesters with rubber bullets. We were separate from them as a group of journalists. One of the officers suddenly turned and opened fire on us,” said Cesur about the Tuesday incident, when he was shot in his left kneecap. Police also fired at journalists in another location in Van on Wednesday and hit Cesur once more on the left leg. He told CPJ that he hasn’t filed a complaint, and he doesn’t intend to.
• Umut Taştan, a reporter for the critical outlet KRT, reported being hit by the police with rubber bullets in Van on Wednesday. CPJ couldn’t reach Taştan for comment.
• Rabia Önver, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish news website JİNNEWS in Hakkari, was hit by a rubber bullet in the foot as she followed police taking protesters in custody on Wednesday. Önver spoke to CPJ via messaging app and said she was not hurt and won’t be filling a complaint. 
• Muhammed Şakir, a camera operator for the Iraq-based Kurdish outlet Rudaw, was hit on the leg with a gas bomb canister as he reported on the events in Van on Wednesday, his employer shared in a post on X. CPJ couldn’t reach Şakir for comment.
• Ece Üner, a presenter for the critical outlet Sözcü TV, on Wednesday said she received a death threat on X for commenting on the situation in Van. CPJ couldn’t reach Üner for comment.
• Ne Haber Ajansı, a local outlet from the southeastern city of Siirt, reported on Tuesday that their reporters were injured by police and hospitalized while covering protests in their city. CPJ spoke to reporter Yusuf Eren via messaging app on Thursday. Eren was hit in the foot by a tear gas canister, and Bünyamin Aybek, another reporter for the outlet, needed medical help after being exposed to tear gas, he said. 

Meanwhile, multiple news outlets reporting on claims of voting fraud on Sunday were blocked from publishing those stories online in Turkey by court order, local anti-censorship group Free Web Turkey reported.

CPJ emailed the Turkish Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, and the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Progressive economists connect meager wage growth to limited purchasing power ─ one cause of the 2008 crash ─ and increased concentration of wealth to cautious job growth in the post-crash years. Their conclusions have engineered debates on how to achieve equitable distributions in wages and wealth and raise middle-class wages, and the roles private industry, government, and labor unions play in achieving a more equitable society.

If private industry refuses to meet its obligations to readjust the divide, Thomas Piketty recommends increasing taxes on high earners and large estates and coupling them with a wealth tax. This method for resolving income inequality gives government a major role in correcting the unequal distributions of income and wealth.

In previous decades, unions had a larger membership, greater clout, and more strength to move management to meet wage demands. Government lacks a mechanism to force corporations to transfer productivity gains into wage gains. Only corporations can do the trick. Not likely. Corporations do not realize the social and economic benefits of decreasing income inequality and increasing middle-class purchasing power. Lowering remunerations to those in top pay brackets and increasing them for lower-income workers is more than a moral obligation; it has direct benefits to the economy for everyone. It is a requirement for achieving a stable economy.

Social costs due to less equitable income and wealth distributions

Rationalizing poorly distributed wealth by noting the American poor are wealthier than the middle class in many developed nations is deceiving. Poverty is defined as an absolute number but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they earn in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not earn in relation to others living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension and leads to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems means combining giving more to the lower classes and taking less by the upper classes.

The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. One statistical proof is that the United States, classified as the most unequal of the developed nations, except Singapore, had the highest index of social problems. The graph below from 2010-2011 and an earlier article, Health is a Socio-Economic Problem, describe the important relationships.

Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Private industry has an obligation and an opportunity to fix the problem it has caused. If not, Uncle Sam, whom they don’t want on their backs, will reach into their pockets, redistribute the wealth and resolve the situation.

Income inequality produces wealth concentration and political consequences. Wealthy individuals have increased control of the political debate, more influence in selection of candidates, tend to place their interests before national interests, and determine the direction of political campaigns. Skewing the electoral process distorts government and the decisions that guide social and economic legislation. Severe disparities in the concentration of wealth reduce democratic prerogatives, fair elections, and equality before the law.

The Sunlight Foundation, in an article, The Political 1% of the 1% in 2012 by Lee Dustman, June 2013, presents a fact-filled discussion of this topic.
Note: Although statistics are from ten years ago, they are interesting statistics and are relevant today.

More than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in the last campaign cycle came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.

Of the 1% of the 1%’s $1.68 billion in the 2012 cycle, $500.4 million entered the campaign through a super PAC (including almost $100 million from just one couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson). Four out of five 1% of the 1% donors were pure partisans, giving all of their money to one party or the other.

These concerns are likely even more acute for the two parties. In 2012, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised more than half (54.2 percent) of its $105.8 million from the 1% of the 1%, and the National Republican Congressional Committee raised one third (33.0 percent) of its $140.6 million from the 1% of the 1%. Democratic party committees depend less on the 1% of the 1%. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised 12.9 percent of its $128.9 million from these top donors, and the Democratic Congressional Committee raised 20.1 percent of its $143.9 million from 1% of the 1% donors.

To the many billionaires who are tilting election campaigns, add the political contributions by super-sized corporations and industries, and electoral control by the wealthy becomes complete. Campaign contributions from the financial sector, the same financial sector that increased its liabilities from 10 percent of GDP in 1970 to 120 percent of GDP in 2009, and shifted investment from manufacturing to rent-seeking ─ making money the new-fashioned way ─ leads the way.

The Sunlight Foundation article also states:

In 1990, 1,091 elite donors in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).contributed $15.4 million to campaigns ─ a substantial sum at the time. But that’s nothing compared to what they contributed later. In 2010, 5,510 elite donors from the sector contributed $178.2 million, more than 10 times the amount they contributed in 1990.

The Debt of each sector as a percentage of GDP tells the story of the financial sector.
Note: 2022 GDP = $25.4T
          2022 Q4 Debt at the following:
          Total = $89.5T, Household = $19.4T, Business = $20.8T, Finance = $19.3T, Government= $26.8
2022 Percent of GDP at the following:
Household = 72.4%, Business = 81.9%, Finance = 76.8%, Government= 105.5%

The graph shows that the FIRE sector increased its wealth by borrowing money, making the economy work for it rather than working for the economy. The credit enabled the financial industry to grow until it led the nation into the 2008 economic disaster.

The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration

What has occurred with wealth concentration? A previous decade indicated a deflection of investment from dynamic industrial processes to static rent situations, from industries that employ workers to make goods to industries that employ money to make money. Graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) record the trend.

Note: In 2023, Financial sector employment was 9.2M and manufacturing employment was 12.9M.

The graphs plot employment in the manufacturing and financial sectors, Manufacturing had a slow deterioration during the Reagan presidency, followed by stability during the Clinton administration and a sharp decline during the George Bush era. Some deterioration in manufacturing employment is understandable; administrative jobs (clerical, administration) have been displaced by information technologies and these fields have added jobs; factory floor work of consumer goods has been displaced by machines (robot, numerical control) that have their own factory floors; and labor has been transferred from highly labor-intensive manufacturing to service industries. However, the employment loss is excessive and bewildering when compared to the increase in financial employment. Can a healthy economy result from a steady growth in financial workers and a consistent decrease in industrial workers?

Beginning in the Reagan era, until economic collapse in 2008, employment in the financial sector monotonically increased, except for slight blips during the 1991 recession and a few years of the Clinton administration. From a ratio of 1/3 in 1986, financial sector employment rose to 2/3 that of manufacturing employment by 2014, and increased by more than the changes in their respective additions to the Gross Domestic Product. Since the 2009 mini-depression, employment in the financial industry has remained relatively static. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the value added by each industry.

Manufacturing rose from $1390.1 billion in 1997 to $2079.5 billion in 2013, an increase of 50 percent.
Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing rose from $1623.1 billion in 1997 to $3293.2 billion in 2013, an increase of 100 percent.

A comparison between salaries of engineers, those who contribute directly to industrial growth, and financiers, those who drive active and passive investments, also reveals the importance given to those who make money from money.

One of the contributors to Capital, Thomas Philipson, in an article Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006, NBER Working Paper No. 14644, January 2009, shows that wages for the financial sector started a steady growth during the Reagan administration, and eventually exceeded engineering wages, especially for those who had advanced degrees from the elite universities.

As the FIRE industry expands, the purchasing power contracts, one reason being that part of the rent-seeking covets higher returns and gets sidetracked into endless speculation; money rolling over and over and never available to purchase anything but pieces of paper. Millions of arbitrage transactions per second can earn thousands of dollars per second, which adds up to 3.6 million dollars per hour ─ no positive effect on the economy; only paper dollars continually created.

Stagnant labor wages and weak purchasing power force expansion of credit to increase demand, The wealthy respond to credit expansion with accelerated demand for larger houses, larger cars, and more luxury goods, spending that raises asset values and places middle-class earners at a disadvantage. The bottom ninety percent on the income scale desperately pursue debt to give themselves a temporary share of prosperity. Debt must eventually be repaid. Real wealth remains with a privileged few and others remain stagnant.

What is the Result?

Thomas Piketty has reshaped the thinking of the Capitalist system. Economics enables the understanding of how and when to increase demand, enable sufficient purchasing power, and the true meaning of profit.  A better understanding of economics may come from less regard for the conventional economics of modern theorists and more regard for the classical economics of the fathers of political economy ─ Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. The latter provided a controversial concept ─ wages provide purchasing power, and beyond what is bought by that purchasing power is surplus, whose value allows profit.

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Piketty shows that profits are being sidetracked into passive investments that produce only more capital and not useful goods, into the accumulation of excessive personal wealth, and into financial speculation that features the constant churning of paper money, which removes dollars from the market and creates difficulties for manufacturing to grow. Accumulation of excessive wealth generates social problems, diminishes the quality of life, and burdens the middle class when taxes are used to seek relief.

Capturing the political system by those most responsible for the problems ─ the privileged wealthy who manipulate a portion of the electoral process for their advantage ─ hinders routes to ameliorating the deterrents to a fair and successful economy. Due to their financial and political clout, the wealthy have their voices more easily heard in Congress and before federal agencies.

Karl Marx claimed that Capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction. Those who foster severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution apparently want to prove his statement is correct.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Pronatalism is on the rise to counter the growing push for gender equality, contraceptive access, and women’s educational and economic empowerment. It is connected to totalitarian policies dictating reproductive choices, the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the religious anti-abortion movement, tech elite futurism. Elon Musk, for example, is an avowed pronatalist who donated $10 million to population collapse “research” and liked the idea of denying voting rights to childless people. He wanted to attend the Budapest summit, but couldn’t make it so he met last week in Texas with Hungary’s President Novák instead to draw attention to the “demographic crisis.”

Lately pronatalists are trying to pull a more appealing game face. The Budapest Summit says it wants to support the “psychological health and security of families,” so they can “plan for a secure future.” The Natal conference claims it “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren.” The Birthgap film purports to help cure an epidemic of “unplanned childlessness” and proposes “re-engineer[ing] our societies to reduce [it so] many more people would go on to have…children just like parents naturally do.” It conducts tearful interviews with regretful women who lament that their natural drive to have children was thwarted by society, and now it’s too late.

Who could object to standing up for families’ health and security, and for the right of people who want children to have them? Yet behind this innocuous-seeming family-friendly rhetoric lurk unsavory connections to Right-wing propaganda, manipulation, and straight-up lies.

The Budapest summit touts Hungary’s achievement of the “highest rates of marriage and childbearing in Europe, while divorce and abortion rates are falling,” a nice way of saying that its right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán adopted and implemented the Great Replacement ideology, which motivated mass-shooters in the U.S., as state policy. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”

The Natal conference has demonstrable links to far-right eugenicists and racists. Birthgap filmmaker Stephen Shaw is feted by right-wing talk show hosts like Jordan Peterson, Neil Oliver, and Chris Williamson, and presented as a “renowned demographer” despite having no credentials in demography. Shaw and Peterson both gave keynotes at the Budapest summit.

But ad hominem objections to the people behind the conferences and the film aside, the assertions they make are discreditable and counterfactual. Decrying imminent “population collapse” while the global population grows by 80 million each year and is projected to hit 10.4 billion in the 2080s is absurd. To make depopulation seem like a threat, Birthgap resorts to lying about data on the reasons for declining birth rates. It cites a 2010 study (which it calls a “meta-analysis”) by Prof. Renska Keizer which the film says indicates that just 10% of women chose not to have children and 10% can’t have them for medical reasons, which “leaves a whopping 80% of women without children childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

But that’s not at all what Keizer’s research says. The 2010 study Birthgap cites is not a meta-analysis, not quantitative, and does not indicate 80% of childless women didn’t choose to be so. In fact a 2011 study by Keizer et al. analyzed a 2006 dataset surveying women in the Netherlands who were childless at age 45, and found that 55% of them were childless voluntarily, while 45% were childless due to medical or other reasons. Other studies found similar results: 56% of those without children were voluntarily childless according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 72% according to the CDC National Survey of Family Growth, and 74% according to a 2022 Michigan State University study. Researchers working on my organization’s fact-checking project Birthgap Facts found no credible data supporting the film’s claim that 80% of childless women were “childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

What the data does show is that women exercising their right to choose if and when to have children results in delaying childbirth, smaller families, and a decline in teen pregnancy. Those outcomes are beneficial and should be celebrated, not stigmatized.

According to the United Nations, at least 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18 every year, and more than 650 million women alive today were married as children. Around 257 million women globally face unintended pregnancies due to lack of access to contraception, abortion care, and counseling.

At current levels of consumption, today’s population of eight billion is driving resource depletion, soil erosion, water shortages, species extinctions, and climate catastrophe. Over a billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from climate change. High fertility rates and population growth undermine climate resilience and complicate efforts to end poverty and hunger and ensure basic services and infrastructure.

These are the real threats to the future, not some imagined conspiracy to stigmatize reproductive choices and hold fertility rates down. They make Shaw’s proposal of “social engineering” to reverse the imaginary threat of depopulation all the more reprehensible. By distorting and lying about childlessness, he’s trying to manipulate young people and their governments into prioritizing procreation over education and career. This purports to avoid a dystopian future, yet it would actually usher one in.

Rather than manufacturing a crisis whose remedy entails “social engineering” to roll back progress on human rights and women’s control over their own lives, we should focus on the real crisis fueled by pronatalist pressures from family, religion, and governments that force millions into motherhood against their wishes, often by means of coercion and sexual violence. The rhetoric of the Budapest summit, Natal, Birthgap and their ilk claiming they’re simply trying to help families and alleviate the heartbreak of “unplanned childlessness” is insidious, and we should recognize and call it out for what it is: another arrow in the pronatalist quiver, another weapon wielded against hard-fought gains in gender equality and reproductive autonomy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nandita Bajaj.

Pronatalism is on the rise to counter the growing push for gender equality, contraceptive access, and women’s educational and economic empowerment. It is connected to totalitarian policies dictating reproductive choices, the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the religious anti-abortion movement, tech elite futurism. Elon Musk, for example, is an avowed pronatalist who donated $10 million to population collapse “research” and liked the idea of denying voting rights to childless people. He wanted to attend the Budapest summit, but couldn’t make it so he met last week in Texas with Hungary’s President Novák instead to draw attention to the “demographic crisis.”

Lately pronatalists are trying to pull a more appealing game face. The Budapest Summit says it wants to support the “psychological health and security of families,” so they can “plan for a secure future.” The Natal conference claims it “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren.” The Birthgap film purports to help cure an epidemic of “unplanned childlessness” and proposes “re-engineer[ing] our societies to reduce [it so] many more people would go on to have…children just like parents naturally do.” It conducts tearful interviews with regretful women who lament that their natural drive to have children was thwarted by society, and now it’s too late.

Who could object to standing up for families’ health and security, and for the right of people who want children to have them? Yet behind this innocuous-seeming family-friendly rhetoric lurk unsavory connections to Right-wing propaganda, manipulation, and straight-up lies.

The Budapest summit touts Hungary’s achievement of the “highest rates of marriage and childbearing in Europe, while divorce and abortion rates are falling,” a nice way of saying that its right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán adopted and implemented the Great Replacement ideology, which motivated mass-shooters in the U.S., as state policy. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”

The Natal conference has demonstrable links to far-right eugenicists and racists. Birthgap filmmaker Stephen Shaw is feted by right-wing talk show hosts like Jordan Peterson, Neil Oliver, and Chris Williamson, and presented as a “renowned demographer” despite having no credentials in demography. Shaw and Peterson both gave keynotes at the Budapest summit.

But ad hominem objections to the people behind the conferences and the film aside, the assertions they make are discreditable and counterfactual. Decrying imminent “population collapse” while the global population grows by 80 million each year and is projected to hit 10.4 billion in the 2080s is absurd. To make depopulation seem like a threat, Birthgap resorts to lying about data on the reasons for declining birth rates. It cites a 2010 study (which it calls a “meta-analysis”) by Prof. Renska Keizer which the film says indicates that just 10% of women chose not to have children and 10% can’t have them for medical reasons, which “leaves a whopping 80% of women without children childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

But that’s not at all what Keizer’s research says. The 2010 study Birthgap cites is not a meta-analysis, not quantitative, and does not indicate 80% of childless women didn’t choose to be so. In fact a 2011 study by Keizer et al. analyzed a 2006 dataset surveying women in the Netherlands who were childless at age 45, and found that 55% of them were childless voluntarily, while 45% were childless due to medical or other reasons. Other studies found similar results: 56% of those without children were voluntarily childless according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 72% according to the CDC National Survey of Family Growth, and 74% according to a 2022 Michigan State University study. Researchers working on my organization’s fact-checking project Birthgap Facts found no credible data supporting the film’s claim that 80% of childless women were “childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

What the data does show is that women exercising their right to choose if and when to have children results in delaying childbirth, smaller families, and a decline in teen pregnancy. Those outcomes are beneficial and should be celebrated, not stigmatized.

According to the United Nations, at least 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18 every year, and more than 650 million women alive today were married as children. Around 257 million women globally face unintended pregnancies due to lack of access to contraception, abortion care, and counseling.

At current levels of consumption, today’s population of eight billion is driving resource depletion, soil erosion, water shortages, species extinctions, and climate catastrophe. Over a billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from climate change. High fertility rates and population growth undermine climate resilience and complicate efforts to end poverty and hunger and ensure basic services and infrastructure.

These are the real threats to the future, not some imagined conspiracy to stigmatize reproductive choices and hold fertility rates down. They make Shaw’s proposal of “social engineering” to reverse the imaginary threat of depopulation all the more reprehensible. By distorting and lying about childlessness, he’s trying to manipulate young people and their governments into prioritizing procreation over education and career. This purports to avoid a dystopian future, yet it would actually usher one in.

Rather than manufacturing a crisis whose remedy entails “social engineering” to roll back progress on human rights and women’s control over their own lives, we should focus on the real crisis fueled by pronatalist pressures from family, religion, and governments that force millions into motherhood against their wishes, often by means of coercion and sexual violence. The rhetoric of the Budapest summit, Natal, Birthgap and their ilk claiming they’re simply trying to help families and alleviate the heartbreak of “unplanned childlessness” is insidious, and we should recognize and call it out for what it is: another arrow in the pronatalist quiver, another weapon wielded against hard-fought gains in gender equality and reproductive autonomy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nandita Bajaj.

The Supreme Court in June disallowed affirmative action in education that had provided relief from discrimination based on racial identity. Affirmative action was to have compensated for past oppression and, in our era, was offering equality to some descendants of the victims.

Young people heading for medical school interacted with affirmative action. The policy eased the way for some of those identified by their skin color to become medical students.  Black youths with economic resources gained, while most of the others did not.

The story here begins with an article from 2000 written by health-policy researchers Magnus and Mick. Affirmative action, they suggested, should “include social class as a supplement to race,” and medical schools “should weigh the possibility of class-based affirmative action.” Sociologists, they noted, have detected “a characteristically American discomfort with the subject of social class… [and] American researchers do not even gather relevant statistics.”

The authors claimed that affirmative action particularly benefited those “economically privileged individuals who belong to ethnic minority groups.” And, “downplaying social class in admissions decisions” assured that most medical students, Black and white, would be of “the middle and upper classes.”

No research was available, they indicated, showing that “access to medical education [was] diminished for lower-SES (socioeconomic status) students.”

We soon published a study of the social-class affiliation of white and Black medical students. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) supplied data based on the responses to questionnaires of successful applicants to all U.S. medical schools between 1990 and 2000.  There were 96,480 white students and 10,181 Black students.

We found that “parents of medical students command significant financial resources, more by far than are available to U.S. families in general.” Median family income for all families in those years was $41,606; for the parents of all black families, $29,114; for the parents of all medical students, $70,000.  Median family income for the parents of white students was $75,000; for the parents of Black students. $49, 000. So, “most Black students [and white students] admitted to medical schools have parents who enjoy at least moderate economic prosperity.”

Data on the parents’ educational levels likewise suggested that relatively few medical students, white or Black, grew up in economically deprived circumstances. For example, in the general population 26.6% of white men and 21% of white women were college graduates.  Only 13% of Black men and 13.6% of Black women had completed college. By contrast, over 25% of the Black fathers and mothers of entering medical students had earned at least a master’s degree; 50% of those fathers had finished college. More than 50% of the fathers of white medical students had completed graduate-level programs.

Most of the parents, Black and white, worked in occupations promising comfortable life styles, and more. We concluded that, “Most beginning medical students—African American and white alike … had parents who are high earners and well educated and whose work was professional, executive, or intellectual in nature.”

Affirmative action, initiated in 1965, led to change. Blacks represented 2% of all U.S. medical students in 1960. Among entering medical students, 6.1%  were Black In 2011, and 10% in 2022.  Even so, the current  5% of all U.S. physicians who are Black, up from 2% in 1960, do not match the 14% or so proportion of Black people in the U.S. population today.

Affirmative action had failed twice. It opened up medical education to a fraction of Black youths only. And the goal of producing enough Black physicians to upgrade quality of care for Black people was defeated, this on the theory that with more of them, access to care would improve and physician-patient relationships would be sympathetic.

Affirmative action worked as it was supposed to.  Black applicants for admission to medical schools were being accepted over the years at rates varying from 34% to 40%, rates similar to, or slightly below, those of white applicants. It was too late.

Discrimination precedes application processes and involves more than racial identity. As regards medical school admissions, affirmative action ultimately served economically-secure Black youths while doing nothing for others who had already been excluded.

In 2020, 29.2% of Black children and 9.1% of white children grew up in poverty. Those children’s lives, and the lives of other Black and white children, were precarious, thanks to economic oppression. Families were enduring low-wage jobs, shifting employment, crowded housing, and stresses relating to racism. Schooling was often poor. In circumstances like these, most Black young people wouldn’t be thinking about careers as doctors.

Now would be the time for a kind of affirmative action to end all discrimination and no longer exclude. The individualized approach to widespread economic hardship, as advanced by New York Times writer David French, is so puny as to be rejected at once in favor of a reality-based proposal.

The Supreme Court, he explains, “left in place a number of alternative admissions measures that can both increase diversity and address real injustice.” He agrees with Justice Clarence Thomas:  the states could give “admissions preference to identified victims of discrimination,” as long as racial discrimination is not involved. If “an applicant has less financial means … then surely a university may take that into account.”

A recent report praises the University of California at Davis Medical School, “because of its ability to bring in diverse students using what the schools says are “race-neutral” socioeconomic models.” Now “a vast majority of the U.C. Davis class — 84 percent — comes from disadvantaged backgrounds, and 42 percent are the first in their family to go to college.”

That medical school apparently recognized its obligation as a public institution to train economically-deprived youth to become physicians and to select students that would match a region’s ethnic diversity. That model may not resonate soon.

The American Association of Medical Colleges recently showed that for 30 years ending in 2017, around 75% of entering medical students benefitted from household income in the top 40% of U.S. households. Each year for 11 years ending in 2017, the parents of between 24% and 30% of the students accounted for incomes in the top 5% of households.  The parents of only 5% of the students took in income at the 20% lowest level.

Most U.S. medical students attend private medical schools and the larger, well-established public ones. The AAMC indicates that “overrepresentation of the highest income levels and the underrepresentation of the lowest income levels is more pronounced” in medical schools than in U.S. colleges and universities.

That may be so, but one wonders, given the picture of undergraduate life painted by commentator David Brooks on June 29: “We’ve wound up with a system where rich kids dominate elite schools,” he claims: “these elite places become these little islands where rich people pass down their advantages to their kids.”

New thinking is required. Instead of individualized rise-to-the-top fantasies, there would be affirmative action of a new type, one versatile enough for use in promoting equality both as physicians are prepared, and as young people build lives. It would be a tool for collective effort and movement toward the social change needed for survival.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

The Forum’s Chair, Epsy Campbell Barr, said it was vital to boost investment to help the poorest of the poor, and meet “elemental demands” for basic services like clean water.

She spoke to UN News’s Pauline Batista in our studio at UN Headquarters in New York.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Pauline Batista.

Florida Republicans on Thursday approved a draconian bill that, among other things, would enable the state to take trans children away from their parents if they are receiving gender-affirming healthcare, even though such care is consistent with the guidance of every major medical organization in the United States.

In addition to trying to authorize kidnapping, Senate Bill 254 also seeks to limit the ability of trans adults to start or continue receiving gender-affirming care and threatens to put doctors who violate the new restrictions behind bars.

The legislation—condemned by civil rights advocates as the Criminalizing Gender-Affirming Care Bill—passed the state Senate in a 26-13 vote and the House by a margin of 83-28. It now heads to the desk of far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis. The presumptive candidate for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination has previously voiced support for the measure and is expected to sign it into law, upon which it would take immediate effect.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation."

Seven Florida parents who are currently challenging state boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine rules prohibiting gender-affirming care for their children and other trans youth plan to ask a federal court to block provisions in S.B. 254 that would codify the existing boards' bans and create additional barriers for families with trans children.

They are represented by Southern Legal Counsel, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The groups issued a joint statement denouncing Florida for "doubl[ing] down on denying science, intruding on family privacy and parental decision-making, and trampling on the rights and well-being of transgender adolescents."

"The bill passed by the Legislature today interferes even further with families, deliberately provoking conflict by inviting challenges to established custody orders. This exacerbates the state of emergency for parents who are already being forced to watch their kids suffer rather than get them the effective healthcare they need and that will allow them to thrive," says the statement. "We will take swift action to ask the federal court to block the ban on access to essential healthcare in S.B. 254, as well as the boards of medicine bans, to stop further harm to transgender youth and their families while the plaintiffs' case continues."

Similar bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth have been blocked by federal judges in Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Under S.B. 254, the state could take custody of a child who "has been subjected to or is threatened with being subjected to" gender-affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers.

As The New Republicreported:

Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as "sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures" and qualifies this care as a form of "physical harm."

Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

[...]

Minors who have already begun transitioning will be allowed to continue to do so, but they are no longer allowed to receive care via telehealth, including for prescriptions. Their doctors have to tell them about the "risks" of gender-affirming care, and patients will have to sign an informed consent form, which the ACLU has pointed out often contains misinformation. Doctors who violate any of these new rules could be charged with a felony.

Equality Florida, the state's largest LGBTQ+ rights group, noted that "while much of the bill proponents' rhetoric focused on transgender youth, multiple bill provisions impact consenting transgender adults."

As the organization explained, "The bill bans government entities from offering them gender-affirming healthcare insurance, restricts their ability to access telehealth for care in the way nearly all other healthcare can be delivered, and denies their ability to receive care from highly trained nurses that provide a large portion of the gender-affirming care in the state." Anyone who violates these provisions could face misdemeanor charges.

As repressive as S.B. 254 is, opponents successfully narrowed the bill from the "much more extreme" House companion filed by state Rep. Randy Fine (R-33), the group pointed out. "Provisions previously approved by the House majority would have banned private health insurance providers from covering care for transgender adults and barred transgender Floridians from updating the gender on their birth certificates. The bill as passed also allows certain transgender youth already receiving gender-affirming treatments to continue doing so, whereas the House provisions would have terminated all care by the end of the year."

Equality Florida public policy director Jon Harris Maurer said that S.B. 254 "painfully shows Gov. DeSantis' 'Florida freedom' farce."

"It's an assault on medical freedom and the freedom to parent," Maurer lamented. "After weaponizing the state's Medicaid agency and Board of Medicine against the transgender community, the governor's surrogates have now rammed through legislation to override parental decision-making, jail Florida doctors following best practices, and force adults to jump through government hoops to access their daily medication. This crusade is about political aspirations, but it has real-world consequences for Florida families."

Maurer's critical assessment was echoed by Cathryn Oakley, HRC's state legislative director and senior counsel.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation," said Oakley. "This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare simply because those people are transgender; it prevents parents from being able to access best-practice, potentially lifesaving healthcare supported by the entire American medical establishment on behalf of their children; it prevents healthcare providers from delivering best-practice medical care; and it even threatens to overturn out-of-state custody determinations."

"This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare."

Oakley warned that "if Gov. DeSantis signs this bill, he will be disrespecting the United States Constitution as well as the rule of law, not to mention transgender Floridians, their families, and their medical care providers."

"Many families are making plans to leave the state to protect their children and get them the care they need to stay alive," she added. "The Human Rights Campaign is committed to doing everything in our power to fight back against these discriminatory bills and give LGBTQ+ children the futures they deserve."

S.B. 254, The New Republic observed, is "one of the cruelest" anti-trans bills yet passed in the country. "State Republicans have openly admitted they 'hate' LGBTQ people and are comfortable with 'erasing' the community from existence."

Equality Florida urged people to call DeSantis' office at 850-717-9337 to assert that "hate has no place" in the state.

As the organization noted, "S.B. 254's passage comes amidst an unprecedented barrage of anti-LGBTQ, anti-freedom bills in the final week of the 2023 legislative session," all of which DeSantis is expected to sign into law. It elaborated:

On Tuesday, the Legislature passed S.B. 1580, known as the License to Discriminate in Healthcare bill, which creates a broad license for healthcare providers and insurance companies to refuse services based on a "religious, moral, or ethical belief." Despite fears from LGBTQ advocates that this could open the door for discrimination in healthcare services, the bill passed on a party-line vote.

On Wednesday, three bills on the Slate of Hate were sent to the governor. H.B. 1069, the Don't Say LGBTQ Expansion Bill... extends last year's censorship of classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity now up to eighth grade and overrides a parent's right to ensure that school personnel address their transgender child with the correct title and pronouns. The bill also dramatically accelerates book-banning efforts in Florida, allowing any person in a county to automatically remove a book from school shelves pending a lengthy review on the grounds of certain objections. The Legislature then passed H.B. 1521, the Anti-Transgender Bathroom Ban, that imposes new restrictions mandating that bathroom use be separated by sex assigned at birth in schools, universities, public stadiums, regional convention centers, airports, and all government buildings. And finally, H.B. 999, which included language banning public funding for LGBTQ-inclusive diversity and inclusion programs in our state colleges and universities.

Florida's hateful offensive is part of a broader nationwide attack carried out by Republican lawmakers and officials. The GOP claims to be "protecting children," but in reality, it is criminalizing LGBTQ+ people of all ages, putting them at increased risk of violence and self-harm.

HRC said it is opposing more than 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in statehouses across the country so far in 2023. According to the group, "More than 220 of those bills would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people, the highest number of bills targeting transgender people in a single year to date."

HRC is currently tracking:

• More than 125 bills that would prevent transgender youth from being able to access age-appropriate, medically necessary, best-practice healthcare; this year, 13 have already become law in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana;
• More than 30 bathroom ban bills; and
• More than 100 curriculum censorship bills and 45 anti-drag performance bills.

"In a coordinated push led by national anti-LGBTQ+ groups, which deployed vintage discriminatory tropes, politicians in statehouses across the country introduced 315 discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2022," HRC noted. "Despite this, fewer than 10% of these efforts [29] succeeded. The majority of the discriminatory bills—149 bills—targeted the transgender and nonbinary community, with the majority targeting children... By the end of the 2022 legislative session, a record 17 bills attacking transgender and nonbinary children passed into law."

"Support for LGBTQ+ rights is on the rise in Florida and nationwide," the group pointed out, citing recent survey data showing that 80% of Florida residents back anti-discrimination protections and 66% oppose refusal of service on religious groups. According to the same poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, roughly 80% of U.S. adults favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations, up from 71% in 2015.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

More than 450 North Carolina healthcare professionals in recent days have signed an open letter condemning a proposed state ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, legislation the signatories decried as a "dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine."

"As North Carolina healthcare professionals deeply committed to protecting our patients and preserving the trusting and informed relationship between patient and provider, we adamantly oppose any bans or restrictions on access to and provision of lifesaving, gender-affirming care," the doctors, nurses, therapists, and other medical professionals wrote in the letter to state lawmakers.

Among the anti-LGBTQ+ bills recently introduced in North Carolina's Republican-led Legislature is the so-called Youth Health Protection Act, which if passed will ban doctors from providing hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and other gender-affirming care. Violators would lose their medical licenses and be fined $1,000.

The letter continues:

Any legislation restricting or banning lifesaving care represents dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine and will be detrimental to the health of transgender and gender-diverse North Carolinians, including youth. The decision of whether and when to seek gender-affirming care, which can include mental and physical health interventions, is personal and involves careful consideration by each patient and their family, along with guidance from their medical providers. These decisions should not be made by politicians or the government. This extreme intrusion will not only disrupt the patient-provider relationship, but will discourage talented healthcare providers from staying and providing all manner of healthcare within North Carolina.

"We applaud healthcare providers for taking a stand for trans youth and the LGBTQ+ community. Their voices are a powerful force against the hateful attacks on trans kids," Kendra Johnson, executive director at the advocacy group Equality NC, said in a statement praising the letter. "Legislators need to stay out of our private lives and let healthcare providers do their jobs."

Allison Scott, director of impact and innovation at the Campaign for Southern Equality, said that "we're grateful to see this overwhelming chorus of medical providers calling this legislation out for what it is—extreme overreach of government into private citizens' medical care, with no concern for facts or medical best practices."

"North Carolina's leading medical experts are demanding that lawmakers listen to their concerns, and accepted medical best practices, before rushing through this dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ agenda," Scott added.

The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are among the many medical groups supporting gender-affirming care for minors. A study published last year by the University of Washington found that youth who received such healthcare were 73% less likely to experience suicidality and 60% less likely to suffer from depression than minors who did not get care.

Yet GOP-led state legislatures in 2023 have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at banning or severely limiting gender-affirming healthcare for minors, according to the ACLU, and more than a dozen states have passed laws outlawing such care.

"Each time our legislators propose laws targeting our LGBTQ+ community, they hurt our family and thousands of other families," Sarah Eyssen, a North Carolina mother of a transgender daughter, wrote in a recent Charlotte Observer opinion piece. "These bills communicate to everyone that it's okay to treat members of the LGBTQ+ community differently. It's okay to discriminate, even against a child."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The state of Alabama's top early education official was forced out Friday by Gov. Kay Ivey over a teacher resource guide—one that promotes inclusion of various kinds of families and acknowledges the reality of racism in the nation's history—the Republican leader denounced as too "woke."

After an apparent refusal to denounce the book or accept its removal, Barbara Cooper, head of the Alabama Department of Early Education, was compelled to tender her resignation, which Ivey accepted.

The text in question is a widely-used resource guide for early childhood educators that informs teachers that the "early education system is not immune" from the forces of "systemic and institutional racism" embedded in the history and development of the United States.

The book, according to a review of its contents by the Associated Press, also urges inclusion and understanding for young children coming into education programs from all kinds of different families.

"Early childhood programs also serve and welcome families that represent many compositions. Children from all families (e.g., single parent, grandparent-led, foster, LGBTQIA+) need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity, and worth," states the resource guide.

A spokesperson for Ivey's office, Gina Maiola, identified the book as the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th edition and told reporters that copies of the text had been removed from all classrooms in the state.

Maiola said the book's glossary "includes equally disturbing concepts that the Ivey Administration and the people of Alabama in no way, shape or form believe should be used to influence school children, let alone four-year-olds."

The NAEYC, a national accrediting board that supplies materials and performs reviews for educational institutions and teachers nationwide, states on its website that the organization "promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research."

According to AP:

The book is a guide for early childhood educators. It is not a curriculum taught to children.

The governor's office, in a press release, cited two examples from the book—one discussing white privilege and that "the United States is built on systemic and structural racism" and another that Ivey's office claimed teaches LGBTQ+ inclusion to 4-year-olds. Those sections, according to a copy of the 881-page book obtained by The Associated Press, discuss combating bias and making sure that all children feel welcome.

On Friday evening, the NAEYC sent a statement to AL.com in response to the ouster of Cooper, who happens to sit on the group's national governing board, and about the resource guide itself.

"For nearly four decades, and in partnership with hundreds of thousands of families and educators, Developmentally Appropriate Practice has served as the foundation for high-quality early childhood education across all states and communities," NAEYC said in the statement.

"While not a curriculum, it is a responsive, educator-developed, educator-informed, and research-based resource that has been honed over multiple generations to support teachers in helping all children thrive and reach their full potential," the group continued. "Building on the good work that is happening in states and communities, NAEYC looks forward to continuing its partnership with families, educators, and policymakers to further ourshared goals of offering joyful learning environments that see, support, and reflect all children and their families."

Megan Carolan, an early childhood researcher, responded to the story online by saying Cooper's ouster was "massively concerning and, I suspect it echoes what many teachers and districts have had to navigate locally."

"This book was a NAEYC-developed resource used as a guide, not curriculum," Carolan added. And while Alabama ranks poorly in public education performance overall, she remarked that the state "is commonly hailed as a success in early childhood education."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

Faced with persistent attacks from Florida Republicans, including presumed 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis, immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights groups on Wednesday issued advisories for traveling to the southeastern U.S. state.

The moves by the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC) and Equality Florida follow the NAACP Florida State Conference voting unanimously last month to ask the national group's board of directors to issue a travel advisory for the Black community.

FLIC's advisory—issued as a website—comes as DeSantis pressures the GOP-controlled state Legislature to pass measures that would threaten Florida residents with felony charges if they provide undocumented immigrants with shelter, transportation, or work while also requiring publicly funded schools and hospitals to participate in the crackdown.

"Travel to all areas of Florida should be done with extreme caution as it can be unsafe for people of color, individuals who speak with an accent, and international travelers," the website warns. "Due to unconstitutional legislation supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis and introduced by legislative leadership, every county in Florida poses a heightened risk of harassment, possible detainment, and potential family separation based on racial profiling."

The coalition's site also notes that "naturalized and U.S. citizens of African, Latin American, Central American, Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islander descent are not immune from racial profiling, heightened scrutiny, and false arrest."

Additionally, as the site explains:

Florida is poised to pass laws creating criminal penalties for medical providers who provide medically necessary care for transgender youth, weaponizing the courts to shred existing child custody agreements and reassign transgender youth to an unsupportive parent, and severely restricting access to prescribed medical care for transgender adults.

Florida has passed or is poised to pass bills that restrict access to reproductive healthcare, including a near-total abortion ban, which threatens to force people to travel out of state or seek unsafe, illegal abortions.

Equality Florida similarly pointed to the "passage of laws that are hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, restrict access to reproductive healthcare, repeal gun safety laws and allow untrained, unpermitted carry, and foment racial prejudice" when warning that the Sunshine State "may not be a safe place to visit or take up residence."

Equality Florida executive Director Nadine Smith said in a statement that "as an organization that has spent decades working to improve Florida's reputation as a welcoming and inclusive place to live, work, and visit, it is with great sadness that we must respond to those asking if it is safe to travel to Florida or remain in the state as the laws strip away basic rights and freedoms."

"While losing conferences and top students who have written off Florida threatens lasting damage to our state, it is most heartbreaking to hear from parents who are selling their homes and moving because school censorship, book bans, and healthcare restrictions have made their home state less safe for their children," Smith continued.

"We understand everyone must weigh the risks and decide what is best for their safety, but whether you stay away, leave, or remain we ask that you join us in countering these relentless attacks," she added. "Help reimagine and build a Florida that is truly safe for and open to all, and where freedom is a reality, not a hollow campaign slogan."

Bryan Griffin, a spokesperson for DeSantis, toldThe Florida Times-Union that the new advisories were a "political stunt" and "we aren't going to waste time worrying about political stunts but will continue doing what is right for Floridians."

DeSantis had responded similarly to the NAACP's move last month, saying, "what a joke" and "I'm not wasting my time on your stunts."

The NAACP request came not only amid battles over various laws but also after DeSantis rejected the new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course for high school students.

"Our question to Gov. DeSantis is, 'What sort of future are you fostering for Black Americans throughout Florida while eradicating our historical contributions to this nation?'" said NAACP Florida State Conference chair Adora Obi Nweze. "There is no 'feel-good' version of the horrors and inequalities that Black Americans have faced or continue to face."

"Slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings followed by ongoing school segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, housing discrimination, healthcare disparities, and [the] wage gap are all tough truths to face," she argued. "Misrepresenting the reality of our history promotes ignorance and apathy."

Although the request for an NAACP travel advisory was submitted as a resolution to the national board last month, review and approval of resolutions won't begin until May and is expected to go through July. However, board chairman Leon W. Russell has already weighed in, saying that "the recommendation from our Florida State Conference is a clear indication of just how egregious Gov. DeSantis' actions are."

"Any attempt to intentionally erase or misrepresent Black history is a direct attack on the foundation of comprehensive education. Be clear—Black history is American history," Russell declared. "We are proud of our Florida State Conference for meeting this moment with the equal aggression and intention that is a necessary response to these attacks. Any location in America where our history has been erased does not offer us, or our children, a bright future."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?

Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public school system: 80 percent of children in public school are low-income; 90 percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter. Almost all new residential buildings are high-income; and the city is referred to as “two Bostons.”

In one of these “two Bostons” live low-wage women workers, a wage that consigns them to poverty compounded throughout their lives and in old age. “Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers in the United States are women,” an inequality worsened by racial inequality. Consider, too, the persistent “motherhood penalty”—whereby mothers are further set back financially by lack of paid parental leave and government-funded child care.

But, my worry today for these working mothers and their children that day concerned only one dimension of the arduous reality facing many women—most egregiously women of color—as we mark International Women’s Day, March 8, a day founded on the fact of women’s inequality. Female textile workers launched the first march on March 8, 1857 in protest of unfair working conditions and unequal rights for women—one of the first organized strikes by working women, during which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages.

Women have gained considerable rights since that and subsequent marches, through our own organizing, protests, and arrests: the right to vote, to own property, to inherit, to education, to have once-legal rape in marriage criminalized. A revolution for human rights without weapons, fists or a drop of blood spilled. Yet, only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women; and ours is not even close. Indeed, U.S. women's progress in gaining equality has both stagnated and lost ground.

Worst of all, violence against women by men in all its forms: pornography, rape, prostitution, physical beating, murder increased during Covid. Women’s reproductive rights have been trampled by the 2022 Supreme Court decision to void the right to abortion; and many states are sponsoring a plethora of regulations to deny women access to abortion and birth control. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that domestic abusers can own guns – a “death sentence for women and their families,” given “abusers are five times more likely to kill their victims if they have access to firearms.”

From 2001 to 2019, approximately 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a period of time in which more than 18,000 US women were killed—nearly 3 per day—by current or former intimate partners. (For those who assume male violence and war are inevitable, don’t waste your time on a doomed view. Consider this: during thousands of years in Neolithic Europe women and men lived in egalitarian, peaceful societies, according to respected archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas.)

In that same period of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an estimated 14,400 US women died before, during and just after childbirth—more than twice the number of US soldiers killed in these wars. Thousands of memorials commemorate those who gave their lives for their country in war; name one for women killed by men or who lost their lives giving birth to the next generation.

The injustice of women’s inequality ripples out to national governments. Peace and the security of nations are powerfully linked with the equality of women. Comparing the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries, researchers have found that the degree of equality of women within countries predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Further, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict.

So, if you care about turning back from the warpath the U.S. is on and eliminating nuclear weapons, consider the words of the revered Ghanian statesman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan:

“There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health, and education than the empowerment of women and girls … and no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by H. Patricia Hynes.

A trio of civil rights groups on Thursday said they will sue after Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ignored pleas from human rights and health experts and signed a bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth—a move that came on the same day the governor also approved legislation criminalizing public drag shows.

Under S.B. 1—introduced by state Sen. Jack Johnson (R-23), the same lawmaker behind the public drag ban—transgender minors undergoing hormone therapy or taking prescribed puberty blockers as of July 1, 2023 will be cut off from such care in Tennessee after March 31, 2024. Trans youth not receiving gender-affirming care by July 1 will be barred from doing so in the state.

Tennessee joins Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah in outlawing or restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth—and, in the case of Alabama, anyone under age 19. Federal judges have blocked Alabama and Arkansas from implementing their bans. Meanwhile this year, at least 24 states have introduced legislation to prohibit or restrict such care.

Lambda Legal—which along with the ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee announced its intent to sue—accused Lee and Republican lawmakers of "taking away the freedom of families of transgender youth to seek critical healthcare" and "putting the government in charge of making vital decisions traditionally reserved to parents in Tennessee."

"They've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee."

"We will not allow this dangerous law to stand," the groups said in a joint statement. "Certain politicians and Gov. Lee have made no secret of their intent to discriminate against youth who are transgender or their willful ignorance about the lifesaving healthcare they seek to ban."

"Instead, they've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee," the groups added. "We are dedicated to overturning this unconstitutional law and are confident the state will find itself completely incapable of defending it in court. We want transgender youth to know they are not alone and this fight is not over."

Ivy Hill, director of gender justice for the Campaign for Southern Equality, said in a statement after the bill passed that "my heart is breaking for transgender youth all across the country and throughout the South."

"We've known for years that it's never been easy to access gender-affirming care in states like Tennessee and the passage of this bill will only make it harder," they added. "But the trans and queer community across the South will do what we've always done: come together, support each other, and chart new systems that help people live authentic, thriving lives where they know they are loved and supported."

Dr. Allison Stiles, a Memphis physician, said that "this bill, I feel, was born out of fearmongering—out of false rhetoric that we are doing sex-change operations on our children."

"The hate has grown, and we now have a bill that could get parents arrested for taking their gender-dysphoric child to the physician, and their physicians for taking care of them," she asserted.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care."

"Just to throw in a little science here... there are four independent aspects to our sexuality," Stiles added. "Our genetics—which could be XX, XO, XY, XXY, XYY—there is our outward appearance, our gender identity, and our sexual preference. The XX and XY fetus are identical, actually, until six weeks of gestation."

Proponents of gender-affirming care noted it saves lives.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care," Rev. Dawn Bennett of the Table Nashville, a faith group that centers the LGBTQ+ community, recently asserted.

According to the ACLU, Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states are trying to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth—and in some cases, even adults.

Lee also signed a bill on Thursday making Tennessee the first state to criminalize public drag shows. The governor signed the measure amid allegations of hypocrisy following the revelation that he dressed in drag at least once while in high school in the 1970s.

"Drag is not a threat to anyone. It makes no sense to be criminalizing or vilifying drag in 2023," Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a professor of culture and gender studies at the University of Michigan who has performed in drag, told the Associated Press.

"It is a space where people explore their identities," La Fountain-Stokes continued. "But it is also a place where people simply make a living. Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are and allows all of us to have a very nice time. So it makes literally no sense for legislators, for people in government, to try to ban drag."

Other GOP-run states—including Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—are considering similar drag bans.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jess O'Thomson.

As Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen explained, “dark money”—funding used to influence policy, elections, and other significant political decisions whose precise donors are kept hidden from the public—“gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.” Many of the funders of the Eagle Forum are unknown, Truthout reported, but the Eagle Forum and its related Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund have received “tens of thousands over the years from the Bradley Foundation and Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, which are both massive foundations with deep connections to the far right.”

Between 2010 and 2013, the CWA (and its partner organization, the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee) received more than $11 million from groups associated with billionaire Charles Koch, including Freedom Partners, the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and TC4 Trust. The IWF, which began as Women for Clarence Thomas, also has links to the Koch brothers and the Bradley Foundation. According to the most recent IRS filings of the IWF and its partner organization, the Independent Women’s Voice, the two groups received more than $4.75 million from these organizations since 2014.

Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen reported that anti-ERA groups such as the Eagle Forum, CWA, and IWF are “riding the recent wave of transphobia.” Many of the nation’s recently proposed anti-trans bills are rooted in erroneous and hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, much like the Eagle Forum’s opposition to the ERA. For example, in October 2021, a senior policy analyst at the IWF, Inez Stepman, told members of a House committee that the ERA would put women’s physical safety at risk, highlighting an unsubstantiated claim that cisgender women are at a higher risk for violence when incarcerated with trans women. Yet, as Truthout documented, most incarcerated trans people are detained in facilities that align with the sex they were assigned at birth, and in fact, trans women imprisoned with men experience “high rates of extreme violence.”

In the last year, sources such as the Washington Post, NBC News, and the New York Times have covered the recent rise in anti-trans legislation in the United States. However, the corporate press has completely neglected dark money groups’ continued support for conservatives leading the charge against the Equality Act and ERA.

Julia Peck, Ansev Demirhan, and Alyssa Bowen, “Dark Money ‘Women’s Groups’ Are Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose ERA,” Truthout, March 22, 2022.

Student Researcher: Mia Wood (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amber Yang (San Francisco State University)

The post #16 Dark Money Fuels Transphobic Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and Equality Act appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu.

The post Victory in Cuba – New Family Code Affirms Equality within Family Life appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

Members of Congress alarmed by the U.S. Supreme Court's recent reversal on abortion rights and threats to other basic freedoms on Monday introduced legislation intended to ensure protections for LGBTQ+ and interracial marriages.

"The far-right Supreme Court is waging war on the freedoms of the American people, including the rights of the LGBTQ+ community."

"The Respect for Marriage Act will protect same-sex and interracial marriages from any radical or bigoted decision that may come from the current extreme Supreme Court majority," said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), one of the bill's sponsors, in a statement.

"As chairman of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, I want the LGBTQ+ community to know that this caucus is fighting for them and their right to live freely," he added. "This legislation will protect their marriages and ensure they continue to be recognized, even if a future Supreme Court overturns landmark marriage equality decisions. I am proud of this bill, and I urge Congress to promptly pass this legislation."

Concerns about marriage equality have mounted since Justice Clarence Thomas penned a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization suggesting that in addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, the court should reconsider the decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges—the last of which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide.

As the bill's sponsors explained, the Respect for Marriage Act would:

• Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): The Supreme Court effectively rendered DOMA inert with its landmark decisions in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell. This unconstitutional and discriminatory law, however, still officially remains on the books. The bill would repeal this statute once and for all.
• Enshrine marriage equality for federal law purposes: The bill requires, for federal law purposes, that an individual be considered married if the marriage was valid in the state where it was performed. This gives same-sex and interracial couples additional certainty that they will continue to enjoy equal treatment under federal law as all other married couples—as the Constitution requires.
• Provide additional legal protections: The bill prohibits any person acting under the color of state law from denying full faith and credit to an out-of-state marriage based on the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the individuals in the marriage, provides the attorney general with the authority to pursue enforcement actions, and creates a private right of action for any individual harmed by a violation of this provision.

The push for the bill is being led by Cicilline and the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus' eight co-chairs; House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.); Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.); Tri-Caucus Chairs Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), and Judy Chu (D-Calif.); and Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

"We will not sit idly by as Republicans and their activist judges take our country backward. They started with reproductive rights and they're targeting protections for same-sex marriage next," declared Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Maloney and other Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus co-chairs noted how their own lives could be impacted if Thomas' opinion—which has fueled fresh demands from progressives for his impeachment, expanding the court, and other potential action by Congress—foreshadows a future ruling by the right-wing justices.

"I've been with my husband Randy for 30 years, but we've only spent eight of them as a legally married couple," Maloney explained. "For families like mine, the Respect for Marriage Act is a necessary step to protect our fundamental rights."

Reps. Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones, both New York Democrats, were the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress.

"Justice Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs made clear that marriage equality is next on the chopping block."

"Justice Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs made clear that marriage equality is next on the chopping block," said Jones. "As the first openly gay, Black member of Congress, this fight is personal to me. I still remember where I was when the New York Legislature passed marriage equality, and when Obergefell was decided years later."

"Progress must be fought for and protected," he continued. "To protect fundamental rights, Congress must use its legislative powers. That's why I'm proud to introduce the Respect for Marriage Act today. It's past time for Congress to establish that marriage equality is the law of the land and ensure Americans across the country can continue to marry who they love without discrimination."

While the Respect for Marriage Act is expected to be voted on in the Democrat-controlled House this week, the legislation would have to make it through an evenly split Senate—in which the filibuster rule enables the GOP to block progressive priorities—to reach President Joe Biden's desk.

The bill's introduction comes after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came under fire for saying—as some other Republicans in Congress have recently suggested—that the high court was "overreaching" in its 2015 Obergefell decision, which "was clearly wrong."

Among those who criticized Cruz was Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), one of the caucus members backing the new bill.

"This is deeply personal to me. My husband, Phil, and I have been married for more than 15 years," Pocan said. "The House and Senate need to pass the Respect for Marriage Act immediately to protect marriage equality."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Women continue to be under-represented in ocean related issues, with most in the sector, stuck on land, “and getting very little pay”, says Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry, President of the World Maritime University, based in Sweden.

On Tuesday, Ms. Doumbia-Henry took part in an event on the margins of the Conference, focused on boosting women’s representation in ocean sustainability and conservation.

She spoke to UN News’s Ana Carmo, who’s also in the Portuguese capital.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by Ana Carmo, UN News.

Women continue to be under-represented in ocean related issues, with most in the sector, stuck on land, “and getting very little pay”, says Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry, President of the World Maritime University, based in Sweden.

On Tuesday, Ms. Doumbia-Henry took part in an event on the margins of the Conference, focused on boosting women’s representation in ocean sustainability and conservation.

She spoke to UN News’s Ana Carmo, who’s also in the Portuguese capital.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by Ana Carmo, UN News.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans' rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.

"This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

"It does not end at abortion. Republicans will not stop until they have stripped away every freedom they can't load with bullets," said MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, referring to this week's ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority that New York's restrictions on carrying concealed weapons were unconstitutional.

In his concurrence, quoting Justice Samuel Alito's opinion, Thomas wrote, "I agree that 'nothing in [the court's] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'"

"For that reason," Thomas wrote, "in future cases, we should reconsider all of the Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling affirmed that the government cannot interfere in people's procurement of contraceptives, while Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned a Texas law which had effectively made sexual relationships between people of the same sex illegal in the state. Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, affirmed that same-sex couples can legally marry.

Like the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, the overruling of the decisions listed by Thomas would be deeply unpopular with the American public.

That is unlikely to stop the right-wing majority from overturning those rulings, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

"It is clear he and the court's majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades," said Jayapal. "This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

The three liberal justices who dissented against the ruling denounced Alito's claim that the decision would not have an effect on other rights previously protected by the court.

"They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions," the dissent reads. "The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not 'deeply rooted in history.'"

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer added:

The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with... So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

Economist Umair Haque said the ruling handed down Friday was "just the beginning, sadly, of the theocratic fascist project reaching its culmination in earnest now."

As progressives called for legislative and executive action to codify the right to abortion care into federal law, attorney and Democratic U.S. House candidate Suraj Patel called on Congress to "move now" to ensure the right to contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality are protected.

"Congress has that power right now. Hold the vote," said Patel. "For 50 years Republicans told us their playbook, they attacked Roe at the edges, we didn't codify it. Let's not be naive and not anticipate what's coming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans' rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.

"This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

"It does not end at abortion. Republicans will not stop until they have stripped away every freedom they can't load with bullets," said MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, referring to this week's ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority that New York's restrictions on carrying concealed weapons were unconstitutional.

In his concurrence, quoting Justice Samuel Alito's opinion, Thomas wrote, "I agree that 'nothing in [the court's] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'"

"For that reason," Thomas wrote, "in future cases, we should reconsider all of the Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling affirmed that the government cannot interfere in people's procurement of contraceptives, while Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned a Texas law which had effectively made sexual relationships between people of the same sex illegal in the state. Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, affirmed that same-sex couples can legally marry.

Like the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, the overruling of the decisions listed by Thomas would be deeply unpopular with the American public.

That is unlikely to stop the right-wing majority from overturning those rulings, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

"It is clear he and the court's majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades," said Jayapal. "This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

The three liberal justices who dissented against the ruling denounced Alito's claim that the decision would not have an effect on other rights previously protected by the court.

"They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions," the dissent reads. "The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not 'deeply rooted in history.'"

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer added:

The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with... So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

Economist Umair Haque said the ruling handed down Friday was "just the beginning, sadly, of the theocratic fascist project reaching its culmination in earnest now."

As progressives called for legislative and executive action to codify the right to abortion care into federal law, attorney and Democratic U.S. House candidate Suraj Patel called on Congress to "move now" to ensure the right to contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality are protected.

"Congress has that power right now. Hold the vote," said Patel. "For 50 years Republicans told us their playbook, they attacked Roe at the edges, we didn't codify it. Let's not be naive and not anticipate what's coming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

After her niece, a low-income mother of three, was murdered several years ago, Wel'ega Ma'Shak of Galt, California, joined Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) to feel less alone in her grief. She also joined the state chapter of the Poor People's Campaign (PPC), and on Saturday, June 18, she stood with tens of thousands of people in Washington, D.C.—representing MMIW—to condemn government policies that elevate militarism over human needs and to denounce religious bigotry and legislation that allows racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia to persist.

"The military budget is immoral," PPC co-chair, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, told the cheering crowd. "This is why we need a third Reconstruction."

The day was a mix of the personal and the political.

The Reverend Jennifer Barrett, a Disciples of Christ pastor from Kansas City, Kansas, was initially drawn to the Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls because of increasing barriers to voting in the United States.

"Making voting harder is disgusting to me," she tells The Progressive. "We have to do better and protect the rights of all people to choose their representatives. We can't be silent anymore." 

Barrett, who attended the march with her twenty-two-year-old daughter, then adds: "I'm also here for a longtime friend who's a single mom of two. She's a full-time teacher in Blue Valley, Kansas, and has to work a second job to make ends meet. Despite this, every month there's a $500 shortfall in her finances. This is just wrong."

Valora Starr, a lay pastor from Chicago's Bethel Lutheran Church, is standing near the Barretts and overhears our conversation. As a child in 1968, she says, she didn't understand the importance of the original Poor People's Campaign led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. "Now I know," she says. "Yes, the arc may bend toward justice, but it is not bending fast enough. I'm here with a group of Black children from my church, and I want them to feel what it means to rise up and organize for peace, justice, and equality." 

Like many at Saturday's march, Starr believes that spiritual uplift is inseparable from activism, and stresses that prayer and practice are two sides of the same coin. "Praying with our feet," an idea popularized by Frederick Douglass, is important, she says, since change will not happen without pressure. 

The visibly religious crowd waved banners and signs to promote the issues that brought them to the nation's capital. Placards read "Fight Poverty, Not the Poor" and "Fund People, Not War"; others proclaimed "There is Enough for Everyone," "Todo el Mundo Necesita el Derecho a Vivir" or "All People of the World Need the Right to Live," and "Poverty is Violence."  

And, while many temples, mosques, churches, and synagogues brought large contingents to the assembly, secular groups—including Black Voters Matter, the Border Network for Human Rights, Code Pink, the Communist Party, Justicia Migrante, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Sunrise Movement, Veterans for Peace, and several trade unions—were also present.  

In addition to changing our domestic priorities, many attendees also expressed concern about U.S. foreign policy. "Human rights are not just for people in the United States," Melissa Nuwaysir of the Washington, D.C., metro area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace tells The Progressive. "We need to make sure that militarism and U.S. support for authoritarian and oppressive governments, including Israel, don't get sidelined."

Indeed, reducing the grotesquely bloated U.S. military budget has long been a goal of the PPC. As one of their pre-printed signs reminded rally goers, since 9/11, the United States has spent more than $20 trillion on war.

"The military budget is immoral," PPC co-chair, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, told the cheering crowd. "This is why we need a third Reconstruction."

This, Barber explained, will build on the work done after the Civil War (the first Reconstruction) and during the contemporary civil rights movement led by Reverend King (the second Reconstruction).

"We are a fusion coalition," he said, "and we will continue our work until sick folks are healed, until affordable housing is provided, until the land and water are protected, and until saving the world is more important than blowing it up. . . . This promise is not negotiable. We won't be silent or unseen any longer."

The PPC's strategy is to build from the bottom up, co-chair Reverend Liz Theoharis told the assembly. "The low-wage workers, the left out, and the excluded are a social force," she said. "When we cry for justice, when we cry for power, when we take bold action," we show those in leadership what's possible. 

What's more, Theorharis added, those who are most directly impacted by racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty can take strength from each other.

Indeed, tears flowed as speaker after speaker shared stories of surviving a range of indignities: anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, incarceration, family separation, homelessness and hunger, opioid addiction, overcrowded and inadequate schools, environmental calamities, and losing loved ones to suicide, gun violence, and to treatable illnesses because of gaps in insurance coverage.  

But the day offered far more than anger, sadness and despair: Performances by a PPC choir got the crowd clapping, swaying, and raising their voices in joyful song. All told, it was a heady and inspiring day.

"Fifty-four years ago, my father, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., launched the first Poor People's Campaign to revolutionize the country," Reverend Bernice King told the crowd. "Decades later, ridding the nation of the evil and violence of poverty remains a moral imperative."

The PPC estimates that there are 140 million poor and low-income people in the United States, with slightly more than half of all children living at or near the federal poverty level of $18,310 for a household of two and $27,750 for a unit of four.

"Any nation that ignores nearly half of its citizens is in a moral, economic, and political crisis," Barber told the assembly. 

"We have the ability to win but it will take a growing movement of poor and working people to take action," Jack Arnow, a retired teacher from Brooklyn, New York, tells The Progressive.  

He adds: "Today's protest has been wonderful, but we now need to use our power to vote, to resist, and to do the hard work of organizing a much bigger group of supporters."   

For more information or to participate in the Poor People's Campaign text MORAL to 38542 or search online for #PoorPeoplesCampaign and #MoralAssembly2022.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Eleanor J. Bader.

This retreat from collective sources of retirement income does have its fans. The affluent have benefited from 401(k)s far more than average workers, and that dynamic doesn’t figure to change. These affluent, CNBC financial planning analyst Kate Dore observed earlier this month, will always be more able to contribute substantial shares of their paychecks into their 401(k)s, “allowing more time for compounded growth and greater tax benefits over time.”

The greater tax benefits have added up. Over half the tax breaks for company retirement plans are now going to our top 10 percent of income-earners.

In other words, we’re not growing retirement security in the United States today. We’re growing — with our current approach to retirement — greater overall economic inequality. The already affluent have become more affluent, and everyone else has become more insecure.

What else could we expect, suggests Tyler Bond from the National Institute on Retirement Security, in a society where income and wealth have furiously concentrated at our economic summit?

“A retirement system built around the individual ownership of financial assets cannot successfully provide retirement security,” Bond notes, “if the bottom half of near-retirees only owns 2 to 3 percent of their generation’s financial assets.”

So what can we do to start reversing the retirement status quo?

“Discussions of how to improve retirement security for all Americans often ignore the fact that the United States already has a nearly universal retirement savings system: Social Security,” note Bond and his colleague Dan Doonan in a new National Institute on Retirement Security study published last month. “A starting place for strengthening retirement security should be with Social Security.”

In Congress, progressive lawmakers have just launched an effort to shove America in just that direction. They’ve introduced legislation — the Social Security Expansion Act — that would significantly increase the benefits that Social Security provides and pay for those benefits by increasing taxes on America’s most wealthy.

An American making $147,000 currently pays 6.2 percent of that take-home in Social Security payroll taxes. But Americans making $1.47 million pay just 0.6 percent of their income to Social Security.

“That may make sense to somebody,” Senator Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing earlier this month. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are sponsoring the Social Security Expansion Act, along with six other Senate co-sponsors, and Rep. Peter DeFazio has 19 co-sponsors on companion legislation in the House.

Under current law, income over $147,000 faces no Social Security tax. Passage of the Social Security Expansion Act would apply the Social Security payroll tax, says Sanders, to “all income — including capital gains and dividends — for those who make over $250,000 a year.”

The new revenue from that move would guarantee existing Social Security benefits for years to come and increase Social Security benefits “by $2,400 a year for both new and existing recipients, lifting millions of senior citizens out of poverty.”

That sort of political move would also enjoy broad support. New national polling from the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation shows “overwhelming bipartisan support” for subjecting income over $147,000 to Social Security tax, the core of the proposed Social Security Expansion Act. Some 88 percent of Democrats back that move — and 79 percent of Republicans!

“Maybe, just maybe,” says Sanders, “we might want to start listening to the overwhelming majority of the American people who want to expand Social Security and stop listening to right-wing billionaires who want to cut, privatize, and dismantle it.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

The long-serving New Zealand MP Louisa Wall has fired a broadside at her own Labour Party as she leaves Parliament to take up a Pacific diplomacy role — using her valedictory speech to accuse the party president of leading a corrupt process.

Wall is leaving politics after 14 years — citing a legal battle in the lead-up to the 2020 election over the Manurewa seat as one of the reasons for leaving.

In the days leading up to her final speech at Parliament, she spoke out about a rift with the party’s leadership, claiming the Prime Minister told her directly she would never be a minister.

• READ MORE: Other Louisa Wall reports

Today she slammed the Labour Party for its handling of the Manurewa electorate.

She accused the Labour Party president, Claire Szabó, of leading a “corrupt process”.

“When I was forced out of my electorate in 2020, by the unconstitutional actions of the party president Claire Szabó and some members of council, I was devastated.

“The president accepted a late nomination, did not share the fact of the late receipt with the council until questions were asked and then retrospectively tried to justify and legitimise her actions.”

Agreed to leave
Wall told the House at the conclusion of the spat, she agreed with the Labour Party to leave politics during this Parliamentary term.

“In 2020, I agreed to leave. Because irrespective of the merits of challenging actions, being in a team where there is no appetite for your contribution is not healthy.

“I took the opportunity to complete some of my ongoing work, including in the international advocacy space. I was placed on the list just below where I had been in 2017 and accepted that I was to resign as an MP during this term.”

Wall thanked MPs Michael Wood, Nanaia Mahuta and Tim Barnett for helping her reach this agreement but told the House she was not going of her own volition.

“I stand here today fulfilling my part of the agreement but I want to be very clear that this was not entirely my choice.”

As is custom on Thursday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was not in the debating chamber but deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson watched on.

Despite never holding a ministerial position, Wall has a long list of legislative achievements, including her successful campaign to legalise same-sex marriage.

‘Rapid-fire course’
She told MPs the journey to marriage equality was “a rapid-fire course in process and procedures” not universally supported within the Labour caucus.

“While the deputy leader of the caucus at the time wanted more recognition of civil unions I believed that advocacy for marriage equality was based on fundamental human rights and that civil unions became a stop gap measure because it was not clear that marriage would get over the line,” she said.

“When I expressed this view I was told that this would be the end of my career and I would be on my own.”

Wall said throughout her time in politics she had been able to advocate on housing, period poverty, surrogacy, alcohol policies, revenge porn and abortion safe zones.

With her family watching from the packed public gallery, she finished her speech on a positive note that paid tribute to her previous sporting career.

“So while there have been obstacles to face and overcome I leave knowing I did what I could within those constraints. To use a sporting analogy, I left it all on the field.”

Louisa Wall is taking up a newly-created role as ambassador for Pacific gender equality starting next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen explained, “dark money”— funding used to influence elections, judicial nominations, ballot measures, and legislation, whose sources are kept secret from the public—“gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.”

Many of the donors to the Eagle Forum are unknown, Truthout reported, but the Eagle Forum and its related Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund have received “tens of thousands over the years from the Bradley Foundation and Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, which are both massive foundations with deep connections to the far right.” (Both of these foundations, Truthout noted, also  funded groups that undermined public faith in the 2020 presidential election results.) Between 2010-2013, the CWA (and its partner organization, the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee) received more than $11 million from groups linked to the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, including Freedom Partners, Center to Protect Patient Rights, and TC4 Trust. The IWF, which began as Women for Clarence Thomas, has links to Koch brothers money and the Bradley Foundation. According to the most recent IRS filings of the IWF and its partner organization, the Independent Women’s Voice, the two groups received more than $4.75 million from their funders since 2014.

Noting that 2021 saw “record highs in anti-trans violence and rhetoric” and was “the worst year for legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ people in recent history,” Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen reported that anti-ERA groups such as the Eagle Forum, CWA, and IWF are “riding the recent wave of transphobia.” In addition to promoting anti-trans positions to their own members, these groups seek to impress their position on the courts and in legislatures. For example, in October 2021 a senior policy analyst at the IWF, Inez Stepman, told members of a House committee that the ERA would put women’s physical safety at risk, invoking the violence cisgender women allegedly face at the hands of transgender women in prisons. As Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen concluded, “The fear-mongering about expanded transgender rights—grounded in the baseless claim that transgender women somehow represent a threat to cisgender women—is simply the latest in a history of attacks on the ERA based on the sexist notion that women are in need of protection and not equality.”

Source: Julia Peck, Ansev Demirhan and Alyssa Bowen, “Dark Money “Women’s Groups” Are Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose ERA,” Truthout, March 22, 2022.

Student Researcher: Mia Wood (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amber Yang (San Francisco State University)

The post Dark Money Fuels Transphobic Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and Equality Act appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

A Māori health leader says a new international misinformation study confirms the alarm many were desperately trying to raise last year about the impact on Māori during the initial vaccine rollout.

The article in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface shows misinformation makes it harder to stop illness spreading during a pandemic.

It states conspiracy theories spread through communities already distrustful of authority.

• READ MORE: Covid-19 update: 23 new deaths, 11,560 community cases, 678 in hospital
• Other NZ covid outbreak reports

It modelled trusting individuals who seek better quality information and take precautionary measures; and distrusting people who reject quality information and have riskier behaviour.

It found major outbreaks cannot be suppressed once the density of distrusting individuals exceeds a certain threshold.

It says its findings highlight the importance of effective interventions to build trust and inform the public.

Māori ‘exposed to significant misinformation for longer’
National Māori Pandemic Group co-leader Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen said the Māori population was younger, so many had to wait to be eligible to get their vaccine dose.

“They [were] exposed to a significant amount of misinformation for longer.

“That’s created a problem for us in terms of getting the momentum for the vaccination programme into the right place.”

Dr McKree Jansen said the unvaccinated were being hit hardest by the omicron wave.

As of Friday, only 88 percent of Māori have had their second dose, and 58 percent their third compared with 95 percent and 73 (72.7) percent respectively of the general population.

As of yesterday, 378 people have died with covid-19 and the seven-day rolling average is now 18.

McKree Jansen said Māori were now dying with covid-19 because of that misinformation.

He said for Māori and Pacific communities it was particularly troubling because those who were dying with the virus were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, rather than older people in other populations.

He said Māori and Pacific populations should have been prioritised in the vaccine rollout.

The Waitangi Tribunal has released a scathing ruling of the government’s covid-19 response and vaccine rollout, saying Māori were put at risk.

The tribunal said cabinet’s decision to go against official and expert advice and not prioritise Māori breached the Treaty principles of active protection and equity.

Misinformation has disrupted families, but is resolvable
Dr McKree Jansen said misinformation had disrupted social and familial connection but he believed it was resolvable.

“We should actually spend the time and the effort to restore relationships with those people that have been affected by it.

“It is being very clear that health services are here to help people.

“I think it is conversations we’ll have within families to restore mana for people who feel that [they have] been belittled, to ensure that people know that they are loved and that they are cared for.”

He said the focus needed to be on learning the lessons and making sure it did not happen again.

“And making sure that when we say we are committed to equity that we do all the things necessary to achieve it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

That’s the straightforward message from UN Women, which has launched a new strategic plan to increase women’s political participation and leadership on climate change and environmental sustainability.

In honour of International Women’s Day which was celebrated all this week, UN News’s Ali Khaffane caught up with Adriana Quinones, Director of UN Women’s liaison office in Geneva, to explain the agency’s approach.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by Ali Khaffane, UN Geneva.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• President Joe Biden marks 50 millionth COVID-19 vaccine, defends $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
• Senator Bernie Sanders holds $15 minimum wage hearing: “Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?”
• U.S. strikes Syria, targets Iran-backed militia.
• President Joe Biden meets with Saudi Arabia’s King, takes softer tone.
• House passes Equality Act, extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ people.
• San Francisco resolution supports amended state constitution to end prison slavery and involuntary servitude.
• Immigrant rights advocates launch campaign to close 10 ICE detention centers.

The post Senate holds $15 minimum wage hearing; House passes Equality Act appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.