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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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Voters on Navajo, Apache, and Hopi reservations helped swing Arizona for the Democrats in 2020. In response, the Republican governor and state legislature have curtailed ballot access for an already marginalized constituency.

To vote in the 2020 Presidential election, Frank Young rode a horse to the polls in Kayenta, Arizona. He was fifty-eight years old, and it was the first time he’d ever cast a ballot. Young is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, the country’s most populous Native American tribe, with nearly four hundred thousand members. About forty per cent of them live on a reservation that spans more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, an area larger than West Virginia. When we met, not far from his home in Rough Rock, a small Native community tucked under the mesa where his livestock grazes, he was wearing cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed black hat that sat low over a broad face weathered from years tending his animals. Two years ago, when his daughter convinced him that another Trump Presidency would be disastrous for Native Americans, Young decided that the best way to “protect the sacred” was to travel into battle the way his ancestors had. “We used to use horses to fight our enemies,” he said. “So my idea was, We’re gonna beat red. And we’d do it on horseback, and the horses will carry our culture and our democratic tradition and that will help us get it back.” Forty other riders joined him on an eight-mile ceremonial ride to vote at the local chapter house, the seat of the tribal government, which doubles as a polling site.

There are close to five million Native Americans of voting age in the United States, but only sixty-six per cent of them are registered to vote. Young said that he previously chose not to participate in American elections because the state and federal governments—he called them “colonizers”—had oppressed his people for centuries, extracting their timber, minerals, and ore, and leaving them to languish on land stripped of its value. “I just felt that our votes didn’t matter,” he told me.

It was an explanation that I heard a lot as I made my way across Arizona’s Navajo, Apache, and Hopi reservations, where human habitation is sparse, and flat-topped mountains preside over scrubby grass valleys. Native Americans have the highest rate of poverty in the nation—around twenty-seven per cent. As the pandemic took hold, the rate of unemployment soared to nearly twenty-nine per cent, reaching rates not seen in this country since the Great Depression. What this looks like on the ground is stunning: whole communities that live in substandard housing and, in 2022, lack electricity and running water. A former state legislator from the region said, “If you were told that there’s a Third World country in the middle of Arizona, you would not believe it. Yet people here still have to haul water, they have to use kerosene lanterns, and they have to use outhouses.”

Vida Begay, a Navajo woman from Indian Wells, Arizona, explained that people there had to strap two-hundred-gallon plastic water tanks—each of which can cost upward of two hundred dollars—to the back of their vehicles, filling them every few days, even in the depths of winter, when they have the tendency to freeze and crack open. On an Apache reservation, in Whiteriver, Lydia Dosela told me that there are members of her community who, because they can’t afford transportation, hitchhike to the town of Pinetop-Lakeside, twenty-five miles away, to work. “If it’s a choice between paying for gas and feeding their family, they are going to feed their family,” she said. As we toured her village, where stray dogs roam in packs, we passed the remains of a community center that had burned down after its copper wires were stripped by vandals. Dosela pointed to a small, windowless, unheated shed, the prefabricated kind that is meant to store tools and other equipment, and said that five people had been living in it.

Both Begay and Dosela are organizers with Northeast Arizona Native Democrats, hired to educate their communities about elections, garner support for Democratic candidates, and encourage voting. It is challenging work. Poverty and geography have combined to create structural barriers that thwart voting on sovereign Native lands. Poor people in the United States vote less than those with higher incomes, generally, but the remoteness of many communities and a general lack of reliable transportation make voting even more difficult for many Native Americans. In Navajo County, for example, which covers ten thousand square miles, there are only seventeen ballot drop boxes and twelve early-voting sites. Because local election offices are underfunded, the hours that those sites are open are often limited. The million-and-a-half acre Hopi Reservation has just three places where people can vote in person on Election Day. Early voting by mail helps Native voters, but post-office boxes can cost money that people may not have, and, in communities where there are not enough boxes to go around, residents sometimes have no choice but to get their mail delivered to towns that are hours away. There are only eleven post offices and sixteen additional sites that provide postal services across the entire Navajo reservation in Arizona. By contrast, West Virginia has seven hundred and twenty-five.

“Most of the time, when you have a post-office box, it makes voting a lot easier,” Allison Neswood, an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, told me. “But, for Native communities, that’s not necessarily the case. The ones that are more rural, more remote, are farther from post offices, and the same obstacles to picking up the mail—Are the roads passable? Does my family have a vehicle that I can use?—also create barriers to voting.” (The majority of roads in Navajo Nation are unpaved and, in some parts of the reservation, only one in ten people owns a car. ) For tribal members who do not speak or read English and need language assistance, voting in person is the only option. But, for those who live in, for example, Teec Nos Pos, which is ninety-five miles from the nearest polling location, or for members of the Kaibab Paiute tribe, who have to travel two hundred and eighty-five miles to an early-voting site, voting in person may not be an option.

This year, Frank Young will once again ride his horse to the polls. His daughter, Allie, meanwhile, who is a program manager at the social-justice nonprofit, Harness, is sponsoring rides to register and to vote in other parts of Arizona, as well as in rural Black and Latino neighborhoods in Texas and Georgia. In her own community, Allie Young said, the show of civic engagement is meant to highlight a long history of voter suppression that continues to stymie Native Americans’ access to the ballot box. “The spirit of the horse represents strength and healing,” she said. “When we put our trust in the horse, it takes us where we need to go.”

Neither the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits both the state and federal governments from denying (male) citizens the right to vote based on race, nor the Snyder Act of 1924, which explicitly granted citizenship to Native Americans, enfranchised them in Arizona, because the Constitution left it up to the states to decide who could vote. That right wasn’t fully extended to Indigenous people residing in Arizona until 1948. Even then, state-sanctioned literacy tests continued to block many Native Americans from registering, until the practice was struck down by a Supreme Court decision in 1970, five years after the Voting Rights Act abolished such tests nationwide. At a campaign rally I attended in Cameron, a place known for its abandoned uranium mines and high rates of cancer, Theresa Hatathlie, a Navajo woman running for State Senate, told the crowd, “For a long time, my mother and my father were not allowed to vote. So when they were finally given that right, whether it was the primary, or the general, or a special election, no matter the distance, whether it was raining, snowing, hailing, they went to vote. They reminded us that our people, our ancestors, encountered all this hardship and all these challenges just to vote.”

In 2020, Native Americans, who comprise six per cent of the Arizona population, voted in numbers never before seen and are largely credited with turning the state blue. According to the Associated Press, voters on the Navajo and Hopi reservations cast seventeen thousand more votes in 2020 than they had four years earlier, a majority of them for Biden, who won the state by about ten and a half thousand votes. With Trump promising to reopen the uranium mines, seizing sacred lands, and threatening to renege on the 1868 treaty that allowed Navajos to return to their ancestral homeland, the prospect of a Republican victory was existential. Jordan Harvill, the national program director for Advance Native Political Leadership, an Indigenous-led nonprofit that works to increase Native American political representation, told me, “After years of chronic underinvestment and voter suppression in Native communities, Native voters proved to be a decisive voting bloc in 2020.”

Rather than trying to appeal to Native voters, the Republican legislature and governor are, instead, actively working against them. The 2021 Supreme Court decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, a case that originated in Arizona, essentially neutered the section of the Voting Rights Act which prohibits states from passing laws that result “in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” In an opinion written by Samuel Alito, the Court’s conservative majority ruled that a law passed by the Arizona legislature, which made it illegal for a person to return the ballot of a friend or neighbor to a drop box or polling location, and disqualified voters who cast ballots in the wrong location, did not violate the Voting Rights Act. In an amicus brief, lawyers for the Navajo Nation pointed out, “Arizona’s ballot collection law criminalizes ways in which Navajos historically participated in early voting by mail. Due to the remoteness of the Nation and lack of transportation, it is not uncommon for Navajos to ask their neighbors or clan members to deliver their mail.” The 2022 election will be the first time ballot collection will be outlawed. There is little doubt that it will suppress the Native vote.

The law’s prohibition against out-of-precinct voting is also likely to undercut Native representation. Indian reservations tend to lack street addresses—by one count, fifty thousand properties do not have a fixed address—so when people there register to vote they have to draw a map of where they live in order to be assigned to the correct precinct. But, in practice, this often leads to voters being placed in the wrong precinct or not getting a precinct assignment at all. Although they may be able to cast a provisional ballot, Arizona rejects provisional ballots more frequently than any other state, and a substantial number of those rejected ballots are from Indigenous communities. And though the state now allows voters to identify their domicile with a code from Google that uses latitude and longitude to create a shareable digital address, numerous challenges, starting with Internet access and poor cell service, make this difficult to implement on reservations. Casey Lee, a thirty-three-year-old Navajo chef, started registering voters in and around Kayenta after the pandemic forced him to shutter his food truck; he told me that he now spends much of his time finding Google codes for his neighbors.

Since the Brnovich decision, the legislature has continued to pass more laws that target Native Americans and other people of color, who tend to vote for Democrats. Voters now must “cure” ballots when there is a mismatch between the signature on file and the signature on the ballot by 7 P.M. on Election Day—previously, they had seven days to do so—a hurdle that is likely to be too high for most people living on reservations. Another law bans local election offices from receiving funding from outside organizations, despite chronic underfunding of those offices, especially on reservations. Two additional laws make it easier for registered voters to be removed from the voter-registration database. “The colonization of our people is not over,” the former state legislator told me. “And one of the most glaring forms is attacking our voting rights. It is the easiest way to take the power away from Indigenous communities. And so it continues to happen.”

Redistricting has also hit Native communities hard. Districts that were created to empower Native Americans have now been sliced and diced to mute Native voices. District 2, for instance, now encompasses sixty per cent of Arizona’s landmass, including fourteen of the state’s twenty-two tribes. It is the most Native voting district in the state. But the newly drawn map adds a large Republican county, diluting the Native vote and giving the advantage to white Republicans. This new map is a direct legacy of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder, which effectively eliminated the provision of the Voting Rights Act that required the Justice Department to review changes to voting rules in states with a history of racial and ethnic discrimination before they could be adopted—what is known as “preclearance”—in order to insure that those changes would not harm minority voters. Without preclearance, states are now free to discriminate at will.

It was the twelfth day of early voting when I arrived in Dilkon, a town of fewer than two thousand people in the southwestern corner of the Navajo reservation. I followed a “Vote Here Today” sign to the town’s chapter house, an unassuming, dun-colored building on a dusty side road. The radio station KTNN, “the Voice of the Navajo Nation,” had set up in a parking lot a few hundred feet away, and was broadcasting a mix of country songs, tribal music, and exhortations to vote. Women crowded into a makeshift kitchen inside a horse trailer, preparing pozole, a pork-and-hominy stew. People arrived in fits and starts, most dropping off ballots before sitting down at folding tables to eat. Cindy Honani, an organizer from Mission for Arizona, a group funded by the Democratic Party, told me that it was the first time they had served hot food at a campaign event. The organizers hoped that both the stew and the presence of the radio station would draw a hundred people by day’s end. It was unseasonably cold—it snowed that morning—and people ate in a hurry and left. The mood was serious, not festive.

On the other side of the road was a neat row of compact houses. Begay told me that each one might have fifteen people living in it. That was the reason that COVID tore through the Navajo Nation, she said. (In May, 2020, there were more COVID cases per capita on the reservation than anywhere in the country.) “If one person got COVID, there was no place for them to isolate, so it went through the houses here like wildfire.” Masks are still required on the reservation, and, as I drove along Indian Route 15, it was not unusual to see hand-painted signs reminding people to wear them.

Missa Foy, the chair of the Navajo County Democrats, told me that, during the 2020 election, the pandemic had curtailed door-knocking and other traditional get-out-the-vote activities. “We had been on the ground since 2019, doing year-round deep canvassing, and when the pandemic hit we were not going to go out there and tell anyone to vote because it was just not the right thing to do,” she said. “So we came together as a team and said, ‘Let’s see who needs help. Let’s see what we can do.’ ” The group began connecting people with needed services, including meal boxes and P.P.E. “This wasn’t a branded effort,” Foy said. “We weren’t saying, ‘The Democratic Party is calling to save you.’ We just did it as community service.”

This effort was being run almost entirely by women. Later on, Foy and her colleagues decided to try to replicate it for voting, training community matriarchs on the ins and outs of voter registration and early voting, introducing them to candidates, and familiarizing them with the ten propositions that are on the midterm ballots. There are now a hundred and sixty-four matriarchs who have pledged to get their extended families to the polls. One of them, Lorraine Coin, a sixty-five-year-old Hopi woman I visited in Second Mesa, told me, “Women are the fire keepers of the house. When the kids come home from school, who is the first person they want to see? The mom, of course. And when the mom or grandmother or auntie talks, they are going to listen.”

Not long before I left Arizona, I drove around the town of Pinon with Suzy Etsitty, a medical-transportation driver who has worked to elect Democrats since 2014. Before that, she said, she “didn’t know crap about politics.” Now she regularly debates her Republican relatives, most of whom live off the reservation, about abortion, immigration, and inflation. And she can persuade her neighbors to register and vote because their lives depend on it. “I tell them that their social security is at stake,” she said. “That their rights are at stake. That we get funding from the government for our schools and our hospitals and for things like food stamps.”

Pinon is a dusty outpost of just over a thousand residents. As we drove, Etsitty, who lives out of town in a house built by her grandfather decades earlier, with her infirm mother and teen-age nieces, pointed out the public-school dormitory where she boarded until third grade. A housing development for the school’s teachers, many of whom have come to this isolated high desert from the Philippines, stood between the high school and a horse paddock. A sign welcoming visitors warned against social gatherings and listed other COVID prohibitions. Not far from the sole grocery store for nearly fifty miles, she showed me the post office where her midterm ballot was waiting for her, and the drop box where she would deposit it. “If Republicans get their way, they are going to do away with our voting rights,” she said. “That’s what really scares me.” ♦

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lesdreams-author · 3 years ago

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Um yes I'm a woman🙂 Is the situtation in Brazil really bad right now?

Bad!? It's awful, horrible, the end!

More than 30% from Brazil population is living in extreme poverty, the unemployment is the highest.

Good is so expensive right now that even families that has one salary can't afford buy everything. Red meat is so expensive, even the worst cut. Chicken also is expensive and man, chicken eyes too!

The gas is a felony! There's more and more people dying or getting serious accident because they tried to cook using alcohol 😖

And if this wasn't enough, we are getting near a hydraulic crises because the rivers aren't getting enough rain to supply energy to the country and it's means right now we are paying huge amounts money to the electric company so they say we can "save water".

Then they are ending Amazon little by lot 😖. Authorizing farms and building to be constructed there and nobody says anything! The world doesn't do anything! Amazon is from Brazil but the whole world needs her! And nobody says fuck.

I'm pretty sure soon my university will declare bankruptcy. Here in Brazil we have public universities, it's called federal university or state university, they are the best center to study academics. I'm from a federal university because 1. I don't have money to pay for high level education and 2. Because this is the best place to study. Unfortunately lots white people who have the means to pay for high education goes into public universities but with Lula government we got some scholarships and vacancies designed to black people, poor people and LGBT+ people. So it's not perfect but it a amazing place for people to study for free.

Bolsonaro cut 92% from the already low money supply to the universities 🙃

I don't know what is going to happen.

Anyway...Yeah, things are very bad in Brazil, if I could I would go away from here but it's hard to be accepted in a first world country when you are a black woman without any money from a third country 😔

#ramblings #venting #real life issues #my country is fucked #ask stuff

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uncontainedkc · 4 years ago

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Necessary Disruption: Housing Reimagined

“There’s no place like home!”, is more than a popular line from the classic movie - The Wizard of Oz. Home is a safe place, a place to grow and create a lifetime of memories with your loved ones. Home is an ideal. It is the American Dream. Sadly, home has been an unfathomable circumstance for millions of humans that lived and died through various tragedies on American soil throughout our troubling history with racism, slavery and discrimination. Home continues to be a mere illusion of a reality that is completely unknowable and out of reach for some. Specifically, more than 500,000 Americans are unsheltered today. Millions more are housing insecure, including 2.5 million children. Despite the fact that housing is a basic physiological need for human survival- “home” evades millions of people in the wealthiest nation on earth, America.

The long-standing traditions of limiting generational wealth and status by prohibiting land ownership coupled with rampant housing discrimination are ever-present even today. Housing in this country is treated as a luxury and not as a human right. That is a problem.

A disruption is necessary.

LIMITING WEALTH BY RESTRICTING ACCESS TO OWNERSHIP OF LAND AND REAL PROPERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Understanding the shift we must make requires we understand the roots of our current land ownership and housing system. Historically, housing in the United States has long been an area of explicit, strategic discrimination and oppressive practices. These practices were implemented and maintained as a way to control mobility, status, and life opportunities of populations that were deemed inferior or less desirable. It was also the most effective way to concentrate power and wealth in a select group of people- white men and by extension white women.

From the time Europeans landed in the Americas, there has been a race for land acquisition. Once the Native Americans and the Mexican states were forcibly removed from their lands and homes via murder, enslavement, or cultural genocide, that made way for what has become The United States of America. The stolen parcels, stained with fresh blood of the rightful inhabitants that gave their lives defending their homes, were divided up for the new owners. When it came time to distribute the stolen land parcels the privilege of ownership was available almost exclusively to a select class- white male immigrants.

In this country, at least fifteen generations of land ownership was the currency by which one built and maintained their family wealth and passed down such wealth to future generations. The institution of slavery ensured that ownership was a privilege specifically denied to most Black, Native and Mexican people, and their children for fifteen plus generations. For centuries, they built wealth for landowners while themselves owning nothing and having nothing to pass down to future generations.

There are some significant legislative landmarks that had lasting impacts on current day US housing:

40 Acres and a Mule

When blacks legally gained citizenship via the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which was ratified by the 14th Amendment in 1868 and after the Civil War, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act. The stated purpose of the act was to allow for land in southern states to be acquired by formerly enslaved people. Hence, the expectation of 40 acres and a mule as recompense for generations of depravity and abject poverty imposed. This was also seen as a way to stabilize black families and allow for a basic opportunity to build a life after the horrors they endured. However, specifically excluded from being beneficiaries of the act were people holding two specific occupations: domestic servants and agricultural workers. As coincidence would have it (insert sarcasm and a major eye roll), formerly enslaved people, Native Americans, and Mexicans just so happened to occupy those roles in society. So white males were again, legally allowed to say “Sorry, no land for ‘you people’- still ”. The inability to own anything in addition to meager wages did not allow for wealth transfer in the form of land or money to be passed down to the children of Black, Native and Mexican families for another 5-8 generations.

Creating the Ghettos- Redlining

The National Housing Act of 1934 was passed by Congress which introduced the concept of redlining. Security maps for residential neighborhoods were created across the country. The security maps designated areas of high risk- which were majority black and minority communities. These maps were created by the Home Owners’ Loan Cooperation as a way to outline the neighborhoods in red (hence the term redlining) so that banks would know exactly the areas to deny mortgages or improvement loans. The lack of loans prevented home ownership, community improvement or updating which lead to crumbling infrastructure and devaluing of those neighborhoods. The domino effect of crumbling infrastructure, no maintenance or upkeep by landlords and more crowded environments led to devaluing of the property. Since the properties were in disrepair the property taxes collected based on their value were insufficient to fund schools at a reasonable level. Resulting in a collapse of the school system. By design, the infrastructure of these redlined areas imploded- making it easy to shove minorities in but nearly impossible to get out.

Public Housing- Redlining 2.0 the new Ghettos

Low-income housing and further segregation was the end effect of The Housing Act of 1937. The intent was to provide relief from the Great Depression for standard low and middle-income families. Over time the housing units were only provided to low income, mostly minority families. The units were built intentionally in segregated parts of town. This further resulted in segregated housing for Blacks, Hispanic and Asian populations.

Black WWII soldiers denied GI Bill benefits

The GI Bill was signed by FDR in 1944 to provide soldiers returning from WWII with education, training, loans for farms, businesses, employment assistance and houses. The low-cost mortgages lead to the rise of the suburbs. The problem, blacks couldn’t live in the suburbs although blacks were technically included in the benefits of the bill. The discrimination was upheld because whites did not want minorities moving to their neighborhoods. They believed that minorities drive down property values. It was also considered unethical to sell a home to a black person in a predominantly white neighborhood. There were covenants and clauses to ensure homes in most suburbs could only be sold to white families.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Enduring 250 years of chattel slavery then 99 years of slavery in a different form brings us to 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. (Of course, we are not detailing many of the tragic and important details during this time frame. It is worth noting that these years were hell for non-white people in nearly every way shape and form!) The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and it prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. So, finally, after dozens of generations of racist and discriminatory practices, we will get some housing justice and equity, right? Nope.

Even since civil rights were passed, discriminatory practices have continually affected who owns property as well as land.

Racial home ownership gaps were at the highest levels in 50 years in 2017. Statistics of home ownership:

79.1% of white Americans

41.8% of black Americans

This gap is even larger today than it was when deliberately racist and discriminatory redlining practices were rampant. Redlining was an effective systemic method to maintain social hierarchy and we still feel the effects today. This has kept blacks in certain neighborhoods and prevented them from owning land or real property. This practice resulted in another three to five generations of limiting opportunities, quality of life, and generational wealth for non-white Americans. This isn’t ancient history. A person that is 56-57 years old has lived this reality.

First Generation of Legally Free and Fully Equal Human Beings

In 2020, we are now living with the first generation of African Americans deemed to be legally, fully free, equal human beings in this country. I am one such African American born to parents that lived through segregation with no basis of wealth and systemically limited opportunities. The lack of generational ownership or wealth is critical to understanding wealth disparity in the black middle class today. The lack of generational wealth also contributes to the lack of mobility of lower-class black Americans. This reality makes it harder- if not impossible- to accrue and pass along wealth to any future generations.

Land ownership has been held as the mechanism by which wealth and status are transferred. The deliberately exclusionary nature of land and real property ownership over the past 400 years has led us to our modern-day housing crisis. Our current housing circumstance in the US is precarious but we are here by design.

A disruption is necessary.

https://www.uncontainedlivingkc.com/post/necessary-disruption-housing-reimagined

#containerhomes Uncontainedliving UncontainedlivingKC affordablehousing containersolutions housingcrisis housingjustice housingdevelopment

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

Very few Americans back full school reopening (AP) Virtual instruction. Mandated masks. Physical distancing. The start of school will look very different this year because of the coronavirus—and that’s OK with the vast majority of Americans. Only about 1 in 10 Americans think daycare centers, preschools or K-12 schools should open this fall without restrictions, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. Most think mask requirements and other safety measures are necessary to restart in-person instruction, and roughly 3 in 10 say that teaching kids in classrooms shouldn’t happen at all. Many of the nation’s largest school districts have announced that they’ll be entirely virtual in the fall or use a hybrid model that has children in classrooms only a couple of days a week.

Remote learning? (NYT) The topic of home schooling is suddenly hot. Parents who never before considered home schooling have begun looking into it—especially in combination with a small number of other families, to share the teaching load and let their children interact with others. Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who writes about parenting, has predicted that clusters of home-schooling families are “going to happen everywhere.” Reporter Eliza Shapiro said she thought many families, across income groups, were likely to consider pooling child-care responsibilities in the fall. Children would remain enrolled in their school and would come together to take online classes in the same house (or, more safely, backyard). In some cases, these co-ops might morph into lessons that parents would help lead.

Pompeo wanted to shake hands. Foreign diplomats offered shoulder pats and elbow bumps instead. (Washington Post) During a trip Wednesday to Copenhagen for meetings with the foreign ministers of Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the top U.S. diplomat, did not wear a face mask. That led to an awkward diplomatic dance. When he extended a hand in greeting, Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s foreign affairs minister, kept to social distancing guidelines and refused to shake back. Undeterred, Pompeo tried again with the foreign minister of the Faroe Islands, who also declined. The third time was not quite the charm: Pompeo and the foreign minister of Greenland successfully navigated an elbow bump. The diplomats in question were all in proximity to one another and did exchange some shoulder pats.

Trump deploys more federal agents under ‘law and order’ push (AP) President Donald Trump announced he will send federal agents to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help combat rising crime, expanding the administration’s intervention into local enforcement as he runs for reelection under a “law and order” mantle. Using the same alarmist language he has employed to describe illegal immigration, Trump painted Democrat-led cities as out of control and lashed out at the “radical left,” which he blamed for rising violence in some cities, even though criminal justice experts say it defies easy explanation. Crime began surging in some cities like Chicago, New York and Philadelphia when stay-at-home orders lifted. Criminal justice experts seeking answers have pointed to the unprecedented moment: a pandemic that has killed over 140,000 Americans, historic unemployment, a mass reckoning over race and police brutality, intense stress and even the weather. Compared with other years, crime in 2020 is down overall.

Will changes to print outlast the pandemic? (Columbia Journalism Review) More than a hundred news outlets have scaled down their print production since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Some publishers had planned to cut print eventually, but the financial setbacks of the pandemic forced their hand. Others, however, say their print suspension is temporary and worry about their audiences that still largely depend on print. As recently as 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that around half of newspaper readers relied exclusively on the print edition. And last month in Australia, News Corp’s decision to end print production at a number of its newspapers reportedly left older readers feeling isolated and underinformed.

Luxury jet spurned by Mexico’s president returns from U.S. without a buyer (Reuters) The luxury presidential jet Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants to sell returned on Wednesday to Mexico, more than 1-1/2 years after he sent it to the United States in search of a buyer. Mexico has struggled to sell the opulent Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which the leftist Lopez Obrador has cast as a symbol of excess and corruption under previous governments in a country where around half the population lives in poverty. The jet was acquired by former President Enrique Pena Nieto in 2012 and fitted with marble-lined bathrooms. Reconfigured to fly only 80 people, the plane has a “presidential suite” and a private bath. The sale has been hamstrung in part by Lopez Obrador’s unwillingness to accept offers below a United Nations-backed valuation of $130 million, even as the plane was potentially losing value as it sat unused in southern California.

Virus slams Bolivia as hospitals say: ‘There is no space’ (AP) Police in Bolivia’s major cities have recovered the bodies of hundreds of suspected victims of the coronavirus from homes, vehicles and, in some instances, the streets. Hospitals are full of COVID-19 patients and short of staff, keeping their gates closed and hanging out signs that say: “There is no space.” And the Bolivian government says the peak of the outbreak is not expected until August. Desperation is growing in one of Latin America’s poorest countries, which seems overwhelmed by the virus even as it endures political turmoil stemming from a flawed election and the ouster of President Evo Morales last year. A plan to hold elections in September, seen as a key to stabilizing its democracy, is increasingly in doubt as the pandemic worsens.

Coronavirus cases in Latin America pass 4 million—Reuters tally (Reuters) Brazil registered a new daily record for confirmed coronavirus cases on Wednesday, pushing the total confirmed cases across Latin America past 4 million, according to a Reuters tally. Brazil registered 67,860 additional cases of the virus on Wednesday, along with 1,284 related deaths, bringing total cases in Latin America’s largest nation to 2,227,514 and deaths there to 82,771.

With no Brits, cash-strapped Algarve fights for survival (Reuters) In his near-empty pub in the Algarve in southern Portugal, Samuel Tilley is fuming that coronavirus regulations in his home country Britain are keeping tourists away, further jeopardizing an already gloomy summer season. Usually packed with tourists at this time of the year, Vilamoura is quiet, leaving bar staff at Tilley’s O’Neills pub without much to do but brood over Britain’s decision to leave Portugal off a list of more than 50 countries safe enough for travel without restrictions. Portugal initially won praise for its quick response to the pandemic but a persistent count of several hundred new cases per day concentrated in and around Lisbon in the past two months has worried authorities at home and abroad, leading Britain and other European nations to impose restrictions on travel from the southern European nation. Last year, Portugal welcomed about 2 million Britons, with 64% of them heading to the sunny Algarve, famed for its sandy beaches and golf courses. So far in 2020, only 92,000 Britons have made it the region. Lonely waiters stand outside restaurants with menus in hand but no holidaymakers to speak to.

Turkey’s quiet offensive (Foreign Policy) Turkish forces have moved deep into Iraqi territory in an effort to root out Kurdish militants, who the government claim use northern Iraq as a staging post for operations inside Turkey. Although Turkish troops have been in northern Iraq for some time, the government recently adopted a more aggressive approach, seeking “to destroy the threat from where it begins.” As part of the campaign–dubbed Operation Claw Tiger–Turkey has advanced 25 miles inside the Iraqi border and established 30 military bases. The operation could serve as the prelude to further incursions into Iraq.

India reports record 45,720 new coronavirus cases, deaths rise by 1,129 (Reuters) India reported a record jump of 45,720 in coronavirus infections on Wednesday taking its total number of cases to 1.24 million, the health ministry said on Thursday. India also reported 1,129 deaths for Wednesday, taking the death toll to 29,861. India has the third-highest number of cases after the United States and Brazil.

Beijing’s summer is more oppressive than usual, but most prefer the heat over the virus (Washington Post) All the signs of Beijing’s infernal summer are in evidence. Men playing cards on the sidewalks are sporting their “Beijing bikinis,” their shirts hoisted up over their beer bellies for better air flow, while young trendy types carry personal fans as they walk down the street. People are cooking meat at outdoor restaurants or on little grills on the sidewalk. It’s so hot that Beijingers—usually insistent on body-temperature beverages—are even drinking their beer cold. It could almost be any other steamy July in any other year. But even here, where life is almost back to normal after months of strict controls, the coronavirus remains a lingering menace. Restaurants and malls are open, but to enter, customers have to activate a health code on their smartphones. The code tracks their movements and determines whether they have been to any risky places. Only those with green codes are allowed in. Many offices insist on green codes, too. A red code, or even an amber one, is the scarlet letter of 2020. As countries around the world try to find the balance between health and economic considerations to deal with a second or third—or in the case of the United States, first—wave of the coronavirus, China has found its sweet spot. These controls involve immediate lockdowns, mass testing and the use of surveillance technology to a degree that the ruling Communist Party could have only dreamed about when this year dawned.

China tells US to close consulate in Chengdu in growing spat (AP) China ordered the United States on Friday to close its consulate in the western city of Chengdu, ratcheting up a diplomatic conflict at a time when relations have sunk to their lowest level in decades. The move was a response to the Trump administration’s order this week for Beijing to close its consulate in Houston after Washington accused Chinese agents of trying to steal medical and other research in Texas. The Chinese foreign ministry appealed to Washington to reverse its “wrong decision.” Chinese-U.S. relations have soured amid a mounting array of conflicts including trade, the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, technology, spying accusations, Hong Kong and allegations of abuses against Chinese Muslims.

China launches ambitious attempt to land rover on Mars (AP) China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. Engines blazing orange, a Long March-5 carrier rocket took off under clear skies around 12:40 p.m. from Hainan Island, south of China’s mainland. Hundreds of space enthusiasts cried out excitedly on a beach across the bay from the launch site. It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.

Saudi king, 84, undergoes surgery to remove gallbladder (AP) Saudi Arabia’s King Salman underwent a successful surgery that removed his gallbladder, the kingdom said Thursday, just days after being admitted to hospital over an inflammation of the organ. The king serves as an absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s top oil producers and the site of the holiest sites of Islam. His health remains a key factor watched by observers of the kingdom, as next in line to the throne is his assertive 34-year-old son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who could rule for decades.

Going cold turkey in Somalia (Reuters) COVID-induced khat shortage adds to Somalia’s health woes. In sweltering Mogadishu, Sharif Ahmed, 22, tried to attack relatives and neighbors, resulting in an emergency trip to a psychiatric hospital in handcuffs. He is suffering withdrawal from the narcotic leaf khat. Somalia shut down flights in late March to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, meaning the drug could no longer be imported by air from Kenya. That affected users, causing some to go for long periods without sleep. The price of khat surged when the flights were stopped, putting it out of reach for most users and straining resources at Mogadishu’s Habeeb Psychiatric Emergency Hospital.

#headlines #news

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foreverlogical · 5 years ago

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Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Between the time this sentence was written and the time this article is published, hundreds more Americans will likely have died from COVID-19. Hundreds or perhaps thousands more people will have been hospitalized, and certainly tens of thousands more will have tested positive for the coronavirus. At this point, making predictions about the pandemic is like riding a barrel over Niagara Falls: We can only guess how it ends, but we do know things are going down.

Here’s another prediction that’s safe to make: The city of New Orleans—and, potentially, all of Louisiana—is going to become the next front in the fight against the pandemic. Even as national attention is justifiably focused on the aggressive outbreak in Washington State and the mounting pressures on New York City’s hospitals, the virus’s advance in Louisiana has shaken local officials and doctors, and the state is already approaching a similar burden of infections and deaths as the crises to the north. There’s good reason to believe that this southern outbreak will be even more difficult to contain, and is perhaps a better harbinger of what’s to come as the pandemic spreads across the country.

The numbers already indicate that Louisiana is a global epicenter of the pandemic. Just over 1 percent of the U.S. population lives in Louisiana. But according to the COVID Tracking Project, 7 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, 7 percent of all hospitalizations, and 3 percent of all positive tests have been in the state. New York has suffered about two deaths per 100,000 residents. Louisiana is at 1.8.

[Read: Red and Blue America aren’t experiencing the same pandemic]

To put the numbers into perspective, if Louisiana were a country, its death count would put it in the top 15 globally. The burden appears to be increasing so quickly that all of these statistics will become quickly out of date. The state reported 83 total deaths from COVID-19 as of noon yesterday. It had reported 34 as of Monday. And, as is the nature of this virus, most of the reported data represent only a snapshot of the infections that took place a week or two ago. Hospitalizations and deaths will increase. And, if other outbreaks around the world are any example, the curve will not rise gently. The fallout in Louisiana will be most painful in the New Orleans metropolitan area, whose Orleans and Jefferson Parishes account for two-thirds of all cases in the state.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards has already declared a state of emergency. In a press conference on Wednesday, he said that, despite the official numbers, he’s certain that all parishes in the state have coronavirus cases. He asked citizens to continue to stay home and follow state guidelines on slowing the spread of the virus. Like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Edwards also warned of a critical shortage of ventilators in the hospitals that will soon be hit with waves of COVID-19 patients. “We could potentially run out of vents in the New Orleans area in the first week in April,” Edwards said. According to state data, a third of all people hospitalized because of the virus so far have required ventilators.

Local officials in New Orleans have made even more dire pronouncements. “We are preparing to mobilize in a way that many of us have never seen,” said Collin Arnold, the city’s homeland- security director, in a separate press conference Wednesday. “This is a disaster that will define us for generations.” New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell said the same day that the city expects hospital beds to fill within two weeks, and she authorized the use of the Morial Convention Center as an overflow site.

Physicians and other health professionals in the city already seem close to being overwhelmed. In a tweet on Wednesday, the former state secretary of health, Rebekah Gee, referenced stories of people reusing protective gear or ordering it from eBay. Joshua Denson, a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Tulane Medical Center and University Medical Center New Orleans, diagnosed the second confirmed case of coronavirus in the city. Now he’s currently under self-quarantine as he awaits the results of his own test for the virus. “I'm not the only one of our critical-care doctors who is on quarantine or sick right now,” Denson told me. “The big point is: If you lose one or two, it's a big deal. This isn't a place that's just swimming with available options.”

According to Denson, problems particular to Louisiana might make an outbreak there worse than what other parts of the U.S. have seen. The state has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, and with that burden comes health disparities—including the kinds of conditions that appear to put people at risk for serious complications from the coronavirus. Louisiana is one of the youngest states in the country, which would seem to suggest its residents would have better outcomes, given that older people have so far been the most vulnerable to the outbreak. But about 43 percent of its adult population falls into “at risk” categories, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A sizable number of young adults in the state have preexisting conditions.

According to Denson, that means that New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana might be looking at a different kind of outbreak than most countries—or even New York and Washington—have seen, including widespread hospitalizations or even deaths of young people. Yesterday, Louisiana reported its first death of a person under 35, a 17-year-old in Orleans Parish.

“We're seeing different processes of this disease than they have seen in China, at least anecdotally,” Denson said. “We're seeing more comorbid conditions that are common to Americans, such as high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes.”

[Read: What do the healthy owe to the vulnerable?]

Many common assumptions about the coronavirus pandemic are about to be tested in the U.S., in ways they haven’t been so far. The effects of the virus on populations like those in the American South—poorer, characterized by marked racial and social disparities in health status and health access, and often saddled with multiple existing conditions—aren’t yet well known. And many other southern states, unlike Louisiana, New York, Washington—all of which expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—have little in the way of public health-insurance options for those younger at-risk populations. If Louisiana (likely through Mardi Gras) was COVID-19’s foothold in the South, then America is about to learn a whole lot about how the disease interacts with some of the most stubborn and intractable health-care issues in the country.

For now, the next point of focus should be on New Orleans. It’s not Italy, not yet. But the warnings are urgent, and perhaps even more portentous in their sobriety and certainty. The state will run out of crucial resources for taking care of coronavirus patients, likely before their number peaks. Hospitals will be under extreme strain. Health-care professionals will contract the virus themselves. Underlying health conditions will make their jobs more difficult.

That means now is the time for desperate measures, Denson thinks. He’s calling for the kind of mobilization people reserve for the worst disasters—including donations of supplies and more doctors and nurses. “I hope that two months down the road, people are saying, ‘I overreacted,’” he said.

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

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Dems Have Squandered Last Opportunity to Beat Trump

President Trump has met and passed his supreme test.

This has left his Democratic opponents desperately espousing gloom and demanding that the economic shut-down continue, according to frequent semi-high-brow Democratic ideologue and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for up to seven months.

Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took to The Washington Post to preach epidemiological defeatism.

While the choristers of fear and despair are clinging to a prolonged economic meltdown like drowning men clutching a raft, their presumptive presidential candidate is disintegrating in the midst of friendly interviews and struggling to get a little attention while the man he wishes to unseat takes one to two hours of prime-time television every day announcing the success of his plan of action to deal with the country’s greatest public health crisis in a century.

When Trump realized that his breezy assurances that everything was under control and that the spring weather would vanquish the problem weren’t cutting it, and that he was wide open to blistering criticism from his opponents, he imperturbably executed a 180-degree turn and became, in FDR’s phrase, apt for a public health crisis, "Dr. Win-the-War."

The Democratic Party spokespeople for a few days were feeling very sufficient, settling into a long siege with the entire economy of the country descending into desperate straits, and then carrying their recently resurrected nominee, the ill-assured and quavering Joe Biden across the finish-line against the new Herbert Hoover.

Democrats had been incredulous at Trump’s appearance as a candidate, judged him unelectable, were so astonished by his victory they convinced themselves and corrupted the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies with the monstrous falsehood that he had won by enlisting the support of the Kremlin. And when that enormous canard came down in flames — like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey in May, 1937— out of terror-induced distraction, they impeached him for unimpeachable offenses and with no believable evidence that he had committed them anyway.

The unelectable Trump had given way to the impeachable Trump, who was replaced by the distinctly beatable Trump, a vision it was increasingly hard to believe in as the economy disobediently boomed and the president’s poll numbers rose. Then, like the Seventh Cavalry guided by a beatific apparition, the coronavirus pandemic descended. It wasn’t quite the Trump exit his enemies had wished, but it would do and it was providential.

Trump would shut everything down after being pilloried for overconfidence and ineffectiveness, the economy would wither, the pandemic would do to him politically what the Iran hostages did to Jimmy Carter, and the Democrats could claim in the autumn that if he had just acted more quickly, all would be well, and the disease-driven poverty of America was Trump’s doing.

The president had the grace of conversion. He shut down all the bunk about his philistine animosity to science by recruiting a blue-ribbon scientific and public health administrative team. He stopped most of the Democratic officeholders by cooperating closely with all the governors, including some he had quarreled with publicly and acidulously.

People in the front lines, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and California Governor Gavin Newsom, were fighting for the lives of the people in their states, as well as for their own political futures, and all those who were trying to cope with the pandemic, rather than exploiting its political consequences, had the same interest.

The eminent scientists and other specialists on the president’s task force appeared with him at his press briefings and spoke in solidarity with him. Trump more or less shouldered the vice president aside and took the podium every day with the whole country watching.

He brought in the private-sector leaders and a collaboration somewhat reminiscent of the brilliant cooperation between government and industry in World War II instantly came into being as many corporations threw their energies into producing and distributing vital equipment for combating the scourge.

Medical supplies were moved quickly and with almost no red tape. The astounding incapacity to test in serious numbers and promptly was replaced in two weeks with mass testing that almost anyone could perform with results coming in 40 minutes.

This week there have been 65,000 tests a day and by next week there will be 150,000 tests a day.

Trump was solid, not rattled, by the questions and entirely believable as he handled the press every day, and fully corroborated by his experts. The anticipated fatality rate between 5 and 10 percent of those afflicted, and a majority of those apparently with coronavirus symptoms, narrowed out after about 10 days and it emerged that only about 15% of those who seemed to have the symptoms tested positive, and of those, fatalities were about 1.5% of infected people.

If the immuno-compromised portion of the population could be segregated and protected, the fatality rate came down to about half of 1% of the 15% of the tested and symptomatic people who actually had contracted the coronavirus.

And there are large regions of the country where the penetration of the virus has been minimal, and this condition was generally conserved by drastically reduced travel.

The independent medical and epidemiological experts confirmed that the president’s actions in closing down flights from China in January and from Western Europe on March 11 had undoubtedly saved many American lives and that without these measures, the United States could have had fatality rates like Italy’s distressing 10.5% of infected cases — scores or even hundreds of thousands of dead if replicated in the United States.

At the time of the move on flights from China, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer fired the usual Democratic charges of "racism" and "xenophobia" at the president—the charges didn’t wear well.

The president championed the malarial remedy Hydroxychloroquine, and when one unfortunate tried to self-medicate but with the phosphate version (an aquarium tank-cleaner) he died so CNN billed it a virtual manslaughter by the president. Laughable.

And the actual remedy does appear to be promising. As this new and less terrifying picture emerged, a rising focus among commentators was on the economic damage of a prolonged shut-down of the country.

Although this was essentially what the Democrats were counting on, they had to concur in the president’s relief package, an awe-inspiring two trillion dollar direct relief bill supplemented by a four trillion dollar liquidity facility.

The Democrats squandered their ability to take much credit for it by trying to pack in nonsense about solar panels, windmills, abortions, carbon emissions of grounded airliners, and back-handers for trade unions.

Too late.

They realized that Trump and the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, had layered in tax benefits that would outlast the public health crisis and its consequences and would be of tangible pleasure to the voters as they went to their election places.

And so the Democrats arrive at their last line of defense: Bill de Blasio, the failed, lame-duck mayor of New York, pathetically wailing for the deployment of the armed forces (for no evident purpose and as if they were immune to the virus) and predicting that the pandemic would rage everywhere in the country at the highest New York City rate, for six months.

Reich and Summers and the others charged out of the firehall one more time demanding a long shutdown, but it won’t fly. They’ve run out of dirty tricks they’re finished.

The Democrats have a presumptive candidate who can hardly utter a coherent sentence in response to a friendly questioner, live-streaming from a little podium in his living room, an absurd, and objectively sad spectacle.

The Democratic bosses are sending an infirm and elderly mouse to bell a big, tawny, roaring cat.

Anyone can see how it will end.

This article was originally published in American Greatness.

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sataniccapitalist · 6 years ago

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FEBRUARY 18, 2019

31 Actual National Emergencies

by PAUL STREET

A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man

Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd.

There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border.

Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low.

Undocumented immigrants are not a crime and violence threat. They are less likely to commit crimes, violent ones included, than naturalized U.S. citizens.

Drugs come into the U.S. not through gaps in border fencing but primarily through legal ports of entry.

There is no big call for a completed U.S.-Mexico wall on the part of U.S. citizens on the southern border.

The United States military has not been “breaking up” and blocking “monstrous caravans” of illegal immigrants trying to harm the U.S.

The only crisis at the border is the humanitarian one created by Trump’s war on asylum-seekers and legal as well as technically illegal immigrants. The wannabe strongman has set up a ridiculous brown menace strawman in an effort to take an unprecedented step. He wants to use the National Emergencies Act to fulfill a ridiculous campaign promises to his white-nationalist base. He wants to make an end run around Congress to spend federal taxpayer on a project that lawmakers chose not to fund – a political vanity scheme that is opposed by 60 percent of the U.S. populace.

Actual National Emergencies

An irony here is that the United States today is in fact haunted by many actual and interrelated national emergencies. Here below are the top thirty-one that came to the present writer’s mind this last weekend:

1. Class Inequality. America is mired in a New Gilded Age where economic disparity is so extreme now that the top thousandth (the 0.1 percent, not just the 1 Percent) possesses more wealth than the bottom U.S. 90 percent and three absurdly rich U.S.-Americans – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – possess more wealth between them than the bottom half of the country.

2. Poverty. The nation’s 540 billionaires (Trump is one of them) enjoy lives of unimaginable opulence (Trump flew off to one of his resorts to play golf after declaring his “national emergency” – an “emergency” he foolishly said he didn’t actually have to declare) while 15 million children – 21% of all U.S. children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to be drastically below the minimally adequate family budgets families require to meet basic expenses.

3. Plutocracy. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies wrote in 1941. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Consistent with Brandeis’s warning, the leading mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens find through exhaustive research that “the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…Government policy,” Page and Gilens determined, “reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.” Economic power is so concentrated in the US today you can count on one hand and one finger the multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions that control the nation’s economic and political life: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. “You have no choice,” George Carlin used to tell his audiences earlier this century, “You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”

4. Bad Jobs. Trump boasts of American job creation and low official unemployment rate (real joblessness is a different story) while deleting the fact that tens of millions of the nation’s workers struggle with jobs whose pay lags far behind employment growth thanks to declining unionization (down to 6.5% of the private-sector workforce due to decades of relentless employer hostility), inadequate minimum wages, globalization, automation, and outsourcing. A third of the nation’s workers make less than $12 an hour ($24,960 a year assuming full-time work) and 42% get less than $15 ($31,200 a year). Good luck meeting a family’s food, rent, childcare, medical, and car payment (car ownership is often required in a nation that lacks adequate public transportation) costs on those kinds of returns on labor power. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported that a record 7 million U.S.-Americans are three months or more behind on their par payments. As the Washington Post reports: “Economists warn this is a red flag. Despite the strong economy and low unemployment rate, many Americans are struggling to pay their bills. ‘The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market,’ economists at the New York Fed wrote in a blog post. A car loan is typically the first payment people make because a vehicle is critical to getting to work, and someone can live in a car if all else fails. When car loan delinquencies rise, it is a sign of significant duress among low-income and working-class Americans.”

5. Corporate Media Consolidation is so extreme in the U.S. now that just six corporations – Comcast, FOX, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and AT&T – together own more than half of traditional U.S. media content print, film and electronic. The Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule online communication and shopping. (It is isn’t just about “news and information” [Carlin], by the way. The corporate-owned mass media probably spreads capitalist, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and military-imperialist propaganda more effectively through its entertainment wing than it does through its new and public/political affairs wing. A movie like “American Sniper” beats CNN reporting bias when it comes to advancing the U.S. imperial project [see #s 28 and 29 below]. A film like Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” beats the evening news when it comes to advancing racist mass incarceration and racial segregation [see #s 6 and 9 below]).

6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid. The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is stark: 8 Black median household cents on the white median household dollar. Equally glaring is the nation’s level of racial segregation. In the Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, for example more than three in every four Black people would have to (be allowed to) move from their nearly all-black Census tracts into whiter ones in order to live in a place whose racial composition matched that of the broader region in which they reside. These two statistical measures are intimately interrelated since housing markets distribute so much more than just housing. They also distribute access to jobs, good schools, green spaces, full-service groceries, safety, medical services and more that matters for “equal opportunity” and advancement.

7. Gender Inequality. Among full-time U.S. workers, women make 81 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The gap is worse in part-time employment since women more commonly work reduced schedules to handle domestic labor. Women ‘s median retirement savings are roughly one third of those of men. Households headed by single women with children have a poverty rate of 35.6 percent, more than double the 17.3 percent rate for households headed by single men with children. Women comprise just 27 percent of the nation’s top 10 income percent, 17 percent of the upper 1 percent, and 11 percent of the top 0.1 percent. By contrast, women make up nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S. workers paid the federal minimum wage.

8. Native American Poverty. Thanks to the savage white-“settler” ethnic-cleansing of most of North America from the 16th century through 1900, Indigenous people make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population. The Native American poverty rate (28%) is double that of the nation as a whole and is particularly high in most of the commonly isolated and high-unemployment reservations where just more than a fifth of the nation’s Indigenous population lives. Native American life expectancy is 6 years short of the national average. In some states, Native American life expectancy is 20 years less than the national average. In Montana, Native American men live on average just 56 years.

9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fueled by the racially disparate waging of the so-called War on Drugs. The racial disparities are so extreme that 1 in very 10 U.S. Black men is in prison or jail on any given day. One in 3 Black adult males are saddled with the permanent crippling mark of a felony record – what law professor Michelle Alexander has famously called “the New Jim Crow.” Blacks make up 12% of the U.S. population but 38% of the nation’s state prison population.

10. Trumpism/Fascism. The U.S. mass media focuses so heavily on the seemingly interminable awfulness of the creeping fascist Donald Trump (whose hideous nature is a ratings bonanza at CNN and MSNBC) that it is easy to lose sight of the fascistic horror of his authoritarian and white-nationalist supporters – roughly a third of the nation. The best social and political science research on Trump’s base reveals a fascist-like movementseeking a “strong” authoritarian “leader” who will rollback civil liberties and the gains won by women and racial and ethnic minorities since the 1960s. Trumpism wants to Make America more fully white-supremacist, patriarchal, and authoritarian (“great”) Again. Herr Donald’s disproportionately armed throng of die-hard devotees backs their Dear Leader no matter how terribly he behaves. It is a grave, creeping fascist threat to democracy.

11. The War on Truth. The aspiring fascist leader Trump made on average 15 false statements per day in 2018. He had stated more than 7,600 untruths as president by the end of last year. Trump lies constantly about matters big and small. He is a practitioner of what Chris Hedges calls “the permanent lie.” It is no small matter. In his description of this as “the most ominous threat” posed by Trump, Hedges quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth,” Arendt wrote in her classic volume The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” Trump is only the most extreme and egregious wave of fabrication in a vast sea of national deception. U.S.-Americans, once accurately described by Alex Carey as “the most propagandized people in the world,” are surrounded by duplicitous and misleading information and imagery. This constant barrage of falsehood – examples include the thoroughly untrue notion that the U.S. possessed a “great democracy” for the Trump campaign and Russia to (supposedly) “undermine” in 2016 – threatens to exhaust our capacity to distinguish fact from fiction.

12. Gun Violence. Fully 40,000 people died from shootings in the American “armed madhouse” in 2017 (we are still waiting for the grisly statistic for 2018). The U.S. was home to 322 mass shootings that killed 387 people and injured 1,227 in 2018. Twenty-eight mass shootings, killing 36 and wounding 92, took place in January of this year. A mass shooting killed five workers in Aurora, Illinois, on the very day (last Friday) that Trump declared his fake national emergency.

13. Sexual Violence. One in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives in the U.S.

14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy. More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level.

15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia. Thanks to corporate control of the nation’s media and schools, U.S.-Americans are shockingly ignorant of basic facts relating to their own history and society. White U.S.-Americans are mired in extraordinary denial about the level of Black-white inequality and the depth and degree of discrimination faced by Black Americans today. U.S.-Americans in general know next to nothing about the criminal and mass-murderous havoc U.S. foreign policy wreaks around the world. This renders them incapable of understanding world politics and woefully vulnerable to nationalistic propaganda and militarism. Eleven years historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” Shenkman found that a majority of Americans: didn’t know which party was in control of Congress; couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court; didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government; believed George W. Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9/11. Ask an average U.S.-American when the American War of Independence or the Civil War or WWII were fought and why, what the Bill of Rights was, what fascism is past and present, or what the Civil Rights Movement was about, and you will get blank stares and preposterously wrong answers. A people that doesn’t know its history wanders without a clue through the present and stumbles aimlessly into the future. Real historical knowledge is a great democratic people’s weapon and it is in perilously short supply in the U.S. today.

16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies. Israel’s power in U.S. politics and political culture is so absurdly exaggerated that a freshman Muslim U.S. Congressional Representative (Ilhan Omar) was recently subjected to a massive and bipartisan political assault absurdly charging her with “anti-Semitism” for daring to Tweet seven words suggesting the elementarily true fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – a deep-powerful, deep-pockets public relations and lobbying organization committed to the advance of Israeli state interests – exercises money-lubricated influence on U.S. politics and policy. To visibly raise the question of Palestinian rights and Israel’s horrendous treatment of Arab peoples is to invite an onslaught from the Israel Lobby’s vicious and powerful attack-dogs. They’ve even been known to strip professors of tenure. Meanwhile, the despotic Saudi regime, possibly the most reactionary government on Earth, continues through money and other means to exercise huge influence on U.S. politics even as it senselessly crucifies the people of Yemen (with direct U.S. military assistance), cultivates terrorism across the Muslim world, and vivisects dissident journalists in its foreign embassies.

17. Neo-McCarthyism. The original Orwellian-American and Russia-mad McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s has been resurrected in the post-Soviet era with a curious partisan twist. Anti-Russian hysteria has been picked up by the Democratic Party, which has been eager to blame its pathetic failure to defeat Trump on Russia’s supposedly powerful “interference in our [unmentionably non-existent] democracy” in 2016 – and to deny its politicos’ role in provoking any such relevant Russian interference as may have occurred. On the Republican side, Trump (who was mentored by Senator Joe McCarthy’s onetime chief counsel Roy Cohn!) and other GOP leaders now routinely follow in the footsteps of Joe McCarthy by calling even cringingly centrist corporate-neoliberal Democrats and everything they propose “socialist.” One of the most horrific moments in Herr Donald’s sickening State of the Union Address came when the Orange Mother of all Malignant Assholes (OMoAMA) told the assembled federal officials to “renew” the nation’s “pledge” that “America will never be a socialist country.” Numerous Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi (net worth $71 million) and “progressive” U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren ($11 million) joined the GOPers in attendance in applauding that “pledge.” McCarthyism was always and remains a richly bipartisan disease.

18. Health Care and Health. The United States’ corporate-owned/-managed for-profit health care system is the most expensive in the world but ranks just 12th in life expectancy among the 12 wealthiest industrialized countries. The U.S. spends almost three times more on healthcare as do other countries with comparable incomes. Reflecting poor, commercialized and corporate-imposed food systems and lethally sedentary life styles, 58 percent of the U.S. population is overweight, a major health risk factor.

19. Bad Schools. The nation’s expensive but very unequally funded schools deliver terrible outcomes. Among the world’s 34 ranking OECD nations, U.S. schools are the fifth most expensive, but the U.S. ranks scores far below average in math. It ranks 17th among in reading and 21st in science.

20. Child Abuse. Childhelp reports that “Every year more than 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies involving more than 6.6 million children. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations – losing on average between four and seven children every day to child abuse and neglect…A report of child abuse is made very ten seconds.”

21. Depression and Substance Abuse. The United States, once described by onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” (in a speech supporting the Congressional authorization of George W. Bush to invade Iraq) has the third highest rates of depression and anxiety and the second highest rate of drug use in the world. “One in five adults in the U.S. experiences some form of mental illness each year,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That estimate is certainly absurdly low.

22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights. Undocumented immigrants make up 55% of hired labor on farms, 15% of laborers in construction, and 9% in both industry and the service sector. “These workers,” CBS reported earlier this year, “play vital roles in the U.S. economy, erecting American buildings, picking American apples and grapes, and taking care of American babies. Oh, and paying American taxes.” Their technically illegal status makes them easily exploited by employers and undermines their ability to organize and fight for decent conditions both for themselves for other workers.

23. The Dreamer Nightmare. Eight hundred thousand people living in the U.S. were brought to the country as children by parents without U.S. citizenship. These “Dreamers’” legal status is stuck in limbo. They are not allowed to vote. They live in the shadow of possible future deportation, with their legal status treated as a partisan political football.

24. Vote Suppression. State-level racist voter suppression and de facto disenfranchisement is rife across the United States. Among other things, this has contributed significantly to the Republicans winning the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016. A “gentleman’s agreement” between the two reigning political parties pushes this critical problem to the margins of public discussion. (The Democrats have widely ignored the matter while they have obsessed for two years plus about Russia’s real or alleged role in the last election. Moscow’s influence was likely small compared to American-as-Apple Pie racist voter suppression in electing Trump.) “The United States,” political scientist David Schutlz noted on Counterpunch last year, “is the only country in the world that still does not have in its Constitution an explicit clause affirmatively granting a right to vote for all or some of its citizens.”

25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution. Popular sovereignty, also known as democracy was the late 18thcentury U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare. They crafted an aristo-republican national charter brilliantly crafted to keep it at bay – in the darkly ironic name of “We the People.” Two and a third centuries later, their handiwork continues to do its explicitly un- and anti-democratic work through such openly authoritarian mechanisms as the Electoral College, the apportionment of two Senators to every U.S. state regardless of population, the distant time-staggering of elections, the lifetime presidential appointment and Senate approval of Supreme Court justices. The preposterously venerated U.S. Constitution is an ongoing 232-year old authoritarian calamity in dire need of a radical and democratic overhaul. It is long past time for the populace to declare a national emergency and call for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new national governing structure dedicated to meaning popular self-rule.

26. Trump and the Imperial Presidency. The OMoAMA (Trump) is by all indications a demented and malignant narcissist, a pure sociopath, and a creeping fascist. But the fact that someone as twisted, venal, sexist, and racist as Trump can pose dire threats to humanity in the first place is in no small part a function of the extreme powers that have accrued to the United States constitutionally super-empowered executive branch over the many decades in which the U.S. has reigned as the world’s most powerful state. The absurdly vast and authoritarian powers of the imperial presidency are an on ongoing national and global emergency.

27. Election Madness/Electoralism. In the early spring of 2008, the late radical American historian Howard Zinn wrote powerfully against the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. “An election frenzy seizes the country every four years,” Zinn worried, “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn said he would support one major-party candidate over another but only “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” Then he offered sage counsel, reminding us that time-staggered candidate-centered major party electoralism is a very weak surrogate for real popular sovereignty, which requires regular grassroots organization and militancy beneath and beyond what his good friend Noam Chomsky has called“the quadrennial electoral extravaganza”: “Before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” The reigning “mainstream” US media and politics culture is fiercely dedicated to advancing the hegemony of the major party candidate-centered election cycle, advancing the deadly totalitarian notion that those two minutes in a ballot box once every four years – generally choosing among politics vetted in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire – is the sum total of “politics” – the only politics that really matters. Since the hidden corporate control of the US electoral politics on behalf of the center-right ruling class rules out victory for candidates who accurately reflect majority left-progressive public opinion, these ritual exercises in fake democracy deeply reinforce the fatalistic and false belief that most Americans are centrist and right-wing. The 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Iowa-New Hampshire circus is already sucking up vast swaths of cable news coverage and commentary while numerous pressing matters (like most of what is listed in the present essay) is largely ignored. It’s pathetic.

28. Guns Over Butter. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly preached that the U.S. could not end poverty or escape “spiritual death” as long as it diverted vast swaths of its tax revenue to a giant war machine that “draw [s] men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Just over half a century after King said this, the United States gives 54 percent of its federal discretionary to the Pentagon System, a giant subsidy to high-tech “defense” (war and empire) corporations like Raytheon and Boeing. Six million U.S, children live in “deep poverty,” at less than half (!) the federal government’s obscenely inadequate poverty level, while the U.S, government maintains 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territoriesaround the world (Britain, France, and Russia together have a combined 30 foreign bases) and accounts for nearly 40 percent of all global military spending. It is deeply offensive that the progressive-populist (fake-“democratic socialist”) U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has repeatedly cited Scandinavian nations as his social-democratic policy role models without having the elementary Dr. Kingian decency to note that those countries dedicate relatively tiny portions of their national budgets to the military. It is disturbing but predictable that most Congressional Democrats voted for Trump’s record-setting $700 billion Pentagon budget last year. U.S. Americans must choose: we can have democracy, social justice, guaranteed free health care, well-funded public schools, and livable ecology or we can have a giant global war machine. We can’t have both.

29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism. Across the U.S. “mainstream” political and media spectrum, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discussion to acknowledge that the United States is a deeply criminal and imperialist power. The examples are endless. It is normative for U.S. cable talking heads, pundits, and politicians to discuss Eastern Europe or East Asia as if the Washington has as much right to influence developments there as Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Terrible developments in the Middle East and North Africa are routinely discussed by “mainstream “U.S. politicos, talking heads, and pundits as if the United States had not wreaked nearly indescribable havoc on Iraq and Libya and the broader Muslim world. Migrants seeking asylum from Central America are regularly reported and discussed with zero reference to the fact that the United States has inflicted massive and bloody devastation on that region for decades – and without mentioning the Obama administration’s support of a vicious right-wing coup in Honduras in the spring of 2009. Reporting on the current political crisis in Venezuela comes with complete Orwellian deletion of the United States’ role in crippling the nation’s democratically elected socialist government on the model of the Nixon administration’s campaign to undermine Chile’s democratically elected socialist government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. No serious discussion is permitted of the historical context of Washington’s longstanding intervention and regime-change operations across Latin America. The reigning Empire-denial is absurd.

30. Amazon. Google (lol) up its mind-boggling and many-sided monopolistic reach and then thank the New York City Left for stopping this public-subsidy-sucking, zero tax-paying corporate monstrosity from setting up its headquarters in the nation’s largest city.

31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide. The climate catastrophe poses grave existential threats to livable ecology and all prospects for a decent human future. It is a national and global emergency of epic proportions. It is the single biggest issue of our or any time. If this environmental calamity is not averted soon, nothing else that progressives and decent citizens everywhere care about is going to matter all that much. The United Nations Panel on Climate Change has recently warned that we have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which true cataclysm will fall upon hundreds of millions of people. Under the command of capital, we are currently on a pace to melt Antarctica by 2100. The unfolding climate disaster’s leading political and economic headquarters is the United State, home to a super-powerful fossil fuel industry with a vast, deeply funded lobbying and public relations apparatus dedicated to turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.

Towards a Green New Deal

If a vicious and moronic creeping fascist like Donald Trump can declare a fake national emergency over a non-existent crisis in order to build a political vanity wall rejected by Congress and 60 percent of the population, perhaps a future decent and democratic government sincerely committed to the common good could declare a national emergency to address the all-too real climate crisis by moving the nation off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy sources while advancing environmentally sustainable practices and standards across economy and society. A properly crafted Green New Deal would also and necessarily address other and related national emergencies including the crises of financial oligarchy, bad jobs, inequality, poverty, plutocracy, racial inequality, mass incarceration, untruth, inadequate health care, fascism, poor schooling, mental illness, substance abuse, gun violence, militarism-imperialism, gender disparity, spiritual death, and much more. I plan in a future essay to elaborate on what it is meant by a “properly crafted Green New Deal.”

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PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

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dmosher24-blog · 6 years ago

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Underrepresentation of Native Americans attending university in the state of New Mexico

Going to university is a privilege not every individual receives; however, what if an entire group isn’t going? Native Americans have been underrepresented at universities for many decades now and while they may begin to attend university, there is often no end product. “Of all the underrepresented groups studied, Native American students graduate from college with the lowest graduation rate of any other group of students.”(https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ987305.pdf) There are many reasons as to why Native Americans are not able or chose not to go to university. In New Mexico there is a very large population of Native Americans; however, we still see a major underrepresentation of them, particularly at the University of New Mexico given the sates Native American population. Being new to New Mexico, and America, after observing I soon began to question why Native Americans in New Mexico are not going to university.

A map indicating where Native American reservations and tribes are situated in New Mexico.

The State of New Mexico is one of the states with the highest percentage of Native American residents. In the 2007-2008 school year “5.22% of all degrees awarded by UNM were earned by Native American students.”(https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43608666.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A512d762784475f4039293c05e3f24a33) This landed UNM with a parity index of “3.20, or 7 times the national average” yet when the parity index “is computed based on New Mexico’s statewide 10.46 percent population of Native people, the parity number drops to a dismal 0.52.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43608666.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A512d762784475f4039293c05e3f24a33) The parity index “compares the number of American Indians who receive a particular degree to the percentage of American Indians in the population overall.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43608666.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A512d762784475f4039293c05e3f24a33) Taking this in to consideration, there is controversy as to whether or not the university should be acknowledged positively for their high rates of Indigenous enrollment or reviewed because of their low parity index considering the actual population of Indigenous in the state. Regardless, there are many factors and questions to be answered with regard to why the Native Americans in the state of New Mexico are not attending university.

In order for any student to attend university it is necessary for them to get an education prior to that; these lower level educational experiences are crucial in building positive associations with education, and the foundation to succeed at the post-secondary level. Native Americans in New Mexico, in both the past and present have had negative experiences in academic environment; inevitably affecting those students desires to further continue their education. It is very well known today that there were boarding schools for Native Americans that physically and mentally abused Native American children while taking them away from their families and culture. The purpose of having Native Americans attend boarding schools was part of the effort of assimilation and conformity to Christianity. The unfortunate truth is that the negative experiences had by several generations of Native American youth attending those boarding schools were shared with the next generations. This process created a distrust and negative stigma towards school in general and continues to impact Native American students views on school and decisions around school.

An image of an Native American students doing an activity at one of the boarding schools that abused them.

Not only are Native American boarding schools of the past responsible for influencing the Native Americans decisions and abilities around pursuing higher education, so are the elementary, middle and high schools in New Mexico today. It is commonly argued that “students are more likely to thrive when they see themselves, their families and their histories at the center of the classroom and in their lessons, and when they are taught by those who speak their language and share their cultural backgrounds.” (http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/) While education ministries today are doing more to address this than in the past, it can be argued that it is still not enough. Part of the problem is that“fewer than 2 percent of teachers in the state’s public schools are Native American.” (http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/) This creates cultural and linguistic barriers between Native American students and their teachers that can make the young children feel uncomfortable in their school environment. In order to encourage the Native American students in New Mexico to continue their education past high school there has to be more consideration towards them. This includes teaching of Indigenous history and culture and acquiring teachers and resources to help the at-risk youth and English language learners. At the University of New Mexico for example it is possible to get a minor in the Department of Linguistics and this has attracted many Navajo from the state of New Mexico; however, there are several different tribes so offering one won’t suffice. The common thread among all the influencing factors mentioned above is financial; they all require money to make them happen.

A university or college education in America today is very expensive. Unfortunately attending university is not an option for all individuals as they must have the financial means to pay for it. Native Americans are one group where many “are in such a precarious position today that economic survival will be difficult without major support of the federal government” (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ987305.pdf) “Poverty is among the challenges many Native Americans face” considering they “have the highest poverty rate of any group nationally.” (Murphy) While scholarships are available many Native Americans are unaware of the different ones out there; and with this being said, “mostly everyone agrees that more money is needed.” (http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/) If an individual is not going to learn about their history, perspective or language, feel culturally disconnected or inferior, and restrained in their beliefs, why spend a huge amount of money to go to university anyways? Another piece to this is that Native Americans have nearly twice the dropout rate of white people. Would you risk everything to pay for a university when the odds suggest you won’t even graduate? Even if a Native American finds a way to get their education paid for or has the financial means, “family income and higher education often go hand-in-hand, many Native Americans who make it to college are the first in their families to attend” which creates a whole other issue in itself. (http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/)

Young children learning at a school in Gallup, New Mexico.

One of “the issue(s) at hand is enabling schools, communities, and students the ability to define and create culturally responsive schools.”; giving the Native American students the opportunity to maintain their culture within the academic environments in New Mexico has not been ideal to say the least. (http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/) “For many Native Americans, the experience can be like traveling to a foreign country.”(http://nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/) Creighton labels this idea cultural discontinuity and suggests that “the cultural discontinuity experienced by Native American students within most educational environments often lies in the dominant culture’s school settings”, meaning the dominant race; in this case white people, have the ability and responsibility in being the ones to create a culturally accepting environment. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ987305.pdf)At the University of New Mexico there was a case where the seal, openly seen by the public was found to be disrespectful to the Native Americans and is an example of how the encouragement of the Indigenous culture is not being supported or portrayed positively. The seal at the university “depicts a frontiersman and conquistador and, thus, celebrates the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. genocide, conquest, dispossession, rape, torture, and enslavement of the original Indigenous Peoples of this land.” (https://therednation.org/2016/05/05/abolish-the-racist-seal-unm-kiva-club-the-red-nation-statement-to-board-of-regents/) The fact that there are still public displays that are praising the horrible mistreatment of Indigenous in the past does not encourage any Indigenous to feel liberties in embodying their culture. University is a place where adolescents and young adults are meant to find themselves yet for the indigenous it seems impossible to do so if they feel the need to restrain themselves with regard to their culture.

The University of New Mexico seal that caused discontent to the Native American population.

In terms of methodologies, the question addressing why Native Americans are not attending university can be reviewed under and expand the ideas of dispossession and immigration. It is rather ironic that the land of the Native Americans is now consumed by universities such as the University of New Mexico that the majority of Native Americans don’t even want to attend. This is due to the influx of immigration that came centuries ago that made Native Americans the minority. Had the immigrants/colonizers from Europe not come Native Americans would never have been dispossessed of their land and would therefore have a very different life. In addition, as mentioned above as well the memories of dispossession and brutal treatment of Native Americans have been shared with the young Native Americans today which is highly likely to be a factor making them hesitant to go to University today.

Many Native Americans in New Mexico are not attending university and for this there are several reasons, some of which non-Native Americans do not and will never know. Some New Mexican Native Americans may not have the opportunity, whether it be because of finances or their grades that don’t allow them to get in. On the other hand, there are some that even if they have the choice would not like to go to university. If this is this case, we now know it is more likely, because of their prior education and academic experiences, the culture divide, and many more as a white person I may be unaware of. Native Americans are people of great value to not only New Mexico or the United States but the world as a whole. Modern day America must find a way to mend the relationships and support Native Americans so that together at academic institutions, we can make the world a better place.

Reflection

While writing this research paper we were required to include a multimodal component. The result of including a new component to a project is that there are more things to think about and more decisions to be made. In this case, I had to add photos for my multimodal component and also had to make it user friendly online as a blog. With regard to the learning outcomes I think this influenced my choices in Rhetorical Situation and Genres.This learning outcome is to “analyze, compose, and reflect on arguments in a variety of genres, considering claims, evidence, and various mediums and technologies that are appropriate to the rhetorical situation.” I think that the use of photos fits within this learning outcome and influenced my decisions as I had to find pictures that fit within my topic and helped provide more visual evidence or analyses for readers to comprehend.

In addition to the learning outcome mentioned above I believe that the process of writing this research paper contributed to the Research learning outcome and the Writing as a Process learning outcome. In terms of Research it may seem self-explanatory as this is a research paper; however, there is more to it than just the research. Within this learning outcome is discovery of your personal self-beliefs and acquiring knowledge about a particular topic. I learned about why Native Americans in New Mexico aren’t attending university and while some things I assumed already, the research moulded my ideas and opinions on the topic as I learned more about the topic. With regard to Writing as a Process there were many steps and exercise myself and the class went through before we actually wrote the research paper. For example, we wrote a literature review on some of the broader topics in order to develop our research question. After our lit review we did research and presented our topics in front of the class to then get peer reviews and feedback or suggestions. All of these elements contributed to the creation of the research paper.

The research genre is more than just spitting out information you got from your research. In a research paper there is typically a question that you are answering and researching the answers to this question through various different sources. Once you have this information and have found different pieces to your answer a writer must analyze this information and try to articulate what it means. I believe the paper I have just written is a research paper however it could also fit as an argumentative essay or even a blog. If I had decided to take more of a side in my paper this could easily become argumentative and could try and influence readers to believe a certain thing or take a side. I decided to try and stay more neutral but most likely could have favored a side if I had wanted. Another route I could have taken could be something like a blog or interview type thing if I did more hands-on research by going to Native American in New Mexico youth and Native Americans attending the University of New Mexico.

References

Home, www.unm.edu/~navajo/.

“The University of New Mexico Fall 2018 Official Enrollment Report Albuquerque Campus.” Albuquerque, NM, 7 Sept. 2018.

April 8, 2019 / CNS, et al. “New Mexico School a Beacon of Hope, Faith for Native American Youth.” New Mexico School a Beacon of Hope, Faith for Native American Youth |, 20 Feb. 2017, theleaven.org/new-mexico-school-a-beacon-of-hope-faith-for-native-american-youth/.

Bitsóí, LeManuel Lee, et al. “An Analysis of Graduation Rates of American Indians at the University of New Mexico: Implications for Higher Education.” Journal of American Indian Education, vol. 52, no. 2, 2013, pp. 21–44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43608666.

Creighton, Linda M. “Factors Affecting the Graduation Rates of University Students from Underrepresented Populations.” International Electronic Journal for Leadership in Learning, vol. 11, 2007.

Editor. “Abolish the Racist Seal: UNM KIVA CLUB, The Red Nation Statement to Board of Regents.” Therednation.org, 6 May 2016, therednation.org/2016/05/05/abolish-the-racist-seal-unm-kiva-club-the-red-nation-statement-to-board-of-regents/.

“For Churches.” The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, boardingschoolhealing.org/healing/for-churches/.

Murphy, Andi. “Finding Community Is Key to College Graduation for Native Americans.” New Mexico In Depth, 3 July 2014, nmindepth.com/2014/06/07/finding-community-is-key-to-college-graduation-for-native-americans/.

Christine Hollis. Native American Children and Families in New Mexico: Strengths and Challenges. New Mexico KIDS COUNT Director, 2012.

Ulloa, Sylvia, and Trip Jennings. “New Mexico Faces Moral Test on Educating Diverse Students.” New Mexico In Depth, 19 Feb. 2019, nmindepth.com/2019/02/05/new-mexico-faces-moral-test-on-educating-diverse-students/.

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Climate & Environment: Redlining Means 45 Million Americans Are Breathing Dirtier Air, 50 Years After It Ended

Boyle Heights, a heavily Latino area in Los Angeles singled out for its ��detrimental racial elements,’ has one of the highest pollution scores in California

— By Darryl Fears | March 9, 2022 | The Washington Post

The Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, reflected in a car window. The community was redlined by federal map drawers from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s. (Jane Hahn for The Washington Post)

Decades of federal housing discrimination did not only depress home values, lower job opportunities and spur poverty in communities deemed undesirable because of race. It’s why 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air today, according to a landmark study released Wednesday.

The practice known as redlining was outlawed more than a half-century ago, but it continues to impact people who live in neighborhoods that government mortgage officers shunned for 30 years because people of color and immigrants lived in them.

The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes.

“Of course, we’ve known about redlining and its other unequal impacts, but air pollution is one of the most important environmental health issues in the U.S.,” said Joshua Apte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley.

“If you just look at the number of people that get killed by air pollution, it’s arguably the most important environmental health issue in the country,” Apte said.

The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) marked areas across the United States as unworthy of loans because of an “infiltration of foreign-born, Negro, or lower grade population,” and shaded them in red starting in the 1930s. This made it harder for home buyers of color to get mortgages; the corporation awarded A grades for solidly White areas and D’s for largely non-White areas that lenders were advised to shun.

Throughout redlining’s history, local zoning officials worked with businesses to place polluting operations such as industrial plants, major roadways and shipping ports in and around neighborhoods that the federal government marginalized.

The researchers analyzed air quality data in 202 cities where communities were redlined and found a consistent disparity in the level of nitrogen dioxide, which forms smog, and PM2.5 pollution, the small particles than can become embedded in people’s lungs and arteries.

With nitrogen dioxide, pollution levels were higher in 80 percent of communities given D grades and lower in 84 percent of communities given A grades. That trend held regardless of whether a city was as large as Los Angeles or Chicago, or as small as Macon, Ga., or Albany.

Haley Lane, a graduate student in the civil and environmental engineering department at UC-Berkeley and the study’s lead author, said the team embarked on the research to show that a “widespread, federally backed, and well documented” practice like redlining was indelibly linked to air pollution. The research took about two years.

“These maps allowed us to analyze conditions in cities across the country, and the consistency we found shows us how many of the pollution problems we have today are tied to patterns that were present in cities more than 80 years ago,” Lane said.

While air quality has improved in the United States overall, several recent studies — including the one released Wednesday — show that people of color, especially African Americans and Latinos, are still disproportionately affected by pollution.

A large body of research has already shown that redlined communities experience other environmental challenges, including excessive urban heat, sparse tree canopy and few green spaces. The new analysis, according to the authors, is the first look nationwide at how redlining leads to disparities within different cities.

“This groundbreaking study builds on the solid empirical evidence that systemic racism is killing and making people of color sick, it’s just that simple,” said Robert D. Bullard, a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and the author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality.”

Sunset in Mariachi Plaza, with a view of downtown Los Angeles, in Boyle Heights. (Jane Hahn for The Washington Post)

Bullard, who was not involved in the study, said that it “makes clear the elevated air pollution disparities we see today between Black Americans and White Americans have their roots in systemic racism endorsed, practiced and legitimated by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation some eight decades ago.”

During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials said underlying diseases suffered by people of color as a result of air pollution and other conditions in marginalized communities contributed to their disproportionate hospitalization and death from covid-19.

President Biden addressed that concern after taking office by signing an executive order to help marginalized communities that are overburdened by pollution. He established the Justice40 Initiative to direct 40 percent of federal resources to those communities and established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council to help guide the administration’s decisions.

Beverly Wright, the founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, said the research confirms what she and other activists have said for decades: Redlining led to zoning decisions that exposed people of color to pollution.

“Any time we can get a study that takes the anecdotal stories of communities and we end up having scientific findings to support those anecdotal stories, that’s a good thing,” said Wright, who, like Bullard, sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “It supports community claims on the ground.”

Julian D. Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington and one of the study’s co-authors, said the research provides the kind of information that helps societies move toward solutions.

“One way is to document that the disparities we see today have a long history,” Marshall said. “The decisions and the actions we’re talking about were made by people who are no longer alive, and yet we’re suffering the consequences of this structural, race-based planning.”

Racial inequality is so baked into redlined communities that even when it shouldn’t matter, it did, the study said. Black and Latino Americans who live within the very same HOLC grade as White people still breathe dirtier air because of their closer proximity to pollution.

“This point is really key,” said Lane, the lead author. “People of color can be living in the same cities, and even in neighborhoods with the same redlining grade as nearby White residents, and they will still tend to experience worse pollution on average.”

The Los Angeles River and train tracks border Boyle Heights. (Jane Hahn for The Washington Post)

The finding suggests that redlining added to inequities that developed from long-standing racial discrimination, Lane said. “Racist segregation was always essential to redlining, but there is a long history and a wide range of factors contributing to the disparities we see today. We can’t point to any single decision or program which brought about current conditions because the problem is systemic.”

The disproportionate impact of smog and particulate matter is more pronounced in four major metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Essex County/Newark, said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a co-author who is a professor of environmental and community health sciences at UC-Berkeley.

In Boyle Heights, a community just east of downtown Los Angeles, federal map drawers ostracized the people who lived there before marginalizing their community in the late 1930s.

“It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements,” they wrote, “and there are very few districts which are not hopelessly heterogeneous in type of improvement and quality of maintenance.”

A map of Los Angeles drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the late 1930s showing redlined areas and neighborhoods. (HOLC/Mapping Inequality)

Following its designation as one of the city’s least desirable communities for investment, Boyle Heights was encircled by four major freeways — Interstates 5, 10, 710 and 110 — in a city with some of the heaviest automobile traffic in the world.

CalEnviroScreen, a mapping tool that tracks state pollution by census tracts, gives large parts of Boyle Heights the highest pollution burden score available, 100 percent. More than 86,000 people live there, most of them Latino.

“It’s not like one part of Los Angeles is considered, you know, necessarily less polluted than another,” said Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxics epidemiology program for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. “We have these air quality problems all over.”

But areas that hug freeways, such as Boyle Heights, get the worst of around-the-clock diesel truck traffic that spews fine particulate matter. “When it comes to the ports and the ways our freeways are situated, in the way we kind of squeezed in a lot of residential areas in and around all of those economic developments, that’s what’s created a major issue,” Rangan said.

A man walks under a freeway overpass in Boyle Heights. (Jane Hahn for The Washington Post)

Government planning and zoning officials gravitate toward Boyle Heights and underprivileged communities where inexpensive real estate is easier to purchase for freeway projects or site-polluting industries that wealthier residents would manage to resist.

“The land and housing tends to be cheaper, so people who tend to live there tend to be people of lower-cost origins,” Rangan said.

Paul Simon, the Los Angeles health department’s chief science officer, said Long Beach and San Pedro, where mostly Latino and Black residents live near major shipping ports, have pollution levels similar to Boyle Heights.

Simon praised the redlining study, calling it something he’s never seen. “It … highlights the challenges moving forward in trying to address these disparities and inequities to change the pattern of land use and transportation planning to sort of alter the built environment,” Simon said.

“The agency that concocted the racist grading system itself deserved an F grade,” Bullard said.

It discriminated against mostly Black and Latino families, robbed them of the wealth their homes could have generated, he said, “and created pollution magnets that threatens the health, well-being and quality of life of families who settle in formerly redlined neighborhoods.”

A residential street is stopped by the freeway in Boyle Heights. (Jane Hahn for The Washington Post)

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burymyart · 7 years ago

Photo

High resolution 12” x 18” poster of HIV/AIDS-related issues that affect Indigenous communities. This poster coincides with #WORLDAIDSDAY & #DAYWITHOUTART. As with all our posters, feel liberated to, share, print out, wheatpaste, and disseminate at will!

HIV/AIDS Among American Indians & Alaska Natives (CDC wedsite). Fast Facts:

HIV affects AIs/ANs in ways that are not always obvious because of their small population sizes.

Over the last decade, annual diagnoses increased 63% among AI/AN gay and bisexual men.

AIs/ANs face HIV prevention challenges, including poverty, high rates of STIs, and stigma.

HIV is a public health issue among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIs/ANs), who represent about 1.2%a of the U.S. population. Overall, diagnosed HIV infections among AIs/ANs are proportional to their population size. Compared with other racial/ethnic groups, AIs/ANs ranked fifth in rates of HIV diagnoses in 2015, with a lower rate than blacks/African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos,b Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders, and people reporting multiple races, but a higher rate than Asians and whites.

The Numbers: HIV and AIDS DiagnosescOf the 39,513 HIV diagnoses in the United States in 2015, 1% (209) were among AIs/ANs. Of those, 73% (152) were men and 26% (55) were women.Of the 152 HIV diagnoses among AI/AN men in 2015, most (79%; 120) were among gay and bisexual men.dMost of the 55 HIV diagnoses among AI/AN women in 2015 were attributed to heterosexual contact (73%; 40).From 2005 to 2014, the annual number of HIV diagnoses increased 19% (from 172 to 205) among AIs/ANs overall and 63% among AI/AN gay and bisexual men (from 81 to 132).In 2015, 96 AIs/ANs were diagnosed with AIDS. Of them, 59% (57) were men and 41% (39) were women.

Living With HIV and Deaths

Of the 3,600 AIs/ANs estimated to be living with HIV in 2013, 18% (630) were undiagnosed. By comparison, 13% of everyone living with HIV were undiagnosed.

Of AIs/ANs diagnosed with HIV in 2014, 78% were linked to medical care within 1 month.e

At the end of 2013, 53% of AIs/ANs who had been living with diagnosed HIV for at least a year were retained in care (receiving continuous HIV medical care), and 52% had achieved viral suppression.

During 2014, 51 AIs/ANs died from HIV or AIDS.

Prevention Challenges

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). From 2011 to 2015, AIs/ANs had the second highest rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea among all racial/ethnic groups. Having another STD increases a person’s risk for getting or transmitting HIV.

Lack of awareness of HIV status. Almost 1 in 5 AIs/ANs who were living with HIV at the end of 2013 were unaware of their status. People who do not know they have HIV cannot take advantage of HIV care and treatment and may unknowingly pass HIV to others.

Stigma. AI/AN gay and bisexual men may face culturally based stigma and confidentiality concerns that could limit opportunities for education and HIV testing, especially among those who live in rural communities or on reservations.

Cultural diversity. There are over 560 federally recognized AI/AN tribes, whose members speak over 170 languages. Because each tribe has its own culture, beliefs, and practices, creating culturally appropriate prevention programs for each group can be challenging.

Socioeconomic issues. Poverty, including limited access to high-quality housing, directly and indirectly increases the risk for HIV infection and affects the health of people living with and at risk for HIV infection. Compared with other racial/ethnic groups, AIs/ANs have higher poverty rates, have completed fewer years of education, are younger, are less likely to be employed, and have lower rates of health insurance coverage.

Alcohol and illicit drug use. Alcohol and substance use can impair judgment and lead to behaviors that increase the risk of HIV. Injection drug use can directly increase the risk of HIV through sharing contaminated needles, syringes, and other equipment. Compared with other racial/ethnic groups, AIs/ANs tend to use alcohol and drugs at a younger age and use them more often and in higher quantities.

Data limitations. Racial misidentification of AIs/ANs may lead to the undercounting of this population in HIV surveillance systems and may contribute to the underfunding of targeted services for AI/AN.

What CDC Is Doing CDC and its partners are pursuing a high-impact prevention approach to advance the goals of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, maximize the effectiveness of current HIV prevention methods, and improve HIV data collection among AI/AN. Activities include:

Working with the Indian Health Service (IHS) and tribal leaders of the CDC Tribal Consultation Advisory Committee to discuss methods for developing and implementing scalable, effective prevention approaches that reach those at greatest risk for HIV, including young gay and bisexual AI/AN men.

Providing support and technical assistance to health departments and community-based organizations to deliver effective prevention interventions.

Ensuring that capacity-building assistance providers incorporate cultural competency, linguistics, and educational appropriateness into all services delivered.

Providing capacity building assistance directly to the IHS so it can strengthen its support for HIV activities, including HIV testing capacity; We R Native, a comprehensive health resource for Native youth; and the Red Talon Project, which works to achieve a more coordinated national and Northwest tribal response to STDs/HIV.

Collaborating with National Association of State and Territorial AIDS Directors to release an issue brief, Native Gay Men and Two Spirit People: HIV/AIDS and Viral Hepatitis Programs and Services.

Raising awareness through the Act Against AIDS campaigns, including

Doing It, a national HIV testing and prevention campaign that encourages all adults to get tested for HIV and know their status;

Let’s Stop HIV Together, which raises HIV awareness and fights stigma among all Americans and provides many stories about people living with HIV; and

HIV Treatment Works, which highlights how men and women who are living with HIV have overcome barriers. The campaign provides resources and encourages people living with HIV to Get In Care, Stay In Care, and Live Well.

In addition, the Office for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support (OSTLTS) serves as the primary link between CDC, the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, and tribal governments. OSTLTS’s tribal support activities are focused on fulfilling CDC’s supportive role in ensuring that AI/AN communities receive public health services that keep them safe and healthy.

a Percentage of AI/AN reporting only one race. b Hispanics/Latinos can be of any race. c HIV and AIDS diagnoses indicate when a person is diagnosed with HIV infection or AIDS, but do not indicate when the person was infected. d The term gay and bisexual men, referred to as men who have sex with men in CDC surveillance systems, indicates how individuals self-identify in terms of their sexuality, not a behavior that transmits HIV infection. eIn 32 states and the District of Columbia (the areas with complete lab reporting by December 2015). http://www.cdc.gov/HIV/risk/racialEthnic/aian/index.html

World AIDS Day Observed on December 1st of every year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection, and mourning those who have died of the disease. Government and health officials, non-governmental organizations and individuals around the world observe the day, often with education on AIDS prevention and control. As of 2013, AIDS has killed more than 36 million people worldwide (1981-2012), and an estimated 35.3 million people are living with HIV,[2] making it one of the most important global public health issues in recorded history. Despite recent improved access to antiretroviral treatment in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claims an estimated 2 million lives each year, of which about 270,000 are children. Day With(out) Art Day Without Art (DWA) began on December 1st 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, some 800 U.S. art and AIDS groups participated in the first Day Without Art, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. Since then, Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part.

In the past, Visual AIDS initiated public actions and programs, published an annual poster and copyright-free broadsides, and acted as press coordinator and clearing house for projects for Day Without Art/World AIDS Day. In 1997 we suggested Day Without Art become a Day WITH Art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that draw attention to the continuing pandemic. Though “the name was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists”, we added parentheses to the program title, Day With(out) Art, to highlight the proactive programming of art projects by artists living with HIV/AIDS, and art about AIDS, that were taking place around the world. It had become clear that active interventions within the annual program were far more effective than actions to negate or reduce the programs of cultural centers.

R.I.S.E.

Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment

Info: https://www.instagram.com/RISEindigenous https://www.facebook.com/RISEIndigenous https://www.burymyart.tumblr.com contact: [email protected]

____________________________.

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

Text

Are There More Democrats Or Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-there-more-democrats-or-republicans/

Are There More Democrats Or Republicans

The Swing State Voting Patterns That Decided The Election

Democrats Vs Republicans | What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans?

Given the importance of the state outcomes in the Electoral College, it is useful to study turnout patterns in swing or near-swing states from the 2020 presidential election .

Three such states in the rapidly growth South and West regions are Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. The former two gave Biden a razor-thin win over Donald Trump; the latter, which Trump won, showed a smaller Republican margin than in recent elections.

In all three states, turnout was highest for white college graduates, and lowest for nonwhite voters. Yet in each case, 2016-to-2020 turnout increases were greater for non-college white voters than for white college graduates. Each state also exhibited sizeable gains in their nonwhite turnout rates, which countered the Republican-leaning impact of the non-college white turnout increase. This was especially the case for the large Latino or Hispanic populations in Arizona and Texas, and modestly for the Black population in Georgia.

It is the case that the white non-college bloc voted somewhat less Republican in each of these states in 2020 than in 2016. However, it appears that the rise in white non-college turnout helped to make the races in Georgia and Arizona close, and in Texas, kept the Republican margins from shrinking further.

Republicans Give More To Charity Than Democrats But Theres A Bigger Story Here

November 3, 2018; New York Times

The political differences between Republicans and Democrats dont play out solely at the ballot box; they also predict how likely people are to donate to charity. This finding from a newly published research project reflects a key difference, one tied to political affiliation, about how our nation should take on critical social issues like homelessness, poverty, and health care. The data also suggest that in times of political strife, both parties supporters pull back, making problem-solving harder.

Using voting and IRS data for the residents of 3,000 counties across the nation, the four-professor research team found, according to the New York Times, that counties which are overwhelmingly Republican report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated counties, although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes. But as red or blue counties become more politically competitive, charitable giving tends to fall. The full study was recently published in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

Importantly, the study did not find that in Republican counties, private funds replaced public funds so that social services were equally supported.

Are There More Republicans Or Democrats What We Discovered

Republicans and Democrats are the dominant political parties in the United States of America. Both parties share different ideologies and view themselves as rivals.

The United States election has been one of the most complicated in the history of democracy worldwide. Its such that candidates with the highest popular votes and lowest Electoral College votes could be denied the POTUS office.

But then, what contributes to a political partys success is the membership strength. Thats why politicians tend to show more concern for their members or states they have more members.

Now about party membership strength, heres a tricky question.

Are There More Republicans Or Democrats?

The number of people supporting republicans or democrats is not set in stone. An individual that supports Democrats in the last election may decide to support Republicans in the next election.

However, in 2018, the Democratic Party had the highest number of registered voters. Total membership strength was 60 million.

In 2020, a Gallup polling report showed that 25% of Americas supported Republicans, 31% are for Democrats, while 41% represented independent American citizens.

But then, dont be surprised to find Republicans membership strength increasing in the next election. In politics, you can never be so sure of anything.

This post is about the Republican and Democratic Party, the two major political parties that as always been rivals since the 80s. Keep reading for more revelation.

Also Check: Did Trump Call Republicans Stupid In 1998

Gallup: Democrats Now Outnumber Republicans By 9 Percentage Points Thanks To Independents

I think what we have to do as a party is battle the damage to the Democratic brand, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jamie Harrison said on The Daily Beasts . Gallup reported Wednesday that, at least relatively speaking, the Democratic brand is doing pretty good.

In the first quarter of 2021, 49 percent of U.S. adults identified as Democrats or independents with Democratic leanings, versus 40 percent for Republicans and GOP leaders, Gallup said. The 9-percentage-point Democratic advantage is the largest Gallup has measured since the fourth quarter of 2012. In recent years, Democratic advantages have typically been between 4 and 6 percentage points.

New Gallup polling finds that in the first quarter of 2021, an average of 49% of Americans identify with/lean toward the Democratic Party, versus 40 percent for Republicans.

Thats the largest gap since 2012:

Greg Sargent

Party identification, polled on every Gallup survey, is something that we think is important to track to give a sense to the relevant strength of the two parties at any one point in time and how party preferences are responding to events,Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones told USA Today.