News & Notes

May 17, 2013

From Protest to Imprisonment

This weekend’s guest on Moyers & Company is Tim DeChristopher, an environmental activist who, in 2008, went to an auction during which drilling rights for the natural gas and oil beneath stretches of pristine Utah wilderness were being sold off. DeChristopher decided he couldn’t stand by and watch the process, so he signed on as a bidder. He purchased plot after plot, knowing he had no way of paying for them, in order to keep the land out of the hands of the oil and gas companies. His act of protest landed him in jail.

A documentary film chronicling his lengthy legal battle, imprisonment and his personal development as an activist, called Bidder 70, opened May 17 in New York. The film, The New York Times says, “nails the way that a spontaneous act of courage can focus the mind and clarify an ideology.” Reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis writes “Observing [DeChristopher] as he ponders nonviolent protest, quotes Edward Abby and visits mountaintop-removal coal mines in West Virginia, where he was born, we hear not the legal machinery humming inexorably in the background but the mental gears of an activist clicking into place.”

Watch the trailer. MORE

News & Notes

May 9, 2013

The Biggest Creator of Low-Wage Jobs? Uncle Sam

by Theresa Riley

Who employs more low-wage workers than Walmart and McDonald’s combined? You do.

Click the chart to zoom, or view the full report.

A new study from Demos estimates that American taxpayers fund nearly 2 million low-wage jobs that pay workers less than $24,000 a year ($12 an hour or less). These private-sector jobs are generated by federal contracts, grants, loans and other programs (see chart).

Workers making $12-or-less an hour say that they are scraping by. Often on public assistance, they find it difficult to afford basic necessities like rent, food, health care and utilities. Because of sequestration, pressure on government agencies to spend less money may add even more to their ranks. MORE

News & Notes

May 5, 2013

California Works to Pass a Homeless Bill of Rights

by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation

A homeless individual sits on the sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Last week the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed AB 5, the Homeless Bill of Rights, by a vote of 7 to 2. At a time when homelessness is increasingly criminalized, this is an important step towards helping people instead of punishing them for not having a home. Advocates overcame strong opposition to the bill, in part through a grassroots movement of homeless and poor people that mobilized hundreds of people to rally and lobby the Democratic members of the committee. MORE

News & Notes

May 5, 2013

The No-Win Decisions of Child Care

by Carol Burnett, Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative

We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column by guest author Carol Burnett.

Alivia Terry looks nervously at the adults waiting for she and her classmates from the Anderson Grove Head Start program in Caledonia, Miss., to ring their hand bells to accompany several patriotic songs at the conclusion of a rally by early childhood education supporters, childcare providers and supporters. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

In a recent article in The New Republic, “The Hell of American Day Care,” reporter Jonathan Cohn investigates what he describes as the “barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children.” Lax regulation leading to unsafe child care is indeed a critical issue that needs to be addressed; and so is the huge unmet need for affordable child care options for low-wage working parents.

Cohn acknowledges that the tragic example used as the frame for his article — a child care fatality — is relatively rare. But what is not at all rare — and what really gets to the root of the problem — is the heartbreaking, no-win choice the mother was faced with in trying to find child care that she could afford on her low wage.

Mothers across the country face this dilemma constantly. They too often work in jobs that don’t pay enough to meet a family’s basic needs. Or they want to work, or go to college for a shot at a better career, but can’t afford child care. Or the welfare work requirement forces them into low-wage jobs where they can’t afford child care. MORE

News & Notes

May 2, 2013

Honey Bee Die-Off Caused By Multiple Factors Including Pesticides

by Theresa Riley

A carniolan honey bee works the hyacinth in Washington Park in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

A federal study released today attributes the massive die-off in American honey bee colonies to a combination of factors, including pesticides, poor diet, parasites and a lack of genetic diversity. Nearly a third of honey bee colonies in the United States have been wiped out since 2006. The estimated value of crops lost if bees were no longer able to pollinate fruits and vegetables is around $15 billion.

The report comes on the heels of an announcement Monday by the European Union that they are banning the use of pesticides that may be harmful to bees for two years. The measure is being closely watched here because the insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, have been in wide use for the past decade. Many studies, including the study released today by the USDA, have made a link between the insecticides — which are used to ward off pests such as aphids and beetles — and honeybee deaths. European researchers will conduct further experiments over the two-year period to assess whether the chemicals are a contributing factor in “colony collapse disorder.”

U.S. beekeepers have been reporting annual hive deaths of about 30 percent or higher for much of the past 10 years, but this past winter marked the worst loss ever — nearly 40 to 50 percent or more. The loss was so bad that California’s almond growers had to scramble to find enough bees to pollinate the state’s 800,000 acres of almond trees this spring. Tim Tucker, vice-president of the American Beekeeping Federation and owner of Tuckerbees Honey, which lost half of its hives this past winter, told The Guardian: “Other crops don’t need as many bees as the California almond orchards do, so shortages are not yet apparent, but if trends continue, there will be. Current [bee] losses are not sustainable. The trend is down, as is the quality of bees. In the long run, if we don’t find some answers, and the vigor continues to decline, we could lose a lot of bees.” MORE

News & Notes

May 2, 2013

Banks Move Shareholders Meetings to Avoid Protests

by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation

The Wells Fargo logo is displayed outside a home mortgage office in Springfield, Illinois. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

You can’t talk about poverty without talking about the practices of the big banks, including their continuing refusal to stem the foreclosure crisis through mortgage principal reductions.

Consider this: Latinos lost 66 percent of their household wealth after the housing bubble burst, and African-American households lost 53 percent. Nearly 12 million families—disproportionately people of color — have either lost their homes or are currently in foreclosure, and another 16 million are underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Communities are decimated by boarded up houses and vacant lots, declining property values and the consequent loss of state and local revenues, and fewer opportunities to weather and recover from financial hardship. A new study from the Urban Institute indicates that white families now average six times the wealth of African-American and Latino families.

So when US Bank executives fled Minneapolis two weeks ago to hold their annual shareholders meeting in what they believed would be friendlier confines in Boise, it was important that activists from Minnesota and Oregon traveled to join Idahoans in an effort to hold the bank accountable. Then last week, Wells Fargo bankers traveled from San Francisco to Salt Lake City for their shareholders meeting, and activists again weren’t deterred — they came from California, Colorado and New York to stand with local groups and protest the bank’s practices. MORE

News & Notes

April 30, 2013

Anti-Fracking Activist Sandra Steingraber Released From Jail

by BillMoyers.com Staff

After serving 10 days of her 15-day sentence for trespassing during a protest against fracking, activist Sandra Steingraber was released from the Schuyler County jail last week in Watkins Glen, N.Y. The day before she was imprisoned, she talked with Bill about her fight to stop fracking and the release of toxins contaminating our air, water and food.

Steingraber had been arrested along with nine other protesters on March 18 for blocking the entrance to the Inergy natural gas facility to protest “the industrialization of the Finger Lakes.” After refusing to pay a fine, Steingraber and two other members of the “Seneca Lake 12″ received 15-day sentences.

In this exclusive video, watch Steingraber’s supporters greet her with flowers, cheers and song as she is released from jail. An emotional Steingraber tells the crowd: “I would do it again in a minute. …Being new to civil disobedience, I’m still learning about its power and its limitations… But I know this: all I had to do is sit in a six-by-seven-foot steel box in an orange jumpsuit and be mildly miserable, but the real power of it is to be able to shine a spotlight on the problem.”

Watch Now

Camera: Cris McConkey and Bill Huston, Shaleshockmedia.org
David Walczak, Groundswell Rising/Resolution Pictures

News & Notes

April 29, 2013

Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube

by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner

Public health historians David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz’s recent book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, chronicles the battles that have taken place over lead poisoning for the last half-century. This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.

A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.

A lead warning sign hangs in a window in Lakewood, Ohio, in April 2013. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.
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News & Notes

April 24, 2013

What It’s Like to Be Terrified by Drones

by Lauren Feeney

On Tuesday, 22-year-old Farea al-Muslimi, an American-educated Yemeni, testified before a Senate subcommittee about the Hellfire missile that had hit his family’s village of Wessab just six days earlier. Al-Muslimi was here in the U.S. when the missile hit, but immediately heard from friends and family back in Yemen.

“They called and texted me that night with questions I could not answer,” al-Muslimi says: “Why was the United States terrifying them with these drones? Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?” MORE

News & Notes

April 23, 2013

Bob Edgar: 1943-2013

by Michael Winship

Bob Edgar (Credit: Robbin Holland)

Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause, the citizen’s lobby group, died suddenly this morning, just a month shy of his 70th birthday.

Bob was one of the good guys, an energetic and ebullient crusader for reform who delighted in progressive success and never let a political setback slow him down. An ordained minister, he served six terms as a congressman from Pennsylvania, first elected in 1974 as one of the “Watergate babies” who came to office in the wave of reform that followed President Richard Nixon’s resignation. An unsuccessful U.S. Senate run in 1986 against Arlen Specter – who was still a Republican in those days – further spurred his interest in campaign finance reform, one of Common Cause’s most important issues. He became head of Common Cause in May 2007, after a period as general secretary of the National Council of Churches.
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