President Obama has promised Oklahoma “everything that it needs right away” to begin the process of recovering and rebuilding, after the massive tornado touched down in the state on Monday, devastating the cities of Monroe and Newcastle. Already hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Association employees are the ground in Oklahoma, and millions of dollars in federal disaster relief will almost certainly follow. Oklahoma will recover.
But the debate in Washington is a reminder that we’re all threatened by a masssive, man-made disaster called sequestration, that could make the next natural disaster even worse.
President Obama has promised Oklahoma “everything that it needs right away” to begin the process of recovering and rebuilding, after the massive tornado touched down in the state on Monday, devastating the cities of Monroe and Newcastle. Already hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Association employees are the ground in Oklahoma, and millions of dollars in federal disaster relief will almost certainly follow. Oklahoma will recover.
But the debate in Washington is a reminder that we’re all threatened by a masssive, man-made disaster called sequestration, that could make the next natural disaster even worse.
Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for May 21st from 12:17 to 12:37:
10-Year-Old On Dad’s Deportation: ‘Why Do They Have To Be So Cruel?’ – "My life has changed without my father," Stephanie, an American citizen born in the United States, said to the camera in Spanish. She began to cry. "Since he's been gone, I miss him every day. Every morning when I wake up I wonder why they didn't let him stay here. Why do they have to be so cruel to the families that are here?"
Friends Remember Mark Carson as a ‘Beautiful, Fabulous Gay Man’ – More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay black man who was shot and killed in Greenwich Village over the weekend. Carson's death is being investigated by police as a hate crime after he was allegedly chased out of a restaurant by a man brandishing a gun and yelling homophobic slurs.
Carson's friends and family shared their grief with the local press.
The Bush Tax-Cut Failure – No hard evidence has ever emerged that the Bush tax cuts stimulated the economy, an economist writes.
The Right’s Scandal Hypocrisy – When it comes to presidential scandal, conservatives are utter hypocrites, says Michael Tomasky.
Gay Boy Scouts Employee: I Can’t Live A Lie Any Longer – The Boy Scouts offered me many important life experiences and skills as a scout. These included skills in leadership, communication and conflict resolution. Many experiences and memories were made that still impact my life now. These opportunities need to be made available to all youth, regardless of their sexual orientation. There are dozens of other gay professionals like me in the Scouts. I have met them through scouting training courses and programs for adult leaders and employees. We dedicate ourselves to the scouting program, fully supporting the organization. Yet, we live with apprehension, hiding our personal lives and not knowing if we could be outed and fired at any given moment.
Inside the Boy Scout Battle to Repeal the Gay Ban – Hundreds of scouts and their leaders will descend on a vacation resort north of Dallas this week to, among other things, take a vote on this new statement: “No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.” The vote, set for Thursday, will steer the course for one of the nation’s largest youth development programs, which currently bans openly gay scouts and scout leaders from joining the decades old organization.
“Mark Is Not Going To Die In Vain”: New Yorkers Rally After Murder of Gay Man – Blinding afternoon sun lit the biggest gay rights demonstration in years in New York's West Village Monday. The LGBT community and its supporters, including a couple of mayoral candidates, marched in the wake of a murder that has capped a month-long spate of homophobic violence.
The Jackie Robinson Republicans – That Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey were Republicans when they shattered baseball’s color barrier in 1947 is only surprising if you consider the changed GOP – after its Southern Strategy and unsubtle appeals to racism, leading to demonizing the first black president. But there was this other principled GOP, says Independent Institute’s Jonathan Bean. By Jonathan Bean If history were written without bias, we would mark the beginning of the U.S. civil rights movement as 1947: the year Jackie…
Will Media Outlets Fall For The Anti-Gay Boy Scout Trap Again? – As the Boy Scouts prepare to vote on whether to change the organization's ban on openly gay members, news outlets should resist the urge to let anti-gay activists frame the debate around concerns about pedophilia and sexual abuse.
Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era – ince market-oriented education reform is producing evidence highlighting the ineffectiveness and even negative outcomes associated with those policies, that the agendas remain robust suggests, again like mass incarceration, education reform fulfills many of the dynamics found in the New Jim Crow.
Blame Congress For the IRS-Tea Party Mess – One of the biggest revelations in the Treasury Department inspector general report on the unfolding IRS-tea party debacle is this: The IRS staffers vetting hundreds of tea party groups and conservative outfits seeking nonprofit status for potential political activity weren't themselves sure what they were looking for. And who bears the ultimate responsibility for this? The very folks who are getting so worked up about the alleged abuses and the dark-money explosion that made them possible: Congress.
How to Stop the Next IRS Scandal – The root of the recent scandal at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—in which the agency admitted to singling out Tea Party groups for special scrutiny—is simple: terrible campaign-finance laws.
Daily Kos: Mormons and Marriage – a sea change in progress? – A couple days ago, I stumbled onto this piece on Mother Jones site. It posits that one of the main reasons that things have moved so very fast on marriage equality in the last year or so is that the Mormon Church has largely abandoned its former role as a main driver of the reactionary forces on the issue. It seems there may well be something going on that is an important subplot to the story of the rapid pace of change on marriage equality.
May Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild Rot in Jail – Joe Francis is headed to prison for the second time. May he rot there. The founder of Girls Gone Wild was convicted Monday on misdemeanor charges of assault and false imprisonment. The allegations: In 2011, Francis met three women who went out after college graduation, took them home with him, and then tried to separate one from the other two, in the process grabbing her by the hair and throat and slamming her head to the floor. Charming. Also entirely of a piece with Francis’ long history of bad boy misdeeds. This is a guy who has literally made it his business to use and humiliate women.
Yesterday I wrote about how obstructionist Republican tactics are hollowing out our government, hobbling its agencies, and diminishing its responsiveness to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our court system, where Republican obstructionism may have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for public policy. And, again, that’s just fine with Republicans.
It’s official. Minimum wage workers going on strike is no longer a mere trend. It’s a movement. Not that there was ever any doubt, after minimum wage workers in the fast food and retail sectors of major cities like New York City, Chicago, St.Louis, and Detroit walked off the job, demanding better wages and better treatment in the workplace.
Republicans in Congress have a new tactic for shrinking government: making sure that nobody’s there to run it. Well into the president’s second term, an alarming and unprecedented number of vital positions in every branch of government remain vacant. As Republicans use and abuse processes that helped government run smoothly once upon a time not so very long ago, government grinds to a halt, and the consequences trickle down to Main Street America. And apparently that’s just fine with Republicans.
Senate’s Amendments on Same Sex Couples Draws Battle Lines in Immigration Reform – The battle lines in the congressional immigration reform debate were drawn more firmly yesterday when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee filed well over 300 amendments. The committee will begin discussing the amendments tomorrow starting what's likely to be several weeks of debate and voting on the bi-partisan comprehensive immigration reform legislation.
If, like me, you’re a working parent or any other adult struggling to balance the demands of work and family, you know the two biggest challenges to pulling off that balancing act: Time and Money. We never have enough of either, and have precious little control over what we do have. Now, House Republicans have introduced a bill to make sure we have even less.
Adam Lanza. James Holmes. Jared Lee Loughner. Seung-Hui Cho. These names instantly bring to mind some of the worst mass shooting massacres of the last decade or so. But they have something else in common. In addition to reviving calls for stronger gun control legislation, their heinous acts also turned America’s attention to dismal state of our mental health system. Every rumor and news report about the mental state of the mass-shooter-of-the-moment, was followed by demands to patch-up the “cracks” in our mental health system through which these young men supposedly fell.
Alas, support for improving mental health services have proven even more fleeting than support for gun control — until the next shooting, that is. Unfortunately, the sequester will turn those existing “cracks” in to chasms, and create new ones.
Reports of austerity’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Yes, austerity has been on the ropes recently, since it was revealed the whole thing was based on a sloppy spreadsheet by a couple of academic austerians. Before that the IMF denounced and even apologized for advocating austerity that shrunk economies all over Europe. The US has avoided full on austerity but “de facto” austerity is in effect and worsening. Sequestration, which is basically austerity by another name, could finally push the economy over the cliff, taking millions of American families with it.
Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 22nd through April 29th:
‘Everybody Is Going to Be OK’: The Difference a Gun Makes – “Four people hurt in Albuquerque church stabbing,” reads the L.A. Times headline. “Hurt” being the key word there. According to police and in the words of the church’s pastor, “It sounds like everybody is going to be OK.”
Those aren’t words you expect to hear when a pistol or assault rifle is in the mix.
Equality’s Nor’easter – At this point, it’s almost a yawn: The last and most Catholic New England state, tiny Rhode Island, population just over one million, passed marriage equality last week. Just nine years after Massachusetts set off moral panic nationwide and triggered the final wave of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, all of New England has now followed the Bay State’s lead.
After my previous post on profiling in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, I wasn’t naive enough to think that I’d be done with the subject for a while. But I didn’t expect to be returning to the subject quite so soon. You’d think that after all that’s unfolded — the identification of the suspects, the death of one, and the capture of the other — that maybe we wouldn’t have to go there quite so soon.
Actually, I shouldn’t say that I’ve settled. I’ve finally found a reader I really like. It replaces Google Reader, does everything I need a Reader to do.
Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 15th through April 22nd:
The Conservative Paranoid Mind – The Daily Beast – There’s a common thread linking conservatives’ positions on gun control, immigration, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: the constant need to stoke fear.
George Takei: Why We Must Remember Rohwer – Last week, just before the attacks in Boston, I took a pilgrimage. I traveled to Arkansas to dedicate the Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee. The town lies between two places of great sadness: Jerome internment camp to the southwest, and Rohwer camp to the northeast. Over seventy years ago, my family and I were forced from our home in Los Angeles at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and sent to Rohwer, all because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. I was just five years old, and would spend much of my childhood behind barbed wire in that camp and, later, another in California called Tule Lake. One hundred twenty thousand other Japanese Americans from the West Coast suffered a similar fate.
Read Him His Rights – The capture of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev presents an opportunity to show that fighting terrorism doesn't require abandoning the Constitution.
Vengeance shouldn’t guide prosecution – CNN.com – There have been numerous calls to prosecute Tsarnaev in federal court because federal law offers the possibility of the death penalty, but Massachusetts law does not. This would be a very poor basis upon which to make the choice.
The decision of where to prosecute should be based on which jurisdiction has a greater interest in the case, not where the potential for vengeance is greater.
Popularity Of Expanding Background Checks Confuses Even Seasoned Pundits – Even legendary journalists can fail to recognize the overwhelming popularity of expanding the background check system for firearms purchases. While it is now a well-known fact that the policy enjoys overwhelming support from the American public at large, some pundits remain unaware that it is also very popular in states that typically support conservative politicians.
How the Tsarnaevs might affect the gun control debate – What began with two homemade bombs planted at the Boston Marathon ended after an extended shootout, when bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev used handguns and a rifle to fight a running battle with police across several Massachusetts towns, leaving one officer dead and another severely wounded.
But police in the state tell Reuters and the AP that neither brother had the permits required to carry a firearm in Massachusetts, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
The Truth About Extreme Global Inequality | Common Dreams – The crisis of capital, the rise of the Occupy movement and the crash of Southern Europe have brought the problem of income inequality into mainstream consciousness in the West for the first time in many decades. Now everyone is talking about how the richest 1 percent have captured such a disproportionate share of wealth in their respective countries. This point came crashing home once again when an animated video, illustrating wealth disparities in the US, went viral last month. When an infographic catches the attention of tens of millions of internet users, you know it is hitting a nerve.
But the global scale of inequality remains largely absent from this story. So we at /The Rules decided to put together a video that would give it some attention.
On Guns, a Mixed Report From the States – NYTimes.com – The power of the gun lobby’s campaign money and propaganda has been clear in statehouses for decades, and gun rights supporters sense that it is growing as time passes since the Newtown carnage. “The knees have stopped jerking,” a spokesman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms told The Wall Street Journal.
At this point, both sides in the debate openly wonder — despite the Senate’s positive decision to allow a vote on background checks — whether Congress will fully face up to the issue.
Do you want to know what sequestration looks like on the ground, and where the real casualties will be found? Look to West, Texas where an explosion at a fertilizer plant has claimed as many as 40 lives, injured more than 200, leveled entire neighborhoods, and driven residents of the small town from their homes while rescue workers search the wreckage and twisted metal for more dead and injured.
Most likely, the explosion itself caused by an industrial accident involving ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer, pesticide, and powerful explosive. In West, Texas ammonium nitrate combined with conservative disdain for government, yielded devastating results. If sequestration continues, we can expect to see more of the same.
As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote, it looks like a horror movie. Thanks to the sequester, and its impact on the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), that horror show could be coming to an industrial plant or factory near you.
It’s widely known by now that the fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas, had not been inspected by OSHA since 1985. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, when the factory was fined $30 for a serious violation for storage of anhydrous ammonia (and got off without a fine for serious violations of respiratory protection standards. (The maximum fine was $1,000, but the company negotiated it down to $30.)
DailyKos’ Laura Clawson pointed out that it would take OSHA 137 years to inspect all Texas job sites. That figure comes from a chart, published as part of the AFL-CIO’s report The State of Workers’ Health and Safety 2012, which shows the number of years it would take OSHA to inspect all jobsites in each state. (South Dakota is the worse, at 243 years, but Texas just makes the top 10.)
The AFL-CIO report and a 2010 report by the Center for Progressive Reform, Workers at Risk, detail the regulatory dysfunction and lack of resources that have plagued OSHA. The AFL-CIO report stated that the OSHA lacks sufficient funding to protect workers, effectively leaving 8.1 million workers without OSHA coverage, due to a shortage of inspectors. In 2011, for example, there were 2,178 state and federal inspectors covering about 8 million workplaces. That’s one inspector for every 58,945 workers, compared to benchmark of one inspector for every 10,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization. That’s a ratio twice as thin as it was when OSHA started.
Under-staffing at OSHA, since the mid , has meant ”hollow” threats of inspection and less accountability for employers, diminished protections for workers, and lax to nonexistent enforcement. According to the 2010 Center for Progressive Reform report, OSHA has operated on a “shoestring” budget for years. The agency’s budget climbed steadily in the 1970s, but a backlash from big business and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush put an end to that.
The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton’s tenure, according to White House lists.
White House officials have dismissed such tallies, emphasizing in recent regulatory overviews that their “objective is quality, not quantity,” and that heavy restrictions on corporations harm economic performance. During Bush’s presidency, they said in a September report, average annual regulatory costs were kept 24 percent lower than during the previous two decades. OSHA says it has issued many rules of lesser consequence that nonetheless clarified industry responsibilities.
But this record has been controversial among occupational health experts and career OSHA staff.
“The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction,” said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been “like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out,” Harrison said.
More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency’s strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees “shut us out,” a longtime senior career official said.
No wonder it would take OSHA 137 years to inspect all the job sites in Texas. Actually, under sequestration it might take even longer. Back in 2008, I blogged about a report that it would take the FDA 1,900 years to inspect every foreign food plant responsible what ends up on our grocery store shelves and in our shopping carts, for all the same reasons it would take OSHA 137 years to inspect job sites in Texas: budget cuts and deregulation, which leads to regulatory agencies adopting “laissez-faire” attitudes and becoming “mired in inaction.”
In both cases, it’s no mystery what happened to agencies charged with protecting workers and consumers. Conservatives disdain government, and when they’re in power they push for deregulation and less funding, and shrink these agencies until they’re ineffective. In other words, Republicans tell American’s government doesn’t work, when they really believe it shouldn’t work, and then they get elected and make damn sure that it can’t work.
West might be the latest failure of our commitment to provide the resources to protect our communities and our environment but there is no shortage of similar examples. The BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which continues to destroy sea life, was a product of lax enforcement, infrequent inspection caused by staffing shortages, and an intermingling of personnel between the regulated industry and the federal oversight agency. Generations from now the Gulf of Mexico will still be suffering and people may find it hard to understand what we allowed to happen in order to hold down our tax burden and to let industry create jobs and find energy without government meddling.
How damned many times do we have to see these images and fail to connect cause and effect? Americans continue to elect and tolerate politicians that tell them everything is fine and we don’t need to invest in infrastructure and safety and there is too much regulation. There is no reason we can’t have businesses that are both profitable and safe. But we have to be willing to spend the money to fund the agencies that provide the oversight. That’s not government meddling; that’s common sense. Elected leadership does not hesitate to spend your tax dollars on fear driven industries like the TSA or defense contractors, but a few inspectors or laws to keep a nursing home away from an ammonium nitrate fertilizer plant is considered too much government?
And now we have to endure those same politicians who are quick with the budget cut running to the site of the tragedy to claim empathy and understanding. How dare they? Why do we never demand accountability until people are dead? The owner of the plant was quoted on television as saying, “This kind of thing just isn’t supposed to happen here.” It isn’t supposed to happen anywhere.
We just let it.
Thanks to sequestration, we may all be living in West, Texas, and sooner than we think.
I have not yet written about the bombing of the Boston marathon, for a number of reasons. What was there to say that had been said and said repeatedly. Yes, the attack was horrific. Yes, the loss of life was beyond tragic. (As a parent of two young boys, any story of a child being endangered or murdered is enough to render me an insensible, emotional wreck.) Yes, the stories of heroism amidst the chaos is inspiring. (While the attacks are a sobering reminder of the worst human beings are capable of, the those who rose to the occasion and rushed to help total strangers are reassuring examples of the best in us.)
There was one more reason I decided to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to risk joining in the inevitable speculation about who might be responsible.
