Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Protecting children and students by empowering them

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Promoting the rights of children, youth, and students is vitally important for keeping them safe. We’ve seen the footage this week from Spring Valley High School of a girl being body-slammed and seriously injured by a police officer in her school — an all-too-common occurrence. While this itself is a grave abuse (➚) and clearly one escalated by racism and misogynoir (learn more➚), one additional element we need to be aware of is how many schools (including in Massachusetts) have adopted policies that may limit our ability to find out about these incidents in future.

Such measures include monitoring students’ internet communications on campus and restricting or confiscating cell phones. While some of this is ostensibly to reduce distractions, its secondary (and I hope unintended!) effect is to reduce the ability of students to record authority figures or otherwise get the word out about abuses or inappropriate behaviors by adults who are supposed to be keeping them safe.

This doesn’t just apply to inappropriate uses of physical force to contain situations, but also to other types of abuse. There have been more than enough institutional sex abuse scandals erupting in recent years to learn from. These often occurred in eras where children and youth were neither respected nor readily empowered to document illegal actions (of any kind) by adults in positions of power. We now know that young people are endangered when they are unable to advocate for themselves against powerful adults or institutions and are unable to prove what is happening.

It would be a serious mistake to move toward policies that prioritize omnipresent surveillance and policing while deprioritizing student rights and student privacy. Such an approach doesn’t foster a culture of being willing to constructively stand up to authority or institutions when there are abuses or illegal activity. (And reportedly, a student who tried to intervene physically in this case to protect his or her classmate from abuse was also disciplined by the school, which should raise some similar questions too.)

In immediate terms, while we always hope these things won’t happen in our schools, if they do happen, it’s much better that we know about them quickly so we can stop them and act against those responsible. For that to happen, students must feel comfortable about coming forward and be empowered to do so. Part of a safe learning environment is not just taking a “public safety in schools” approach but also ensuring students can advocate for themselves when something isn’t right.

In the bigger picture, I believe that the latter approach – respecting the rights of young people and protecting their ability to blow the whistle on abuses of power without fearing recrimination – also helps promote a generally more engaged and empowered civic attitude for a lifetime. Part of our education system should be to encourage people to defend each other and themselves from abuses of power wherever it may occur. It should never be to teach our children that they are powerless to stop injustice, illegal activity, or abuse.

Could single-payer be coming to Colorado?

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Pending verification of signatures, this proposal will be on the Colorado ballot in November 2016!

“Colorado Pushes for Universal Health Care That’s Governed by the People” – Yes Magazine:

ColoradoCare proposes a single-payer model that covers every Colorado resident. A tax on income and employers would replace insurance premiums, but the revenue wouldn’t be subject to the whims of legislators; instead, it would go directly to a fund overseen by trustees whom the recipients choose. In this respect, it would be a cooperative-like system accountable to everyone in the state, independent from the rest of the government and enshrined in the constitution.

 
State Sen. Irene Aguilar (MD) explains the genesis of the proposal:

“In 2007, Colorado had something called the 208 Blue Ribbon Commission for Healthcare Reform. The four plans it considered included a single-payer health care plan, and the commissioners created subgroups to consider how the plans would impact certain populations. Since my daughter was disabled, I applied to be on the vulnerable populations task force. We learned that if we adopted the single-payer plan we could have everyone covered and decrease spending by $1.6 billion a year.”

They didn’t pick it and — after various twists and turns — she ended up running for office to find a way to pass it. Now it’s a ballot initiative effort.

More mechanics and projections of the program:

“You collect the funds through a premium tax—a 6.6 percent employer tax across the board and a 3.3 percent individual tax. If you’re self-employed, it’s the whole 10 percent, but because it’s tax deductible it ends up being less than that. The funds are collected through our taxes, but they’re transferred into a separate authority that is run by its own elected board of directors.”
[…]
“We had a fiscal analysis done by Gerald Friedman, an economist at UMass, Amherst. He anticipated that with the Affordable Care Act, health care would be about 19.4 percent of the gross state product, and if we were to switch to this model, it would be closer to 15 percent. By Obamacare standards, the level of care would be the very top—Platinum Plus—covering 90 percent of your total health costs. We added in no copay for primary care and low copayments that the primary-care provider can waive if necessary to prevent longer-term costs. We also had it priced for everyone in state, regardless of documentation status, under the knowledge that we would not be turning people away for emergency care, so it made more sense to have up-front preventative care available for all the people who lived in the state. Vermont’s single-payer policy imploded because it was way too expensive for them. It’s a small state. But we have the numbers.”

 

Regressive income pressure in the tax code of U.S. states

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“Robin Hood in Reverse:” “State and local taxes in the United States take the most from those who have the least, undermining efforts to redress inequality.” – The Atlantic:

Those who earn the least pay the most in nearly every state across America. Or rather, the poorest citizens pay the highest proportion of their incomes to local and state governments—twice as much in fact, as the top one percent.

According to The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as cited by The Atlantic:

…in every single state “at least some low- or middle-income groups pay more of their income in state and local taxes than wealthy families.”

On the other hand:

Some of the most regressive aspects of the tax code are designed to advance broadly popular goals. The gas tax, for example, falls hardest on middle-class families, but it may promote environmentally friendly modes of transportation [and infrastructure?]. Tobacco taxes discourage tobacco consumption.


But:

Yet combining America’s regressive state and local taxes with the progressive federal code reveals a system that barely asks more of its most comfortable citizens than of the middle-class.



 

AFD Micron #45

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Other students in the Spring Valley High School video are terrified and still. Other adults are in the room and do nothing. Public abuses of power make people frightened of authority and more subservient, even after we all agree they are abuses. The officer’s been fired; good, but you can hardly still act surprised if people of color feel threatened by state authority.

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AP alleges Kunduz hospital airstrike was intentional

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The Associated Press alleges that US Special Forces intentionally called in an airstrike on the Kunduz hospital, knowing it was a hospital (albeit one erroneously associated with the Taliban).

And furthermore:

Also a mystery is why the AC-130 gunship would have kept firing during the course of an hour on a building that both the Air Force and the Army knew was an internationally run trauma center. To avoid civilian casualties, a gunship would typically stop firing as soon as it achieved its objective — in this case, ostensibly, protecting U.S. forces. Generally, the aircraft would require further clearance from the troops on the ground to continue firing.

An AC-130 gunship flies low and slow, often with a good view of its target and the damage it is inflicting. The pilot also would have had to know the locations of U.S. and allied forces in the area, to avoid hitting them.

 

We previously discussed this airstrike on a radio episode: Oct 14, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy Ep. 146

FIFA World Cup Qatar: Ghost of Christmas Future

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You’ve probably heard of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar (which never should have been awarded to Qatar) being moved to the winter to avoid scorching stadium temperatures. You might also have heard of the devastating heat waves this past summer from Lebanon to Iran.

Will the Persian Gulf region and Arabian Peninsula be uninhabitably hot later this century (without significant action on climate change soon)? A new study published in Nature Climate Change journal argues so.

Satellite photograph of the Arabian Desert from NASA World Wind 1.4.

Satellite photograph of the Arabian Desert from NASA World Wind 1.4.

“Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows” – The Guardian:

The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence.
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They said the future climate for many locations in the Gulf would be like today’s extreme climate in the desert of Northern Afar, on the African side of the Red Sea, where there are no permanent human settlements at all. But the research also showed that cutting greenhouse gas emissions now could avoid this fate.
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The new research examined how a combined measure of temperature and humidity, called wet bulb temperature (WBT), would increase if carbon emissions continue on current trends and the world warms by 4C this century.

At WBTs above 35C, the high heat and humidity make it physically impossible for even the fittest human body to cool itself by sweating, with fatal consequences after six hours. For less fit people, the fatal WBT is below 35C. A WBT temperature of 35C – the combination of 46C heat and 50% humidity – was almost reached in Bandar Mahshahr in Iran in July 2015.
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Air conditioning might be able to protect people indoors and those in wealthy Gulf oil states might be able to afford it, said the scientists, but less wealthy nations would suffer. In Yemen, for example, the WBT would reach 33C.

 

Criminal justice and prison reform

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Prisons, like many institutions under our governance system, should not be privately owned or operated. Corrective rehabilitation or lifetime imprisonment are public functions — the role of society as a whole to be implemented by the instrument of our government. They should not, therefore, be privately handled. I don’t believe we should be introducing private profit motives into public functions. That distorts public policy with the goal of making money off of it, rather than doing it in the best and most responsible manner.

That is particularly vital in the context of our correctional system. We need to be finding ways to reduce revolving-door recidivism and keep people out of our jails and prisons in the first place. That’s much a better course of action than finding ways to make a buck off their internment whether by volume of inmates or cheaper treatment. Part of “doing time” for lower-level offenses should be about learning from mistakes and learning ways to be a more productive and positive citizen. It should not be about getting traumatized and abused (whether publicly or privately) every day for an arbitrary number of years and then turned loose for a brief span before re-arrest.

We also need to be sure that every single person we are imprisoning should actually be there. We should not be imprisoning people because they can’t pay a fine or can’t afford adequate representation, and we certainly shouldn’t be imprisoning innocent people. We need a judicial system that is both speedy and fair to accused and victims alike. We have a fairly adversarial system of criminal law in this country, but we need fair-minded judges who are trying to achieve justice for all — not trying to be “tough on crime” for its own sake. They should be the last line of defense for anyone caught in the middle of a system bigger than themselves.