Five states have abridged early voting this year, including Florida, which canceled voting on the Sunday before the election. This directly targets black voters; black churches have traditionally helped increase turnout in a “Souls to the Polls” effort that, according to Time, resulted in African Americans accounting for one-third of the early votes cast on Sundays.
In juvenile detention centers across the United States, one in eight detained children experience abuse in any given year—12 percent of all kids in juvenile detention. Eighty percent of them are victimized by a member of the facility’s staff. “In detention facilities, there are extreme power differentials between staff and detainees, and very little oversight,” Stannow says. “When people have unchecked power, bad things happen. When predators have unchecked power, horrendous things happen.
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| — | Amanda Hess, How Do We Stop Child Sex Abuse? What Penn State Can Learn From Prisons - Politics - GOOD |
eThousands of other inmates in the Texas prison system have been eating fewer meals since April after officials stopped serving lunch on the weekends in some prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three. A meal the system calls brunch is usually served between 5 and 7 a.m., followed by dinner between 4 and 6:30 p.m.
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Read more here: In Bid to Cut Costs at Some Texas Prisons, Lunch Will Not Be Served on Weekends (via harmreduction:This is totally nuts…not to mention, unacceptable! If Texas doesn’t want to pay to feed the thousands of people it incarcerates, how bout they STOP incarcerating people. Community problems need community solutions.) |
Transcript
On March 8, 2011, Governor Beverly Perdue established the five-member, Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. The following is the testimony of Elaine Riddick who was sterilized at the tender age of 14 when she became pregnant after being raped by a much older neighbor. Not only was she sterilized but she was deemed promiscuous.Elaine Riddick: I had to have a child at the age of 14 and when I had my son, they went into me at the same time they gave me a cesarean birth and they took my child they sterilized me. What do you think I’m worth? What do you think I’m worth?
Reporter: Elaine Riddick was just 13 when a neighbor raped her, then she endured what she refers to as her second rape. State officials declared Riddick feebleminded and unfit to have children.
Elaine Riddick: The main reason, reasons is because I was poor and out and Black. I believe that with all of my heart.
Reporter: Based on the pseudo science of eugenics, over 30 states passed laws regarding the sterilization of so-called defectives. The goal was to rid society of certain undesirable traits.
Charmaine Fuller Cooper (victim advocate): Some of those traits that they listed were epilepsy, feeblemindedness, promiscuity, criminal mentalities.
Reporter: Researches believe that as many as one hundred thousand Americans were victimized. By the time that North Carolina ended its own eugenics program in 1974, it had taken away the reproductive rights of 7,600 people - most like Riddick were poor. Tony Riddick still lives close to his mother’s town in the coastal plane. He says she doesn’t come home often.
Tony Riddick: They used to call it little Korea, yeah little Korea. The reason why is cause it was very violent you know, coming up. She grew up in a very very abusive home. My mother’s life and my life by any measure would have been, should have been, could have been totally written off, but the fact of the matter is God still prevails and I’m grateful for that, very grateful.
Reporter: Riddick’s mother would be grateful for justice. She drove from her adopted home in Georgia to testify before a North Carolina task force considering compensation for sterilization victims.
Elaine Riddick: There’s nothing that the state of North Carolina can do to justify what they did to me, what they did to these other victims. You know, it’s not my grandmother’s fault that she uneducated. It’s not my mother’s fault that she was abused by her husband. It wasn’t my fault that my environment that I was raised in - that I was brought up in this kind of environment; I had nothing to do with that. I was a victim. God said, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth in his image you know. I always told everybody, “how can you ever get to see the image of God when you are killing it off”?
Reporter: Riddick is tired of feeling like the victim but she’ll have to wait until next February to see if the tar heel state will give her and 2, 000 other eugenics survivors justice.
Some members of Congress have described this move as “eliminating a big increase for physicians.” They point out that Medicare will pay more to physicians in 2012 than in 2011. This is true when speaking of total dollars spent by Medicare.
Medicare will pay more to physicians as a group for all services to all Medicare patients because, with the aging of the Baby Boom generation, the number of Medicare patients grows by almost 10,000 people per day. In addition, the current Medicare population keeps getting older, requiring more medical care. However, what your doctor will be paid for providing a single episode of medical service to you will be reduced by 27.4 percent. This is an extremely important and relevant distinction.
Washington views Medicare from a global perspective, but it ignores the impact this cut will have on you and your doctor as individuals. Simply put, your doctor will have little economic incentive to provide care to you as a patient. In fact, such a cut could result in some services costing the physician more to provide than he will be paid. The bottom line is that seniors may find it increasingly difficult to find a physician who is either willing or financially able to provide services to Medicare patients if the cuts go through as planned.
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| — | What proposed cuts to doctors’ Medicare fees will mean - NorthJersey.com (via sexartandpolitics) |
I’m in a place I don’t often find myself. I’m equally horrified and proud. I’m disgusted with the police for beating non violent protestors and I’m so amazed at the resilience of the protesters who have been maced, beaten, arrested, denied due process, and generally fucked over by the police…
The Latino population in the Chicago area contributed more in tax revenue than the cost incurred by local governments to deliver public services, a newly released study found. Latinos contributed almost $1.2 billion more in tax revenues than the cost of public services such as education, health care and other services like public safety, according to “The State of Latino Chicago 2010: The New Equation” report released today.
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Today in studies that concur with my world view. (via sexartandpolitics) |
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping—and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping—and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.
A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the over-consumption and waste of that top 1 percent.
Joe Paterno’s right to his dignity is not more valuable than the right of children not to be assaulted by adults.
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| — | Alyssa Rosenberg, The Shame of Joe Paterno, Or, Sports Are Just a Job | ThinkProgress |
