Ppl of Color POC
new category 11/14
see voter suppress
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an 12 24
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a set of tax cuts Donald Trump signed into law during his first term as president, will expire on Dec. 31, 2024. As Trump and Republicans prepare to negotiate new tax cuts in 2025, it’s worth gleaning lessons from the president-elect’s first set of cuts.
The 2017 cuts were the most extensive revision to the Internal Revenue Code since the Ronald Reagan administration. The changes it imposed range from the tax that corporations pay on their foreign income to limits on the deductions individuals can take for their state and local tax payments.
Trump promised middle-class benefits at the time, but in practice more than 80% of the cuts went to corporations, tax partnerships and high-net-worth individuals. The cost to the U.S. deficit was huge − a total increase of US$1.9 trillion from 2018 to 2028, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The tax advantage to the middle class was small.
Advantages for Black Americans were smaller still. As a scholar of race and U.S. income taxation, I have analyzed the impact of Trump’s tax cuts. I found that the law has disadvantaged middle-income, low-income and Black taxpayers in several ways.
Cuts worsened disparities
These results are not new. They were present nearly 30 years ago when my colleague William Whitford and I used U.S. Census Bureau data to show that Black taxpayers paid more federal taxes than white taxpayers with the same income. In large part that’s because the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and structural racism keeps Black people from owning homes.
The federal income tax is full of advantages for home ownership that many Black taxpayers are unable to reach. These benefits include the ability to deduct home mortgage interest and local property taxes, and the right to avoid taxes on up to $500,000 of profit on the sale of a home.
It’s harder for middle-class Black people to get a mortgage than it is for low-income white people. This is true even when Black Americans with high credit scores are compared with white Americans with low credit scores.
When Black people do get mortgages, they are charged higher rates than their white counterparts.
It’s harder for middle-class Black people to get a mortgage than it is for low-income white people. MoMo Productions/Getty Images
Trump did not create these problems. But instead of closing these income and race disparities, his 2017 tax cuts made them worse.
Black taxpayers paid higher taxes than white taxpayers who matched them in income, employment, marriage and other significant factors.
Broken promises, broken trust
Fairness is an article of faith in American tax policy. A fair tax structure means that those earning similar incomes should pay similar taxes and stipulates that taxes should not increase income or wealth disparities.
Trump’s tax cuts contradict both principles.
Proponents of Trump’s cuts argued the corporate rate cut would trickle down to all Americans. This is a foundational belief of “supply side” economics, a philosophy that President Ronald Reagan made popular in the 1980s.
From the Reagan administration on, every tax cut for the rich has skewed to the wealthy.
Just like prior “trickle down” plans, Trump’s corporate tax cuts did not produce higher wages or increased household income. Instead, corporations used their extra cash to pay dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives.
Over that same period, the bottom 90% of wage earners saw no gains in their real wages. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, a labor group, estimates that 51% of the corporate tax cuts went to business owners and 10% went to the top five highest-paid senior executives in each company. Fully 38% went to the top 10% of wage earners.
In other words, the income gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else has gotten much wider under Trump’s tax regime.
Stock market inequality
Trump’s tax cuts also increased income and wealth disparities by race because those corporate tax savings have gone primarily to wealthy shareholders rather than spreading throughout the population.
The reasons are simple. In the U.S., shareholders are mostly corporations, pension funds and wealthy individuals. And wealthy people in the U.S. are almost invariably white.
**Sixty-six percent of white families own stocks, while less than 40% of Black families and less than 30% of Hispanic families do. Even when comparing Black and white families with the same income, the race gap in stock ownership remains.
These disparities stem from the same historical disadvantages that result in lower Black homeownership rates. Until the Civil War, virtually no Black person could own property or enter into a contract. After the Civil War, Black codes – laws that specifically controlled and oppressed Black people – forced free Black Americans to work as farmers or servants.
State prohibitions on Black people owning property, and public and private theft of Black-owned land, kept Black Americans from accumulating wealth.
A woman protests outside Trump Tower over the Trump administration’s proposed tax cut on Nov. 30, 2017, in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Health care hit
That said, the Trump tax cuts hurt low-income taxpayers of all races.
One way they did so was by abolishing the individual mandate requiring all Americans to have basic health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama, launched new, government-subsidized health plans and penalized people for not having health insurance.
Department of the Treasury data shows almost 50 million Americans were covered by the Affordable Care Act since 2014. After the individual mandate was revoked, between 3 million and 13 million fewer people purchased health insurance in 2020.
Ending the mandate triggered a large drop in health insurance coverage, and research shows it was primarily lower-income people who stopped buying subsidized insurance from the Obamacare exchanges. These are the same people who are the most vulnerable to financial disaster from unpaid medical bills.
Going without insurance hurt all low-income Americans. But studies suggest the drop in Black Americans’ coverage under Trump’s plan outpaced that of white Americans. The rate of uninsured Black Americans rose from 10.7% in 2016 to 11.5% in 2018, following the mandate’s repeal.
The consumer price index conundrum
The Trump tax cuts also altered how the Internal Revenue Service calculates inflation adjustments for over 60 different provisions. These include the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit – both of which provide cash to low-wage workers – and the wages that must pay Social Security taxes.
Previously, the IRS used the consumer price index for urban consumers, which tracks rising prices by comparing the cost of the same goods as they rise or fall, to calculate inflation. The government then used that inflation number to adjust Social Security payments and earned income tax credit eligibility. It used the same figure to set the amount of income that is taxed at a given rate.
The Trump tax cuts ordered the IRS to calculate inflation adjustments using the chained consumer price index for urban consumers instead.
The difference between these two indexes is that the second one assumes people substitute cheaper goods as prices rise. For example, the chained consumer price index assumes shoppers will buy pork instead of beef if beef prices go up, easing the impact of inflation on a family’s overall grocery prices.
The IRS makes smaller inflation adjustments based on that assumption. But low-income neighborhoods have less access to the kind of budget-friendly options envisioned by the chained consumer price index.
And since even middle-class Black people are more likely than poor white people to live in low-income neighborhoods, Black taxpayers have been hit harder by rising prices.
What cost $1 in 2018 now costs $1.26. That’s a painful hike that Black families are less able to avoid.
The imminent expiration of the Trump tax cuts gives the upcoming GOP-led Congress the opportunity to undertake a thorough reevaluation of their effects. By prioritizing policies that address the well-known disparities exacerbated by these recent tax changes, lawmakers can work toward a fairer tax system that helps all Americans.
Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University
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an 8 23
Revealed: The shocking voter purge crisis of democracy
Thom Hartmann
andRaw Story
August 14, 2023
If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.
A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.
Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.
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So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).
When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.
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For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Blackvoters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:
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“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”
Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:
“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”
Another X user noted:
“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”
The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.
But that’s just the beginning.
Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.
Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.
Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.
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As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:
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“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”
The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:
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“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.
They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:
“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).
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This is called “caging” andused to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:
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“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states.Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.
Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.
While some of thesepoll watcherswill be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.
All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.
Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.
As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:
“Common CauseTexas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”
Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.
If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.
Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.
Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.
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aha cf moral aspects of debt in graeber ilan ziv caplism
prison isstate of exception
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random intercept grab 921
FEDERAL PRISONS’ SWITCH TO SCANNING MAIL IS A SURVEILLANCE NIGHTMARE
Lauren Gill
signature match ppl color
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/signature-matching-could-result-in-millions-of-perfectly-legitimate-ballots-being-thrown-out-especially-among-non-white-voters-report/
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New Report: Communities of Color in U.S. Will Be Hardest Hit by Extreme Heat
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-americas-wealthiest-are-profiting-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic/
American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Michael Strain wrote an op-ed in the New York Times recently explaining how “The American Dream Is Alive and Well,” and that in his opinion this nation has, “bigger issues than inequality.” Strain’s piece is part of the paper’s new pandemic-era series called “The America We Need” and engages in a set of impressive mental gymnastics to conclude that it ought to be of no concern that the rich are getting richer and that it would be better to focus instead on, “the relatively slow rate of productivity growth,” or “the long-term decline in male employment.”
Michael Strain is incredulous over our fixation on the concentration of wealth at the top, asking, “Do Americans really care as much about inequality as the attention by media and liberal politicians suggest?” He adds, “Given that income inequality has been stagnant or declining over the most recent decade, the timing… is odd” for a conversation “about whether inequality suggests that capitalism itself is broken.” However, inequality continues to steadily rise—a fact it seems the pro-free-market American Enterprise Institute is hoping we ignore.
In his op-ed, Strain chants a mantra that he and other proponents of capitalism want to realize through sheer repetition: “Capitalism isn’t broken. The game isn’t rigged. Hard work does pay off.” Most insultingly, he maintains that: “American workers are resilient and are accustomed to facing—and overcoming—economic challenges.” In other words, because American workers are used to being screwed over by the economy and most have seemingly managed to survive it, they will continue to do so in the face of ever-increasing hardship.
Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) during a Senate hearing on May 19 questioned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asking, “How many workers will die if we send people back to work without the protections they need, Mr. Secretary? How many workers should give their lives to increase our [gross domestic product] by half a percent?” Mnuchin responded, “I think your characterization is unfair,” but the Trump administration he attempted to defend has in fact forced people back to work, namely in the meatpacking industry. President Donald Trump invoked theDefense Production Act—not to direct the commercial production of much-needed medical and protective equipment, but rather to provide cover to the meat industry as it seeks to force workers back into a dangerous environment.
Thousands of workers have become infected in recent months. But if meatpacking workers contract the disease and die, it is their fault as per Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who recently claimed that it was the “home and social” conditions in the lives of meatpacking plant workers that were responsible for their COVID-19 diagnoses.He even went as far as suggesting more law enforcement surveillance of those communities where meatpacking workers live in order to police social distancing.
Making clear just how little Republicans in particular care about workers, Trump has opposed extending unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. His Labor Department has encouraged companies to snitch on workers so that their unemployment benefits are cut off if they are too fearful of returning to work. And, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to protect corporations from liability in coronavirus-related lawsuits by workers.
Republicans have also refused to take up any more stimulus bills even as more than 38 million Americans have lost jobs in just nine weeks. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, showing just how blind he is to the pain of workers, said, “I don’t see the need right now.” Senator McConnell echoed this, saying, “I don’t think we have yet felt the urgency of acting immediately. That time could… [come], but I don’t think it has yet.” Time and again conservative politicians, in shilling for the rich, have indicated that American workers, rather than being essential, are simply expendable. This is their version of a class war.
The White House’s latest idea for helping workers is to cut corporate taxes in half as a way to incentivize overseas jobs to return to the U.S. Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, touted a payroll tax cut as a way to put more money into Americans’ pockets. He failed to mention that cutting payroll taxes meant a cut in payroll-tax-funded programs like Medicare and Social Security—programs many Americans rely on that the class warriors have wanted to cut for years.
Amazingly, the stock market appears to not care that there is record unemployment as week after week even with skyrocketing unemployment, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices remain buoyed. Indeed, the indicators that are announced with much fanfare every day on the popular radio program Marketplace have never had a real bearing on the well-being of American workers, no matter how much enthusiasm host Kai Ryssdal musters during his announcements. To his credit, he has admitted as much, explaining that the “wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all stocks.”
Before the pandemic, Trump bet his reelection on a low unemployment rate and the buoyancy of the stock market. Now, with official unemployment figures so incongruent with the stock market’s growth, he has a harder time making a claim of widespread economic prosperity. In fact, there was no prosperity even before the pandemic. The official unemployment rate was low, but that did not indicate how many people had quit looking for work or how poor quality those jobs were. The pandemic has exposed the fact that Trump’s claims of financial triumph were always more of a mirage than a miracle.
As the anguish of millions of American workers remains irrelevant to the corporate profiteers and their political benefactors, we are expected to rejoice in the fact that JeffBezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, could become the world’s first trillionaire in a few years. It would be convenient for Michael Strain and the American Enterprise Institute if we are convinced to ignore such obscenity and focus instead on workers remaining “resilient” as the rich wage their class war.
The only rational response to the absurd state of the U.S. economy is to insist that billionaires (and especially trillionaires) are simply not allowed to exist. After the first $100 million, there is no need to continue to amass any more wealth. Congress could easily enact laws to tax billionaires heavily enough that they remained more than comfortable for the rest of their lives while funding necessary services that huge numbers of Americans could benefit from: paid sick leave, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and so much more. There is no justification for individuals to hoard so much wealth compared to the rest of us. But they will never give up that wealth voluntarily. They will instead fight tooth and nail, lie and cheat, to preserve and expand their inconceivable riches. Against such a class war there is only one option.
Sonali Kolhatkaris the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.
This article was produced by :{Economy for All:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/no-the-coronavirus-is-not-an-equalizer-black-people-are-being-infected-and-dying-at-higher-rates/
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an 420
no lnx
Here’s why conservatives really oppose federal aid for the ‘undeserving’
Written by Daniel Schultz / Religion Dispatches March 31, 2020
There is a singular and profound question that tugs at the sleeve of even the most sober analyst pondering the federal response to coronavirus. To wit, what the hell is it with these people? Although he’s since backed off the proposal Michael Gerson couldn’t figure out why Trump would decide to re-open the nation on Easter:
To be sacrilegious requires some recognition of what is actually sacred — a type of knowledge Trump has never displayed. To him, choosing Easter must have been like selecting Independence Day or Arbor Day or Groundhog Day — a useful date on which to hang a ploy.
Likewise, Paul Waldman is baffled by Lindsey Graham’s attacks on nurses: “You know, the ones who right now are risking their lives to treat coronavirus patients, and are in some cases forced to wear trash bags because their hospitals have run out of protective gear.”
John Stoehr is equally befuddled by Graham, who was joined by Rick Scott, Tom Scott, and Ben Sasse in attacking the third coronavirus relief bill because it had the audacity to toss in a measly $600 extra in unemployment compensation. John has a theory about conservative ideology behind the senators’ performative opposition:
That interpretation is this: The rich can be trusted with public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death.
It goes almost without saying that there’s more than a little connection between conservative economic ideology and conservative racial ideology. Part of the performance in modern conservatism is opposition to the undeserving receiving federal largesse, with “undeserving” being more or less explicitly defined by skin tone, depending on who’s talking at the moment.
It’s possible to read the senators’ rear-guard action as nothing more than an attempt to signal to the Trump-hoodooed base that their white bona fides were all in place, despite their inability to limit the bill’s direct relief to white working-class domestic automobile-driving Red Man chewers. You can’t win ’em all, sometimes you gotta help those big city folks too, you know.
As deep as the scar of racism runs in American society, though, there’s something even deeper at work here. Stoehr is right to point out the economic hierarchicalism that pervades this attitude. Somewhere along the way, Republicans went from Reagan’s belief that maybe the government should step off the necks of the wealthy a little, to Trump’s brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, to the more up-to-date proclamation that the economy should reopen to save the stock market, even if it meant potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some of them really seem to believe that rich people are better than everybody else.
I suppose the “to be fair” part of this is to say that Congressional Republicans believe it’s important to fuel industries that employ thousands directly or provide the economic underpinnings of those who do, but this is a paper-thin rationalization. The trade-off for taking care of average working people was always going to be shoveling large stacks of cash at the rich. It doesn’t take much to work that out.
But where does the instinct for class warfare come from? I think Stoehr is right to frame his argument in religious terms: heavenly import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin.
A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those who really want to see one.”
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That’s about the size of it. Some people just want to know the names of all those they’re better than, to paraphrase a singer. And some of them, like the current occupant of the Oval Office, see the world as a profoundly zero-sum game: either you’re on top, or you’re a loser. There are no alternatives.
This kind of domination play runs counter to the stated teachings of most of the religions Americans subscribe to, but let’s not kid ourselves. You can find elements of social and economic hierarchalism in all the major faiths, despite their loving concern for the neighbor. For as long as humans have pondered God or gods, there have been those who have been willing to invoke the sacred to justify their position at the top of the social heap.
In fact, as Brueggemann points out in his most famous book, faith in a god who doesn’t guarantee the social order is forever an anomaly. This is where religion turns the corner into ideology, just at the cusp of moving from gratitude for the blessings one has received to thinking the less fortunate deserve to be that way.
I’ll leave it to readers to decide if this is a necessary development of faith, or a form of idolatry. The truly interesting thing about it is how naked it is. Graham, the two Scotts, and Sasse have simply abandoned anything but the thinnest fig leaf of moral justification, and a mighty incoherent fig leaf at that. It’s as if the good Lord found them in the garden chomping away on an apple and without bothering to stop chewing they responded, “Buzz off, old man. We’re worried about our donor base.”
What is wrong with these people? God knows.
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incubator
https://theconversation.com/the-made-up-crisis-behind-the-state-takeover-of-houstons-public-schools-128346
school bd pipeline for ppl of color into politics, TX abbott
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Senate moved Wednesday to end an Obama-era policy that warns auto lenders against discriminating against people of color by charging them more on auto loans. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin joined Republicans in a 51 to 47 vote to overrule the policy by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an agency that’s been assailed by Republicans since its creation in 2010. The House is expected to approve the bill and to send it to President Trump for his signature. The rule was adopted after a 2011 report by the Center for Responsible Lending found African Americans and Latinos disproportionately received interest rate markups more frequently and to a greater degree than their white counterparts.
debt
see pro publoca inforgiven
Update, Dec. 8, 2015:This story has been updated to include a response from DBA International, the debt buyers’ trade group.
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster today proposed a series of changes to state court rules to curb what he called “abusive“ collection lawsuits that saddle debtors with illegitimate debts.
The changes address many of the issues raised in an investigation by ProPublica in October that found such lawsuits were far more prevalent in mostly black neighborhoods than mostly white ones. With court judgments in hand, collectors can seize up to a quarter of debtors’ take-home pay.
The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods
Our first-of-its-kind analysis shows that the suits are far more common in black communities than white ones. Read the story.
Koster’s recommendations are not limited to black defendants. But in laying out his reforms, he cited ProPublica’s reporting and said restricting abusive practices would be especially beneficial to minority communities.
“I believe these reforms would also serve as an important step toward eliminating the disparate impact of debt-collection litigation on minorities who become targets of such litigation,” Koster said in a press release.
Koster’s proposed the rule changes in a letter to the Missouri Supreme Court’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness. The commission was formed two months ago to investigate multiple parts of the justice system, including the civil courts. The commission will recommend reforms to the seven-member state supreme court which has the authority to change state court rules.
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In ways that might be unexpected, voter suppression, too, has become a climate issue.Al Jazeera reported [19] earlier this week that climate is a high-priority issue for voters of color, in no small part because communities of color have been some of the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change and extraction. Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight.com found that non-white voters were almost twice as likely [20] to see climate change as a “top priority,” skewing traditional perceptions of climate as a white issue. Unfortunately, voters of color, who tend to vote for Democrats, are also those most likely to face challenges getting to the polls. The Supreme Court’s repeal [21] of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last summer opened the floodgates for even more brash gerrymandering and voter suppression [22] by conservatives this election cycle. [23]